The 15 minutes that produce content nobody can copy

The material is not online

Anything a research tool can find out about one suburb, it finds out about the one next door. Competitor names, review counts, price benchmarks, the shape of what people search. Run it across a 20 km radius and the answers come back the same every time.

Suburb pages written from online research alone come out as the same page with the name swapped. No amount of spend on better research tools changes that, because the missing input was never on the internet in the first place. It is in the head of the bloke who did the work.

Which is why there is a call.

What the call has to produce

Two answers per suburb. One local specific, and one real job. That is the entire bar.

Not a brief, not brand values, not a customer persona. If a suburb can’t produce both, it doesn’t get its own page, and the right thing to do on the call is say so out loud and move to the next one. Nobody has to pretend later.

Ask about a job, not about the suburb

The order matters more than the wording.

Ask a tradie what’s different about Kingsley and he says “not much really, it’s just houses”. He isn’t holding out on you. Nobody has a filing cabinet in their head labelled by suburb.

Ask him to tell you about a job in Kingsley he’d remember and you get a story with a date, a cost, a street and a fault in it. The specifics arrive attached to the event, because that is how memory files things. Every one of those specifics is unusable if you ask for it directly and free if you ask for the job.

Then ask what’s different about the houses round there. Now that he is standing in that street in his head, the question he couldn’t answer 90 seconds ago has an answer.

The follow-ups are the actual skill

The first answer is almost always one sentence. “Yeah, did a hot water changeover in Padbury, nothing special.”

That sentence is not a page. These 4 questions turn it into one:

• “How long were you on site?” Puts a real number on it. Numbers are the hardest thing on a page to fake and the easiest thing to remember accurately.
• “What did you have to go back to the van for?” The best question in the set. Whatever he went back for is the thing that made that job different from the other 200 like it.
• “What did it end up costing him?” A price he actually charged, on a job he actually did. It also stops the page making promises the next quote can’t keep.
• “Which street, roughly?” Named places are the fastest local specifics there are.

One rule sits underneath all 4: never ask a question that can be answered with an adjective. “Was it a tricky job?” gets you “yeah, bit tricky”. “What did you have to go back for?” gets you a part number and a 40-minute round trip.

The questions that produce nothing

Ask whoever runs your call which of these they plan to ask. Every one of them fails for the same reason.

• “What makes you different from your competitors?” Quality workmanship, turn up on time, clean up after ourselves. That answer fits any business, so it can’t go on a page that needs to be unlike every other page.
• “Who is your ideal customer?” He doesn’t think in customers. He thinks in jobs.
• “What are your values?” Produces a sentence he would never say to a customer standing in a driveway.
• “Which areas do you service?” Produces a list of suburb names. You already had the list of suburb names. That list is the problem you are trying to solve.

They all ask him to summarise himself. Summary is where the specifics die. Ask for the event and the specifics come along on their own.

The one question worth the whole call

“What 5 questions do you get asked on every single job?”

Asked once, across the whole patch, not per suburb. The answers are yours, they cost nothing, and no competitor has your version of them. They are an FAQ, they are headings, and they are close to word-for-word what a customer types into a phone at 8pm.

Fifteen minutes, in order

• 0 to 2. What this is for, and that it’s being recorded.
• 2 to 10. The suburb loop. About 90 seconds each. Job first, then the housing, then what makes work harder there.
• 10 to 14. The whole-patch questions, including the 5 questions above.
• 14 to 15. Name the suburbs that produced nothing and agree there and then that they become sections of the service-area page instead of pages of their own.

Fifteen minutes is not a promise about efficiency. It is the point at which recall runs out. Push a call to 40 minutes and the back half is him inventing things to be helpful, which is worse than having less.

What happens to the recording

Record it, with permission, and draft from the recording rather than from notes. Nobody remembers a 15-minute call well enough to write 8 pages from it 2 days later, and the exact words matter: a customer searching for the problem tends to use the same ones the tradie does.

The parts that survive onto the page are the countable ones. Costs, times, build eras, named streets and estates. Those are also the parts a check can see later, which is what a uniqueness check counts when it decides whether a page carries anything of its own.

One thing does not go on the page. Nothing that identifies the customer. A street name is fine. A house number, a surname or “the place with the boat out front” is not, and no page needs it to be specific.

If you are not paying anyone to do this

Do it yourself, in the ute, on the way home. Voice memo on the phone, one job, one suburb, and ask yourself the same 4 follow-ups. Two a week and your whole radius is covered inside a month.

Getting it out of your head is the hard half. Typing it up is not, and it stays true no matter who or what does the typing.