Content marketing in Newcastle, NSW: articles that answer what people search.

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.

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

What it looks like

• The questions asked before the sale. How much does it cost, how long does it take, what goes wrong, and whether a permit is needed.
• Explanations. What a job actually involves, written for somebody who has never had it done.
• Comparisons. This option against that one, honestly, including when the cheaper one is fine.
• Local specifics. What is different about doing this in Newcastle or the Hunter, named rather than gestured at: the suburbs you actually travel to, what a job costs here against Sydney, which council you deal with in Lake Macquarie as against Newcastle, how the coastal air treats the work. A competitor can copy a claim about local knowledge. 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 on it.

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

Because a page that answers 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 the day the spending stops. A page that answers a question keeps arriving in results long after it was written, without anybody touching it.

The second reason is 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 a particular suburb.

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

The questions you get asked on the phone every week. They 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 written them down.

Where the list comes from

• The phone. What you explain over and over. Write it down for a fortnight and the list makes itself.
• The quotes that go quiet. What was the hesitation. That hesitation is a page.
• What people search for. The terms and their rough volumes, which tells you which of the questions are asked most widely.
• The local version. The same question, answered for here. Prices, rules, conditions, and which suburbs make a job harder.

One page that answers 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. The check is straightforward and most businesses have never run it.

What to look at

• Which pages bring visitors. From your analytics. It is usually a short list and it is usually not the pages anybody expected.
• Which of those produced an enquiry. Visitors on their own are an audience. This column is the result.
• What they searched for. The questions that brought them, which tells you what to write next.
• What is 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 subject.

Write down the questions you get asked, check which are searched for, answer one properly, link it to the service page it relates to, then look at what happened before writing the next.

1. Write down the questions

For a fortnight, every question a customer asks before booking. This list is the whole plan, and building it takes a notepad.

2. Check which ones people search for

The rough volumes. Some of your most common questions are asked in person and never typed, which is worth knowing before spending an afternoon on one.

3. Answer one properly

In full, in plain words, including the parts that do not flatter you. 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 most likely person on your site to enquire.

5. Look at what happened

After a few months. Visitors, and whether any of them enquired.

6. Then write the next one

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

Slow. A page takes months to settle into results, and the ones that work keep working for years afterwards without being touched.

The order it happens in

• The questions get written down. From the phone. Nothing is published yet and this is the part that decides whether any of it is read.
• The first pages go up. One question each, answered properly, linked to the service page they relate to.
• They settle and accumulate. Slowly. The ones that work carry on working, and that is the whole return on this channel.

If a business needs enquiries this month, this is the wrong channel and advertising is the honest answer. They are different purchases.

Ask where the topics come from, who writes it, whether anything is generated, and what gets reported. The topics question tells you whether it will be read by anyone.

We do this work in Newcastle, so we are not neutral. These are the questions we would want asked of us.

• Where do the topics come from? Your customers' questions and what people actually search for. A calendar of themes has not asked either.
• Who writes it, and does anybody in the business read it first? Ours goes to the owner before it publishes, because the owner is the one who knows whether it is true.
• Is any of it generated? Worth asking plainly. A page nobody in the business has read is a page with your name on somebody else's guess.
• What gets reported? Which pages bring visitors and which produce enquiries. A count of published pages is a count of work done.
• Am I locked in? Ours runs month to month and always has. Any arrangement you cannot leave at the end of a month is worth a second look.

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