Answer the questions you already get asked. Record the answer into your phone on the drive back from a job, hand the recording to somebody who can write, publish it. One genuinely useful page a month will do more for a local business than a content calendar you abandon in March.
The reason content fails at small businesses is almost never a lack of knowledge. You know more about your trade than anyone who would write about it for you. It fails because sitting down to a blank page after a ten hour day is a thing almost nobody does twice.
Where do the topics come from?
Your phone. For two weeks, write down every question a customer asks before they hire you. Not the polite ones, the real ones: how much, how long, do I need a permit, will you make a mess, what happens if you find something, can you do it before Thanksgiving.
You will end up with fifteen to twenty questions and they will repeat. Those are your topics, in priority order, and they are better than anything a keyword tool would have handed you because they come with the intent already attached. Somebody asking how much is somebody who is deciding.
How do I write it without writing it?
Talk it. Open the voice recorder and answer the question the way you would answer it standing in a customer's kitchen. Five minutes of that is a thousand words, and it will sound like you, which is the part that cannot be faked.
Then somebody types it up and cleans it. That somebody can be an assistant, a family member with a good ear, or us. What matters is that the thinking is yours and the tidying is theirs, because the reverse produces the flat, careful writing that reads like every other page on the internet.
Want the list of questions to answer first?
Tell us your trade and your area and we will send back the fifteen questions worth answering, in the order we would answer them.
Get a free website and marketing auditHow often, honestly?
Monthly, and keep it up for a year. That is the recommendation we give almost every local business, and it is deliberately unambitious, because the failure mode is not publishing too little. It is publishing four things in January and nothing again until the following January.
Twelve pages that each answer a real question is a genuinely useful resource for a customer and a solid foundation in search. Fifty thin posts is a worse asset and considerably more work.
What should each piece actually contain?
The answer near the top, in the first few lines. Then the caveat that makes it honest. Then what you would do if it were your house or your business.
Put the numbers in. The single biggest difference between a page that earns attention and one that does not is whether it contains figures somebody could act on. A range with an explanation of what moves it inside that range is more useful than a precise number, and it is also more honest, because the precise number depends on things you have not seen yet.
And say the thing you actually believe, including where it is unpopular in your trade. A page that could have been written by any of your competitors will not be remembered by anybody who reads it.
What about video and social?
The recording you already made is most of the way to both. The same five minutes can be a page, a short video, and three social posts, and repurposing one good answer beats generating three mediocre ideas.
What I would not do is start with social. A social post has a life measured in days. A page answering a question people search for has a life measured in years, and the page is the thing you own.
Who should the page be written for?
One person, and preferably a real one. Think of a specific customer you dealt with recently, the one who asked this question, and write the answer to them.
That single habit fixes most of what makes small business writing bad. You stop hedging, because you would not hedge to their face. You stop explaining things they already know. You put the number in, because they asked for the number and a vague answer would have annoyed them. And you naturally include the detail that only applies around here, the thing about the older houses or the winter or the permit office, because that is what you would actually have said to them in their kitchen.
Where this falls down
It falls down when the business publishes for six weeks and then stops because nothing happened. Nothing happening for six weeks is the normal shape of this work. A page written in September might be bringing in inquiries the following spring, and if you judge it in October you will cancel something that was about to start working.
It also falls down when the owner reads their own transcribed words and hates them. That is worth knowing in advance. You will sound less polished on the page than you think you do out loud, and less polished is exactly what makes it read as a real person rather than a brochure.
If you want somebody to take the recordings and turn them into pages every month, that is what the content side of the Growth Engine does, and it sits in the plans priced on the pricing page. If you would rather just be told which fifteen questions to answer first, ask us and we will send you the list.