What Should You Write About on a Business Website?

It is a Tuesday night. A roofer sits at the kitchen table with a laptop open to a page titled Services. The cursor blinks. He has been staring at it for twenty minutes and has written one sentence, and the sentence is "We offer a full range of roofing services." He deletes it. He types it again.

That same day, his phone rang eleven times. "How long does a reroof take?" "Do you work out in Helotes?" "Is that hail damage or just old?" "Can I get a ballpark before you come out?" He answered every one without thinking, in about forty seconds, in plain words, with numbers. Two of them booked.

That is the content. All of it. The web industry has spent a decade convincing owners that content is a special substance produced by content teams on content calendars for the purpose of engagement. It is not. Content is the answer you already give on the phone, written down once so the next thousand people can get it without calling. The roofer does not have a writing problem. He has a transcription problem, and the rest of this guide is about solving it.

Every search is a question, even the ones without a question mark. "Slab leak repair San Antonio" means "who fixes slab leaks near me and what will it cost." Google matches questions to the pages that answer them best. The AI answer engines above the results do the same thing more literally: they find the clearest answer and quote it. The SEO basics guide explains the matching; the AI search guide explains the quoting. Both come down to one rule. A page that answers a question can rank for it. A page that talks about the company ranks for the company's name, which it already ranks for.

This is where the industry's version of content goes wrong. An agency sells "thought leadership": 800-word posts about industry trends nobody in your town has searched for. A strategy deck arrives with personas named Brenda. Meanwhile "does a slab leak show up on my water bill" has been typed by thousands of homeowners, and nobody in the county has answered it on a page.

Two tests for any piece of content, before it is written. Would a customer ask this? Would the answer change what they do next? If both are yes, write it. If either is no, do not, however interesting it seems from inside the business.

Notice that a blog is not first. The pages below are in order of how close they sit to the money. Write them in that order, and stop wherever the business is busy enough.

Service pages get the call and are the pages most sites do worst. One service per page, written for the person searching for it. The service page guide is the anatomy; long-tail SEO is the work of building them around the phrases people type.

Area pages put you in a town, and only work when they say something true about it. The service area page guide draws the line between a real one and a copied one.

FAQ and answer pages are the cheapest content on this list to produce and, since AI answers arrived, among the most valuable. Eighty plain words answering one question is exactly what an answer engine wants to quote.

Project pages are proof with a search benefit. "Metal roof replacement, Alamo Heights, 2025" ranks for a search nobody else is bidding on. The work page is built on that logic.

A pricing page is the page most trades refuse to write, which is why the ones that write it win the call.

Guides come last because they are for people who are not ready yet. They are worth it when you can own a subject; the blog ideas guide has the ones that pay, and content marketing is the service for having them written.

The question "how much content should a website have" wants a number, and the industry supplied one. Somewhere around 2015 someone noticed that top-ranking pages averaged roughly 1,500 words and concluded that 1,500 words made pages rank. Backwards. Those pages were long because they answered the question completely. Length was the result, not the cause.

The rule that holds up: long enough to answer the question the searcher had, short enough that they never hunt for the answer. A drain cleaning page does its job in 500 to 900 words. A guide like this one takes more, because the question is bigger. A contact page needs fifty. Across the site, a service business typically needs 20 to 40 pages, each as long as its own job; the page count guide does the counting, and how many pages you need for SEO covers the search side.

Padding is the sin, and it costs twice. The reader, who came for one answer, leaves when the third paragraph still has not delivered it. The search engine, which now reads for meaning rather than length, finds less of it per paragraph and ranks the page accordingly.

On the phone, a deck builder says: "Yeah, we can do that. Usually a day, two if the joists are rotted underneath. Runs about eight hundred to twelve, depending." The customer understands every word and hears a person who has done this before.

On his website, the same man writes: "We offer comprehensive deck restoration solutions tailored to your unique needs." Something happens between the phone and the keyboard. He puts on a suit that does not fit. Every trade does it, and every customer can tell, because nobody has ever said that sentence aloud to another human being.

The fix is mechanical. Record yourself answering the question, transcribe it, clean up the ums. That is the voice. Keep the "you." Keep the numbers. Say what happens when things go wrong, because that is the part the customer is worried about. Admit what you do not do; it makes the rest more believable. Pages that sound like a person get the call, and the answer engines, which prefer plain direct sentences, quote them; the generative engine optimization guide explains why.

The editorial calendar is the phone. Here is how to turn a month of calls into a year of pages.