What it is, and why it has a bad name
The idea is sound: people research before they buy, so be the thing they find when they research. The execution, for most small businesses, has been a blog with “5 tips for choosing a plumber” written to a schedule, read by nobody, and abandoned after four months. That is content, not marketing, because it neither ranks nor persuades.
The evidence of what does work is in the search results themselves. On the UK result for “website design cost”, the pages holding positions 4 to 13 are all cost guides with real numbers and a year in the title, from small studios. On “website maintenance uk”, two cost guides sit in the top seven. An AI Overview appears above both and cites those small sites. None of them is a blog; each is one answer to one question, written properly.
The version that works locally
- List the questions you are asked before every sale. Cost, timescale, what if, which option, is it worth it, what usually goes wrong. Every trade has fifteen to forty.
- Check which are searched. Most are, from a handful to hundreds of times a month; the keyword research guide shows how to check for free.
- Answer each on its own page, in the first paragraph, with a real number or a real example from your own work. Then the detail.
- Use the People Also Ask questions from the live result as your subheadings and answer each in a sentence.
- Date it, sign it, source it. A named person, the date the figures were read, and where each came from.
- Link it to the service page it supports, and the service page back to it.
How many pages is that, honestly
Fewer than the industry says. When we pulled every question-shaped search around websites and search marketing in the UK, we found several thousand phrases and well over a million monthly searches, and after removing consumers and students the buyer questions collapsed into around a hundred distinct pages. Google records every phrasing separately; the pages are one per question, not one per phrasing.
For a local trade the number is smaller again: thirty to fifty pages covers what customers actually ask. Two a month, written from real jobs, is a complete library in under two years, and every page keeps working. A post a week about industry news is more work and produces less.
What it does for the business
- It ranks for searches your service pages never will. A service page cannot rank for “how long does a driveway take”; a guide can.
- It pre-sells. The reader who learned the price and the process from you arrives at the enquiry form already trusting you.
- It earns links and citations. Other sites and AI answers cite the page with the real numbers, not the page with the slogan.
- It feeds the service pages. Every guide links to the service it supports, and Google reads the cluster as expertise.
- It answers the trust question. The two human queries this site’s domain received in sixteen months were “cybrial manchester reviews” and “can i trust them”. Forty pages of straight answers is part of the reply.
What it is not
- Industry news. Your customers do not care about your trade’s trends; they care about their job.
- Posts written to a calendar rather than to a question. If nobody searches it and nobody asks it, do not write it.
- Rewrites of other agencies’ pages. Google’s helpful-content systems rank the original with the real numbers, and readers can tell.
- AI-generated volume. Mass-produced pages with nothing first-hand in them are exactly what Google’s scaled-content policy targets. Use the tools to draft; put your own figures and experience in; sign it.
- Social media posting. Useful for people who already follow you; not searchable; gone in a day. Different job.
