Content marketing in Newcastle, NSW: articles that bring work.

It is the writing on your site that is not a service page. The questions people ask before they buy, the explanations, the comparisons and the guides. Its job is to be found and to be useful.

Service pages exist for people who already know what they want. Content is for the stage before that, when somebody is still working out what the job involves and what it is likely to cost them.

What it looks like

• The questions asked before the sale.

  How much it costs, how long it takes, what tends to go wrong, and whether a permit is needed for any of it.

• The explanations of how the work goes.

  What a job actually involves, written for somebody who has never had it done before in their life.

• The comparisons, done honestly.

  This option against that one, including the times when the cheaper one is perfectly fine.

• The specifics that are local to here.

  Not gestured at, but named. The suburbs you actually travel to, what a job costs here against Sydney, which council you deal with in Lake Macquarie rather than Newcastle. A competitor can copy a claim about local knowledge, and they cannot copy the detail.

What it is not is publishing to keep a calendar full. A page nobody searches for and nobody reads is a cost with a publication date attached to it.

Anything you publish is still advertising, and the ACCC sets out what counts as a misleading claim.

Because a page answering a question properly keeps being found for years, and because the local version of an answer is something a national competitor cannot write.

Search advertising stops on the day the spending stops. A page that answers a question keeps arriving in results long after it was written, without anybody having to touch it.

The second reason for it is entirely local. National sites can out write a Newcastle business on the general version of any question. They cannot write what a job costs around here, what the council requires, or what the ground is like in one suburb.

It also does a job that has nothing to do with search at all. A customer who read a page that genuinely helped them arrives at the phone call already half decided, which changes the whole conversation.

The questions customers ask you on the phone every week. Those are already known to be real questions, which is more than can be said for anything on a content calendar.

The list of what to write already exists inside the business. It is the questions people ask before they book, and nobody has ever written them down.

Where the list comes from

• The phone calls you already take.

  Whatever you find yourself explaining over and over again. Write it down for a fortnight and the list builds itself.

• The quotes that went quiet on you.

  Whatever the hesitation was. That hesitation is a page, and it is usually one nobody has written.

• What people are actually searching for.

  The terms and their rough volumes, which says which of those questions are asked most widely.

• The local version of each one.

  The same question, answered for here. Prices, rules, conditions, and which suburbs make a job harder.

One page answering a real question properly does more than ten written to fill a schedule. This is the part of the work where less is genuinely more.

Look at which pages bring visitors and which of those visitors enquire. Most published pages do neither, and knowing which ones do is what makes the next ones better.

Publishing is easy to do and easy to keep doing without ever checking whether it did anything at all. The check is straightforward, and most businesses have never once run it.

What to look at

• Which pages bring visitors at all.

  Taken straight from your own analytics. It is usually a short list, and usually not the pages anybody expected it to be.

• Which of those produced an enquiry.

  Visitors on their own are only an audience. This column is the one that is a result.

• What those people actually searched for.

  The questions that brought them in, which is what says what to write next.

• Which of the pages are doing nothing.

  Pages with no visitors after a year. Worth improving or removing rather than joining with more of the same.

Improving a page that already brings visitors is nearly always a better use of an hour than writing a new one, and it is the least popular advice in this whole subject.

The questions go down on paper first, then against what people actually search for. One of them gets a proper answer, linked to the service page it belongs to, and then somebody looks at what that page did.

The order keeps the writing pointed at real questions rather than at a schedule.

1. Write the questions down

For a fortnight, every question a customer asks before booking. That list is the plan, and building it takes a notepad and nothing else.

2. Check them against what people search for

Against their rough monthly volumes. People ask some of the most common questions in person and never type them, which is worth knowing before spending an afternoon on one.

3. Answer one of them properly

In full, in plain words, including the parts that do not flatter the business. Half an answer is worse than none, because the reader goes and finds the rest elsewhere.

4. Link it to the service page

Inside the writing, where it belongs. Somebody who has just had their question answered is the likeliest person on the site to make an enquiry.

5. Look at what that page did

After a few months have passed. Visitors, and whether any of those visitors went on to enquire about anything.

6. Then write the next one

Or improve the one already working, which is usually the better hour of the two.

The whole thing is slow. A page takes months to settle into results, and the ones that work keep working for years afterwards without being touched again.

The order it happens in

• First the questions go down on paper.

  Straight off the phone. Nothing is published yet, and this is the part that decides whether anybody reads the rest.

• Then the first pages go up.

  One question each, answered properly, and linked to the service page they relate to.

• Then they settle in and accumulate.

  Slowly, over months. The ones that work carry on working, and that is the entire return on this channel.

Where a business needs enquiries this month, this is the wrong channel and advertising is the answer. The two are entirely different purchases.

Ask where the topics come from, who writes it, whether any of it is generated, and what the monthly report shows. The topics question says whether anybody will read it.

These are worth asking of any agency, including this one, so the answers given here are underneath each question.

• Where do the topics come from?

  Your customers' questions and what people actually search for. A calendar of themes has asked neither of those.

• Who writes it, and who reads it first?

  It goes to the owner before it publishes here, because the owner is the one who knows whether it is true.

• Is any of the writing generated?

  It is worth asking plainly. A page nobody in the business has read is a page carrying your name on somebody else's guess.

• What does the monthly report show me?

  Which pages bring visitors, and which produce enquiries. A count of published pages is only a count of work done.

A business with no service pages yet should build those first. Content works best when it is pointing at somewhere genuinely worth arriving at.