Content Marketing
Content marketing has a bad name because most of it is filler: a thousand words assembled from whatever already ranks, published on a schedule nobody asked for, and read by nobody. The version that works answers a question your customer genuinely has, at the moment they have it, and gives them somewhere to go next. That is a smaller amount of writing and a lot more thinking.
Content and PR are quoted on the work rather than sold as a package, because a monthly article count is a vanity metric and we would rather not sell you one. Tell us what the campaign has to achieve and we will price the work that does it.
See what everything costsWhere this fits in your marketing
The useful content is almost never about your product. It is about the decision somebody makes a fortnight before they are ready to buy, when they are still working out what they need and are not yet comparing suppliers.
One good page beats six thin ones
Publishing volume splits your own relevance across pages that each half-cover a topic. Most content programmes we take over improve fastest by consolidating, not by adding.
A page with no route onwards sells nothing
An article that ranks, informs and then dead-ends is a cost. The link into the relevant service or category page is the part that turns reading into enquiries, and it is the part most often missing.
The gap most businesses never fill
Your service pages catch people who already know what they want and are choosing who to buy it from. That is a small, late, expensive audience and everyone is competing for it.
The larger audience is a fortnight earlier and still deciding. They are asking what thickness of oak flooring they need, which compression class is right for a long flight, whether they need planning permission, what a rebrand should cost. They are not ready to contact anyone and they are forming an opinion about who knows what they are talking about.
Content marketing is being the answer at that point. The person who reads your guide arrives at your service page already trusting you, and they arrive having been told what to ask, which means they are a better enquiry as well as a warmer one.
Why most of it does not work
Four failures account for nearly all of it, and none of them is about writing quality.
- 01
It is about the company
Announcements, milestones, "five reasons to choose us". Nobody searches for these and nobody reads them. The test is whether a stranger with a problem would want the page if your logo were removed.
- 02
It was assembled from what already ranks
If the research method was reading the current top five and combining them, the output is a worse version of pages that already exist. It also has nothing in it that only you could have written, which is exactly what both readers and AI assistants are now selecting for.
- 03
It is published to a schedule rather than a purpose
Four posts a month because the retainer says four posts a month. The quota becomes the goal and quality becomes whatever fits the quota.
- 04
Nothing links to it and it links to nothing
A page with no internal links in is a page Google struggles to find a reason to rank. A page with no links out is a dead end for the reader who was ready to act.
What we write, and how it gets decided
The plan comes from three inputs, in this order: what your customers actually ask you, what the search data says people look for, and what your competitors have failed to cover properly.
The first is the one agencies skip and it is the most valuable. The questions you answer on the phone forty times a year are, without exception, questions people also type into Google. They are also questions you can answer better than anyone writing from research, because you have the specifics.
From that we get a short list of pages worth existing, each with one job. Some are guides that catch people early. Some are comparisons, which convert unusually well because the reader is close to deciding. Some are simply better versions of pages you already have, which is frequently the highest-return work available and the hardest to sell, because it produces no new URLs to point at.
Written by someone who asked you questions
Every piece starts with a conversation, because the difference between content that works and content that fills a page is almost always a specific detail only you knew.
That is also what makes it defensible now. Generic explanatory writing is the easiest thing in the world to produce at volume, which means it is worth close to nothing and getting less valuable monthly. What cannot be produced at volume is your data, your worked examples, the mistake you see constantly, and the thing you would tell a friend that the industry does not say publicly.
It is the same test AI assistants apply when deciding what to cite. They quote the source that contains a specific claim, not the fourth paraphrase of a consensus. If you want to be recommended by an assistant, having something to say is the entry requirement, and that is covered further on our AI search page.
Consolidating before publishing
On most sites we take over, the first content job is subtraction.
A business that has been publishing for a few years has accumulated several pages circling the same subject: an old service page, two posts from different agencies, and a landing page from a campaign that ended. They compete with each other, split the internal links, and none is authoritative.
Keeping the best one, folding the useful parts of the others into it, and redirecting the rest routinely produces more improvement than months of new writing. It is unglamorous, there is nothing new to show for it, and it is very often the right first move. The same discipline is why this site has 62 pages where the previous version had 359.
Measuring it without lying to yourself
Content is easy to report on dishonestly, because impressions and pageviews always go up if you publish enough.
This site is a useful cautionary example. The old version had four legacy articles carrying 156,757 impressions between them and, across the whole period, one click. Twenty-one per cent of all impressions the domain earned, delivering nothing, because they ranked at positions 72 to 88 where nobody looks. Any report leading with impressions would have called that a success.
What we report instead: which pages entered the top twenty, which produced enquiries, and which internal links people actually followed. When a piece does not earn its place after a fair run, we say so and stop writing that kind.
What it costs
Content is quoted on the work rather than sold as a monthly article count, because the article count is the thing that ruins it. A quota can only be met by writing whatever is quickest, and that is how a programme ends up producing pages nobody needed.
For reference, writing specific to your business costs roughly £75 to £250 a page when bought as part of a website build, and that is the honest range across the UK market. A campaign is priced on what it has to achieve.
It sits naturally alongside digital PR, which turns a genuinely good asset into coverage and links, and inside an SEO campaign, where new pages are part of the monthly work already. Everything we publish a price for is on the pricing page.
Earned, not published and forgotten
Publishing is the easy half. The work that decides whether any of it pays is what happens before and after.
- Step 1Angle and evidence
What you know that nobody else is saying, and what you can prove. A story without evidence does not get picked up, and an article without a reason to exist does not get read.
- Step 2Production
Written properly, by someone who asked you questions first. Specific to your business rather than assembled from what already ranks.
- Step 3Distribution
Pitched where your customers actually are, and linked from the pages it should feed. Content with no route into a commercial page ranks and sells nothing.
- Step 4Measurement
What it earned: coverage, links, rankings, enquiries. Reported monthly whether the answer flatters us or not.
Per project
Quoted on the work, not on an article count.
For reference, writing specific to your business costs £75 to £250 a page when it is bought as part of a website build. A monthly article quota is a vanity metric and we would rather not sell you one.
Straight answers to the usual questions
How much content do I actually need?
Far less than most agencies sell, and better. A service business usually needs a strong page for each thing it sells, a handful of genuinely useful guides covering the decisions customers make before buying, and then a slow, deliberate rate after that. Publishing four mediocre posts a month is worse than publishing one good one a quarter, because the mediocre ones compete with your own pages.
Do you write it, or do we?
Either, and we say which in the quote, because content is the single most common thing quietly left out of a cheap price. If we write it, it starts with a call so the piece contains something only you could have told us. If you write it, we give you a brief per page and a deadline, and the deadline is the part that keeps the project moving.
Is AI-written content a problem for SEO?
Google has been explicit that it judges the content, not how it was produced. The practical problem is that AI-generated content is usually a fluent summary of what already ranks, which means it contains nothing new, and pages containing nothing new have no reason to outrank the sources they were summarising. We use AI in research and drafting; the specifics that make a page worth reading come from you.
How long before content produces anything?
A new page typically takes three to six months to settle into position, and longer in competitive topics. Guides aimed at people early in their decision usually rank faster than commercial pages, because the competition is thinner. Anything that ranks quickly and then fades was usually ranking on novelty rather than merit.
Should I be blogging every week?
Almost certainly not. Frequency is the wrong target and it is the one most content retainers are sold on. A page should exist because there is a question worth answering that no existing page of yours answers. If there is not one this week, publishing anyway produces something that competes with what you already have.
What is the difference between this and copywriting?
Copywriting is writing the words on a page well. Content marketing is deciding which pages should exist, what job each does, how people find them, and where they go next. We do both, and the second is where most of the value is, because excellent words on a page nobody needed are still a page nobody needed.
The other services we run
- Conversion Rate OptimisationEnquiry and quote forms · Landing pages for paid traffic · Checkout and basket flows
- PPC ManagementGoogle Ads search campaigns · Local Services Ads · Google Shopping
- AI Search OptimisationEntity and schema modelling · Content written to be quoted · llms.txt and entity files
- Branding & Graphic DesignLogo design · Brand identity systems · Brand guidelines your printer can follow
- Web Design & DevelopmentBrochure and service sites · Booking and member sites · E-commerce builds
- Technical SEOFull technical audits · Crawling and indexing fixes · Core Web Vitals
Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.