I Pulled the Oldest Post From 43 Small-Business Blogs. None Was a Welcome Post

Most advice on writing a first blog post is aimed at personal bloggers: introduce yourself, say why you started, tell readers what's coming. For a business blog that gives you a post nobody searches for, about a company the reader hasn't met yet.

I wanted to know what small businesses actually published first, so I went and looked. 43 blogs, from roofers and pool services to a dental practice and a UK bookkeeping firm.

How I got the data

In November 2026 I searched Google (US results) for 18 phrases of the form "[trade] blog": roofing, plumbing, bookkeeping, landscaping, dog grooming, HVAC, bakeries, dental, pest control, house cleaning, electricians, auto repair, painting, chiropractic, tree service, moving, pool service and physical therapy. I kept blogs run by the businesses themselves and dropped agencies, software vendors, manufacturers, directories and list articles.

Most of these sites run WordPress, and WordPress exposes posts publicly unless someone turned it off. Sorting oldest first gives you the earliest surviving post in one request:

curl -s "https://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?order=asc&orderby=date&per_page=3&_fields=date,modified,title,link"

That returns the publish date, last-modified date and title of the first three posts. 43 blogs answered. Squarespace, Wix and Webflow sites don't expose the same list, so they aren't in the sample.

I then read each first post (not just the title) and put it in one of four groups.

What they published first

Some of the 30 answer posts:

None of them mentions that the blog is new. Someone reading the pool post this April gets the same use from it as someone who found it in 2010... which is probably why it's still up.

Big caveat: this method only sees posts that still exist. A business that opened with "Welcome to our new blog!" and deleted it later shows up here with its second post. Welcome posts do get written. While searching I saw a painting contractor's "Welcome to the Benson Painting Services Blog!" ranking for "painting contractor blog". None of these 43 kept one though.

The other 13

Holiday greetings (2). One roofer's first post, from March 2012, is a 68-word St. Patrick's Day greeting introducing a new team member. Nice on Facebook, where existing customers see it. On a blog it waits for a search that never comes. The same roofer's second post, eight months later, was "6 Green-Roof Myths, Busted", and the blog now has 170 posts.

Sales pitches (4). "The Best Pest Control in Cypress-Pest Stoppers in Texas" is a service page with a blog date on it. It competes with the actual service page for the same search.

General tips (7). "Create Heart-Healthy Habits" isn't wrong. It just doesn't answer anything specific, so it competes with every health site on the internet for searches nobody types that way.

One answer post is hidden behind its own title. An HVAC company's first post is called "HVAC News | Pinellas Park, FL". The body explains which home energy tax credits apply to HVAC upgrades, which people do search for. Something like "Does a new heat pump qualify for a tax credit?" would have told both the searcher and Google what it answers.

Answer posts get maintained

I think this was the most telling number. WordPress returns a modified date, so I could see which first posts had been touched recently. 14 of the 30 answer posts were edited since January 2025. Of the 9 general tips and holiday greetings, 1 was.

Any small change bumps modified, so it's a rough signal, not proof. The clearest case is a Denver mover's first post from July 2017 about protecting floors during a move. Its title now ends in "A Denver Movers 2026 Guide". Nine years later they still think it's worth keeping current.

A welcome post is a page you eventually delete or ignore. An answer is a page you update, link from your service pages, and send to the next customer who asks.

One post is fine

People worry a blog with one post looks abandoned. The sample doesn't support that much.

• Median gap between the first and third post: 31 days.
• Half reached their third post within about a month.
• The seven slowest now have between 27 and 170 posts each.
• 10 blogs put up three posts within a week. One tree service published its first three within 25 minutes of each other in July 2025.
• Bob's Heating published its furnace filter post in September 2015, didn't get to a third post until a year later, and now has 168.

These are blogs that rank today, so blogs that stopped after one post aren't in the search at all. A slow start isn't proof every blog recovers. It does mean the first post doesn't need nine others behind it.

Length wasn't a big deal either. Of the 29 answer posts I could measure, 20 were between 400 and 1,200 words and 4 were shorter.

If you're picking a first post

What the 30 answer posts have in common, as far as I can tell:

• A customer actually asked it, and the title uses their words. "How much water does my grass need?" over "Optimal Turf Irrigation Practices". Your sent folder is a decent place to look for the answer you've typed more than twice.
• The business can answer it better than a national article. The New Jersey tree law post works because a generic tree article can't say what the state requires. Local prices, local rules, local climate.
• The answer leads to a next step. Someone reading "how much does it cost to remove a tree" is close to booking one.

I ran this research for a post on the JustBlogged blog, which has the full list of all 43 blogs with links.

Still not sure how many welcome posts got deleted before I looked. The API can't tell me that