Read the 2026 content benchmark
Content strategy
Our content benchmark read 140 small business blogs in 2026. What they publish, what they skip, and the habits that set the strongest blogs apart.
AI search
How AI search tools find, read and cite pages, and what a small blog can do about it. Crawler rules, answer-first writing, sources and measuring.
SEO writing
Our complete guide to SEO writing. Plan each post around one question, structure it for skimmers, and edit it until it earns its place in search.
Technical SEO
A step-by-step technical SEO audit for small sites. Check crawling, indexing, speed, structure and markup, then rank the fixes by impact and effort.
Content strategy
A content strategy a team of two to five can keep. Set goals, pick topics, plan a steady pace, brief each post, then measure and refresh.
Content strategy
Sample benchmark data from our 2026 content benchmark is now free to download under an open licence, with a data dictionary and method notes.
AI search
Find the AI referral traffic that assistants send to your blog, group them in your analytics, and learn what the numbers can and cannot tell you.
AI search
What we learned about how AI search picks the pages it quotes, and the writing habits that make a blog post easy to cite and hard to ignore.
AI search
Episode one of The Ledger, out loud. Priya and Maren explain why you should put the answer first, so AI search tools can find, trust and quote it.
Content strategy
The content brief template Larkspur Studio fills in before any post is written, section by section, with a finished example you can copy.
Technical SEO
Our notes on debugging INP on a blog. Read the field data, split a slow tap into its three phases, and find the cause in Chrome DevTools.
Technical SEO
What structured data tells search engines about a blog post, which fields matter, and how to add it and test it without breaking anything.
Content strategy
Download sample rows of our 2026 content benchmark data as a CSV file, with a data dictionary, our method, the licence and how to cite it.
SEO tools
Add your blog to Google Search Console, prove you own it, submit a sitemap and check your pages are indexed, in six short steps.
Technical SEO
What the Core Web Vitals measure, the scores that count as good, and the habits that keep a writer's posts fast without help from a developer.
SEO tools
Seven free SEO tools that cover search data, page speed, structured data, crawling and trends for a small blog, with the limit of each.
Content strategy
A content refresh playbook for small teams. How to find the old posts that slipped, decide what each one needs, and update it without losing what it earned.
AI search
Answer capsules are short, plain answers under question headings that readers, featured snippets and AI search can lift whole. With examples.
SEO tools
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are both free. Here is where each one wins, and which a small blog should set up first.
Content strategy
A simple way for a small team to measure content ROI with the tools it already has, one spreadsheet and an honest count of hours and results.
Technical SEO
How to use hreflang to tell search engines which language each version of a post is in, with the tags from our English and German posts.
SEO tools
Our Quillmeter review after six months of daily use. What the readability checker does well, where it falls short, and who should skip it.
Content strategy
How to plan a content calendar that a small team can actually keep, with a free template, a simple weekly rhythm and room for refreshing old posts.
SEO writing
Does word count decide rankings? We checked the claim that Google ranks longer posts higher. Our verdict is false, and here is the evidence.
SEO writing
The editing checklist Larkspur runs on every post before it goes live, from the first-line answer to the last link. Copy it and adapt it.
Technical SEO
What XML sitemaps for a blog should list, what to keep out of them, the size limits, and how to point search engines at the file.
SEO writing
Writing headlines that win clicks without tricks. Five patterns that work, how to measure them, and the bait to avoid.
Technical SEO
Internal linking for blogs: anchor text, clusters, click depth, orphan pages and a full audit, so readers and search engines find every page.
SEO writing
A meta description is the short pitch under your title in search results. Here is how to write one that makes a promise your page keeps.
SEO writing
Search intent is the goal behind a search. Learn to read it from the results page and write the page the searcher came for.
SEO tools
How a small team should choose SEO tools. Start with free data, list the jobs you need done, then trial a paid tool for two weeks with a scorecard.
SEO writing
Our complete guide to SEO writing. Plan each post around one question, structure it for skimmers, and edit it until it earns its place in search.
Technical SEO
A step-by-step technical SEO audit for small sites. Check crawling, indexing, speed, structure and markup, then rank the fixes by impact and effort.
Content strategy
A content strategy a team of two to five can keep. Set goals, pick topics, plan a steady pace, brief each post, then measure and refresh.
SEO writing
Keyword research for a small blog: find the phrases buyers search, judge volume and difficulty with care, and plan one post per goal.
SEO writing
A free SEO writing course for small teams. Seven short lessons, each with one exercise, take you from the search to a post ready to publish.
Numbers from 140 small business blogs, free to read.