Developing a GEO content strategy: which pages to write, in what order, and how to keep them true

Content an answer can use

An answer draws on pages that state facts and answer questions: what the business does, where, for how much, and what a buyer needs to know before calling. More pages are not the goal. Our audit of 9,483 small business websites found a median homepage of 880 words, with only 3.9% under 150, yet 61.5% of the sites had no question-and-answer content of any kind. The sites were not short of words; they were short of answers.

The pages worth writing, by kind

Each has an article of its own on this site: writing to be cited for answer blocks, documenting reference projects for project pages, and thought leadership a machine can count for your own figures.

Where the topics come from

• The panel. Every question the assistants answer with someone else's name is a topic, and the answer's cited sources show what the named business's page stated.
• The front desk. The questions people ask by phone, email and message, written down in their words for two weeks and counted.
• Reviews. The words customers use for what you did, and the facts they mention that your pages leave out.
• Your search data. The queries that bring visitors from search, where your analytics or Search Console shows them.
• Competitors' pages, where the answers cite them: what they state that you do not, never what they wrote.

Keep one list of topics, each with where it came from and the page it belongs on. A topic with no page to live on is either a new page or a question for an existing one.

The order to write them in

1. Service pages for the work you want more of, each with the service in buyers' words, the area and a price or range.
2. Prices, terms and how to book, because buyers ask about them before anything else.
3. Answer pages for the three to five questions the desk hears most, each under its own heading.
4. Location pages, if you have more than one place.
5. Project pages, one per service, from real jobs with the client's permission.
6. A page of your own figures, when you have something counted.

Within each step, start with whatever the panel shows you losing. And before any of it, make sure the pages can be read: the technical floor comes first, because a page a crawler cannot fetch helps no one.

Writing each page so it can be lifted

Put the answer in the first sentence under each heading, with the business named in it, so a passage lifted alone still says whose answer it is. State each fact once and link to it from elsewhere. Put the facts in the page's HTML, not in an image or a PDF, and date anything that changes. The one controlled study we cite, Aggarwal et al. (KDD 2024), found that adding statistics, quotations and citations to a source raised its visibility in generated answers by up to about 40% on its benchmark, while keyword stuffing did not help. Specific, attributable text is the target.

Upkeep: a monthly slot, a review date, a retirement rule

• One improvement a month: a new page or a better one, chosen from the topic list by what the panel shows you losing.
• A review date on every page, and a named person who checks its facts on that date.
• A rule for retiring pages: a service you no longer offer comes down the day it stops, with a permanent redirect to the nearest page that still applies.
• A change log beside the panel, so a movement in the answers can be set against a page you changed.

What not to write

• Posts that answer nobody's question. A blog post about your company picnic is fine for people; it gives an answer nothing.
• Pages for towns you do not serve, or the same page with the town swapped: Google's spam policies give pages aimed at particular cities that funnel visitors to one page as an example of doorway abuse.
• Text written around keywords rather than questions.
• Anything copied from a competitor, or rewritten from one closely enough to be theirs.
• Figures you cannot back with your own records.