Answer the questions customers ask before they book

The default local play is one page per town: three paragraphs with the place name swapped, twenty times over. Readers spot it, and the twenty pages compete with each other and with your own service pages for the same query. The engine does not write them.

An article answers the service question once, properly, then carries the local signal through its internal links into your service pages, your areas-covered page and your contact details. Someone who lands on how long a consumer unit replacement takes is one click from the page for the area you actually cover.

Where geography changes the answer, the article says so, because that is a fact rather than a keyword: rules that differ between England and Scotland, a council permit for a skip on the highway, a conservation area that limits where a camera may point.

Over a few months the articles form a topic cluster per service. That is how topical authority accrues for a small firm: depth on the four services you sell, not a paragraph each on forty you do not.

An agency retainer assumes a marketing budget that renews whether or not last month's work did anything. A two-van business does not plan spend that way.

You pay per published article from a prepaid balance, with no subscription. A draft that fails the checks is not charged, because you did not get an article out of it.

Fixed prices per published article: Lite £9, Standard £19, Pro £39 and Premium £69 — about $11, $24, $50 and $88, charged in GBP. Length does not change the price, only the tier does; the tiers are compared on pricing.

So one Standard article a week is about £76 a month, and a month you are too busy to think about marketing costs nothing at all. There is no seat fee, no per-site fee and no minimum. The catch is the other side of prepayment: when the balance runs out the next article does not start, so a top-up is the one thing this needs from you.

Four quality tiers, Lite through Premium, let you spend more on the pages that lead to a quote and less on the ones answering a simple question.

How much you publish is bounded by that balance rather than by a contract. One article a week is a real programme for a sole trader. Either way the engine drips articles out rather than dumping a batch on a Tuesday, so the site reads as a business that publishes rather than one that tried it once.

What that buys, measured: across 186 Standard-tier runs, 21% of drafts cleared every check on the first attempt with no revision, and 51% got there within the three revisions allowed; the rest never published.

Most local service sites run on WordPress, usually built by a designer who has since moved on. The delivery path assumes exactly that.

• Install the WordPress plugin and paste the key from your dashboard.
• Articles arrive as posts, with the Yoast or Rank Math title and meta fields already filled.
• Each post carries its JSON-LD schema, a hero image, a FAQ block and links into your service pages.
• On publish, IndexNow pings the search engines that support it, so the URL is submitted the moment the post goes live.

Not on WordPress? A Next.js site uses the @itmaster/sdk package; any other stack can pull the REST feed or receive a signed webhook at an endpoint your developer names. Shopify and Webflow we set up for you on request. Wix and Squarespace get a copy-paste queue in the dashboard: the finished article, its meta fields and its image, ready to paste into the editor.

Nobody on your side writes, formats or schedules. Because the posts land in your own site, anything you would not have said you edit or delete like any other post.

A trade lives on the accuracy of what it publishes. A wrong figure about sign-off, warranty or cost is not a typo to the customer who quotes it back to you.

So an article is never judged by the model that wrote it, and every check includes at least one model from a different vendor. There are four: a fact-check and a novelty score against the pages already ranking, both led by Gemini and GPT, a critique of its experience and expertise signals, and a screen for the patterns that mark generic machine text. A draft that fails goes back for revision, up to three rounds, and is rejected if it still fails. Nothing that has not passed is published.

Where you hold first-party data — a price list, datasheets for the kit you fit, the questions your inbox answers weekly — the articles are grounded in it, so the claims in them trace back to your own material rather than to a competitor's blog. That is also the part a rival cannot copy. They can copy a heading. They cannot copy your job notes.

A small business cannot afford content it cannot see the result of. Every night the engine pulls your Search Console data article by article, impressions, clicks and the queries each one appears for, and queues anything whose performance has started to slide for a refresh rather than leaving it to decay.

The same loop puts the questions your articles answer to GPT and Perplexity and records whether your site is cited in the reply. A customer who asks an assistant what a boiler service should cost never sees your ranking. They see whether you were the source.

Before you spend anything, point the free tools at the site you already have. The site check audits your current pages. The AI Visibility Checker asks whether assistants name you for your services. The AI Crawler Check shows whether their crawlers can reach you, which on some hosting plans they cannot.

Content is not the right first spend for every trade, and this page is the place to say so.

• Your Google Business Profile is thin or unclaimed. For a service business the map pack usually moves more work than the blog does. Fix the profile, the reviews and the opening hours first; articles will still be there afterwards.
• You need enquiries this month. Content is a slow instrument. A published article has to be crawled, indexed and given time to gather links before it earns anything, which is months rather than weeks. Paid search buys you next week; this does not.
• You work one postcode and one service. There may be a dozen genuine questions worth answering, and after those the engine would be adding pages rather than answers. That is a small, finite job, not a programme.
• You want to read every article before it goes live, forever. You can set exactly that, and plenty do for the first month. But the value of this is that it runs without you, and if reading every article is a hard requirement rather than a reassurance, the queue becomes the bottleneck the engine was bought to remove.
• Your site is not yours to change. If the designer who built it has the only login and no longer answers, sort that out before you buy anything — the plugin needs an administrator.

The free site check will tell you which of these applies to you before you spend anything, and it needs no account.