Content Somebody Cannot Summarise Away

Add specifics is not an instruction

Everybody now says to write content only you could write, and almost nobody says what that looks like when you sit down.

So the advice gets received as write better, which is not actionable.

What follows is five recognisable shapes, each of which produces a page that a summary cannot stand in for.

All five come out of work you have already done rather than from research.

The worked example with real figures

One job, described end to end, with what it actually cost and how long it took.

What was quoted, what changed, what the final figure was, and why.

That is a narrative with numbers in it, which nothing can compress without losing the thing that made it useful.

A summary can say that costs vary with access; it cannot say that this particular job went from eleven hundred to fourteen because of a retaining wall nobody had mentioned.

Three of these on a site is worth more than thirty general pages.

Get permission where a customer is identifiable, and describe the job rather than the person where you cannot.

The decision framework you actually use

How you decide between two approaches, in the terms you actually use.

Not a list of options with advantages, which anybody can produce, but the sequence of questions you ask on site.

If the substrate is sound and it is under about eight years old, this; if not, that; and here is where it stops being worth doing at all.

That is judgement written down, and it reads as expertise because it is.

It is also the single most useful thing you can publish for somebody trying to decide whether to call you.

The thing that went wrong

A job that did not go to plan, what happened, and what you changed afterwards.

This is uncomfortable to publish and it is more persuasive than anything else on this list.

It demonstrates that you have done enough work to have had something go wrong and enough judgement to have learned from it.

Nothing assembling an answer from general sources produces this, because the general sources describe how things are supposed to go.

Keep it factual, avoid blaming a customer or a supplier by name, and say what you do differently now.

A worked example

A business wrote three pages in these shapes over a month: one job described with figures, their decision sequence for a common choice, and an account of a job that went wrong.

All three were harder to write than their usual service pages and took about two hours each.

Within six months the decision-sequence page was their second-highest source of enquiries, and people quoted it back on the telephone.

The went-wrong page produced fewer visits and the highest conversion rate on the site.

None of the three could have been written by anybody who had not done the work.

They now add one a quarter.

The comparison across many jobs

What you have observed over a large number of jobs, stated as a pattern.

Of the last fifty, this proportion needed the additional work; this is what the older properties around here have in common; this is the failure we see most in this material.

That is original data, produced by being in business, and nobody else has it.

It requires you to look at your own records, which is the same exercise as the price ranges and can be done at the same time.

A page containing a number nobody else has published is the strongest kind of page a small business can have.

The local exception

Where the general answer does not apply here, and why.

A municipal requirement, a soil condition, a climate factor, a supply constraint, a common feature of properties in your area.

Every trade has several of these and they are almost never written down.

A summary drawing on national sources gives the general answer and is wrong locally, which is exactly the gap you can occupy.

This is also the shape most likely to be linked to, since it is the only place the information exists.

Write one, properly

Rather than attempting all five.

Each takes an hour or two and is harder work than a general page, which is precisely why competitors do not do it.

One a quarter is four a year, which after two years is a body of material nobody can assemble.

Start with the decision framework, since it is the most useful to a reader and the easiest to write from memory.

And put the price ranges in whichever one you write, since the two arguments reinforce each other.

None of this is about length

Worth stating, since depth gets read as word count.

A decision sequence written properly might be six hundred words, and a general page padded to two thousand contains nothing that could not be summarised in fifty.

What makes these shapes work is that the information in them exists nowhere else, not that there is a lot of it.

So write until the thing is said and stop, which is usually shorter than the general page it replaces.

A short page with a number nobody else has published beats a long one with none, every time.

The counter-case

These are slower to produce.

A business needing pages quickly will not write four of these in a month, and general service pages still have to exist.

Some of them also require permission, records, or a willingness to publish something uncomfortable, none of which every business has.

And a site with no basic service pages should build those first.

Pick one shape, write it properly this quarter, and add one a quarter thereafter.

The five shapes

1. One job with real figures.
2. The decision sequence you use.
3. Something that went wrong.
4. A pattern across many jobs.
5. The local exception.
6. Write one this quarter.
7. Include the prices.

Step two is the one to start with, since your decision sequence exists complete in your head and has never been written down anywhere.

Why this matters more now is covered in the same page as your three competitors.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.