Start with a plan

Fraud Alert: Protect Yourself from Business ImpersonationFraud alertRead the warning

A man standing on a wet driveway after a hailstorm, phone in hand, looking up at his roof; a torn shingle lies on the lawn beside him.

SEO content. Written for a person who is looking.

Most content written for search is written for search, which is why so much of it ranks for nothing. The pages that work answer the thing that was asked, in the first paragraph, in words the person would use themselves.

Start with a plan Get a free SEO audit
Rockford · Northern Illinois · The Chicago suburbs
A woman sitting on a bench outside a row of storefronts in the late afternoon, reading something on her phone.

Four real pages beat forty thin ones.

A thin page is one that covers a topic without answering the question behind it. Publish forty and they compete with each other for the same term, split whatever authority the site has, and give a search engine forty reasons to think the site is padding.

So the unit of work here is a page that fully answers one thing somebody actually searches for, and the plan is a short list of those rather than a monthly quota. If a month has nothing worth writing, the honest thing is to say so rather than fill it.

What we have written

What gets written.

Four kinds: service pages, articles, town pages and the ones written to be quoted. Most businesses need the first two long before they need the fourth.

Service pages that say something

One page per thing you actually do, written about that thing rather than assembled from the same paragraph with the noun swapped. It is where nearly all the commercial search goes.

Articles and blog posts

Whatever a customer asks you three times a week, written up properly. That is what the blog is for, and it works because it is specific: an article answering one real question beats a monthly post about industry trends, and it saves the call whether it ranks or not.

Town pages that are about the town

Written for the place rather than templated across it. Fewer towns done properly, because a page that could be about anywhere is a page about nowhere.

Pages worth linking to

A direct answer in the first paragraph of each section, clear headings, no burying the point. It is the shape an assistant can quote and it is the only reliable way to earn a backlink: somebody links to the page that answered the thing, and nobody links to the page that circled it.

Nobody reads a page because it was optimized.They read it because it answered the thing they typed. The optimization is making sure they find it.

What we won't do.

Content is the easiest thing in this industry to produce a lot of and the hardest to produce well.

We will not publish to a quota

A monthly count is a billing convenience, not a strategy. Some months want two pages and some want none, and we would rather tell you it is a quiet month than fill it with something that dilutes the rest.

We will not invent expertise you do not have

What goes out under your name has to be true and has to be yours. Where a page needs something only you know, we ask you rather than write around the gap.

AI writes drafts here, not pages

It is useful for structure and for a first pass, and it is not what goes out. Everything published is written or rewritten by a person, because the pages that rank are the ones with something in them that a model could not have guessed.

Nobody buys a plan they haven't seen.

The free audit is a look at what you already have and what it is costing you, sent over with nothing to sit through. The plan is a conversation about where the business is and where you want it to get to, and it ends with a path written down rather than a quote. Or you call, and somebody who works on accounts picks up.