· The AI Web Factory team
Writing so people find you without writing for Google
What kind of content brings clients to a small business, why generic articles don't work and how to find topics in what you already do every day.
Almost all Spanish company blogs look alike. Four articles in the first month, titles along the lines of “The importance of having an online presence” and then silence for two years.
The problem isn’t how often they post. It’s that nobody was searching for those four articles.
What people really type into Google
Nobody searches for “the importance of an online presence”. The people who search for it are the ones writing blogs about the importance of an online presence.
What people type is uglier and more specific: “how much does it cost to change the timing belt on a León”, “I’ve been fined over my tachograph and I don’t understand it”, “what do I put in the legal notice if I’m self-employed”.
Notice the pattern. These are questions from someone with a problem in front of them and in a hurry to solve it. Someone searching like that is much closer to hiring than someone reading an article about trends.
The content that works for a small business
What you already explain over the phone. If there’s a question you get asked three times a week, that question is an article. You already have the answer and you give it away free every day on your mobile. Written down once, it works on its own.
What things cost. Prices are the content that brings the most visits and the one almost nobody publishes, for fear of the competition. The competition already knows what you charge. The one who doesn’t know is the client, who is looking for exactly that and goes to the website that tells them.
Real cases, with numbers. “We repaired the gearbox of a Scania R450 with 740,000 km on the clock: what failed, what it cost and how long it took us” is worth more than ten articles on the importance of maintenance. Ask the client for permission, change whatever you need to, but keep the figures.
What you got wrong. It’s what gets written least and what builds the most trust. On this very blog we’ve told how our own website had fourteen pages serving the description of a demo template, in Spanish even on the English version. We could have kept quiet about it. Telling it says more about how we work than any sentence about our commitment to quality.
What doesn’t work, however hard it’s sold
Articles written to fit in a keyword. You can spot them because the same phrase appears fifteen times and the last sentence of every paragraph says nothing.
“Top ten” lists. There are a hundred identical ones and yours arrived last.
Publishing weak content every day. It’s worse than publishing little: it dilutes the good stuff and makes work for nothing in return.
And copying other people’s articles with a tweak. Apart from the obvious, Google detects it and the copying page never beats the original.
Where to find topics when you can’t think of any
Look at last week’s call log and note down the questions people asked you. There are six months of blog posts in there.
Look at your quote request emails and notice what people ask you to clarify. Every clarification is an article.
And search Google for your own sector with a “how” or a “how much” in front. The suggestions that come up as you type are, quite literally, what people are searching for.
How much you need to write
Whatever it takes to answer the question properly. If it can be answered in four hundred words, four hundred it is.
That said, in practice the articles that really solve something tend to go past a thousand words, because a complete answer needs context, detail and the unusual cases. What doesn’t work is padding out a short text with filler to reach a number: it shows when you read it. What Google measures is whether the person who came in stayed.
A realistic pace
One post a month kept up for two years makes twenty-four articles that keep bringing in visits every day. Eight articles in January and nothing more makes eight dead articles.
We publish once a month. We said so in the first post on this blog, in January. This is the tenth. Promising it was easy. The hard part is post number thirty, when the novelty has worn off.
A word of warning about AI
You can write a whole article with artificial intelligence in thirty seconds. We’ve tried it. We work with these tools every day and they’re good for many things.
Not for this, if they’re used on their own. What comes out is correct, well written and says nothing that wasn’t already in a hundred other articles. It lacks the one thing that sets you apart: the specific case you lived through, the figure you measured, the mistake you made.
AI is useful for putting what you already know in order, for correcting you and for getting over the fear of the blank page. The material has to come from you, because it’s the one thing nobody else has.
If you’d like us to help you set up the blog on your website, or to decide whether you need one, get in touch.
Comments
To comment you need to sign in with an account. We never publish your email.
When you sign in, your name and profile picture are saved with your comment. You can delete it whenever you like. We explain it in theprivacy policy.
