SEO content writing: fewer pages, each answering one question.

Content for SEO is the writing on your website that exists to answer a search your customers make: service pages, cost and comparison articles, and answers to single questions. It’s one part of organic SEO. The searches worth answering set how much of it I write, with no monthly quota, and I track each page by itself.

Why publishing more doesn’t rank more

A new page helps only when it answers a search that people make and that your site doesn’t already answer. Past that point, extra pages work against you. Ten posts on slightly different versions of “signs you need a new water heater” leave Google to choose between them, and it may rank none of them well. Google’s spam policies also name the practice of producing pages in bulk mainly to manipulate rankings. The monthly post count exists because a count is easy to invoice.

The four tests a page has to pass

I write a page only if every one of these is true:

1. People search for it, in words a homeowner would use, and it appears in the keyword research.
2. You have no page for it already. If one exists, the job is to improve that page.
3. You know something first-hand, such as a price range from your own jobs or what your crews find in older Clairemont houses.
4. It sits near a job: the person asking is likely to need a company soon.

Where the substance comes from

I don’t know what a slab leak repair runs in Chula Vista, and neither does a writer working from other websites. So I ask you and your technicians what the job involves and what goes wrong. I also ask what customers misunderstand. That material is what a competitor can’t copy.

A language model can draft sentences quickly, and Google has said it judges content on quality, however it was produced. A model working alone, though, only restates what is already published.

Merge, rewrite or remove

On an established site the first content job is usually the pages that already exist. A content audit reviews them page by page, and I make one of these decisions for each.

How a page is written

Every page opens with its answer. I put the question in the heading and the answer in the first sentence, with the detail after it. Steps go in a list and comparisons in a table. That structure serves a reader in a hurry. It’s also what lets a search engine quote the page, the aim of answer engine optimization (AEO, the work of being the source quoted for a question).

How I measure content

Whether a page will rank is never certain in advance, and I’ll tell you that before it’s written. Once it’s live I measure it separately from every other page: the searches it appears for, its position, its clicks, and calls where they can be traced to it. I look about two weeks after publishing or rewriting, knowing that a brand new page often needs longer before its position settles. If a page earns nothing after a fair wait, I rewrite or merge it.