The Content and Keywords Guide: What to Write and Why

Most content that fails does not fail on quality. It fails because nobody checked whether anyone was asking the question. This library covers the work that happens before you write, the writing itself, and how to tell afterwards whether it did anything.

It sits between the SEO library, which covers how ranking works, and the GEO library, which covers being quoted by AI engines. The writing craft is the same for both. What differs is the shape of the answer.

Finding what to write about

Query research, intent and the topics your competitors already own.

Planning it

Turning a query list into a plan someone can actually execute.

Writing it

Copy that ranks, reads well and can be lifted by an answer engine.

Checking it worked

The measurement that tells you whether to write more of it.

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Frequently asked questions

How do I choose what to write about?

Start from queries people actually make rather than topics you find interesting. Build a query set for the topic, not a single keyword, then check which of those queries you already rank for, which competitors own, and which nobody has answered properly. The last group is where new content pays best.

How long should an article be?

There is no evidenced target. Across 174,048 pages cited in AI Overviews the correlation between word count and being cited was 0.04, effectively zero, and more than half of cited pages were under 1,000 words. Write until the question is answered, then stop.

Does writing for AI differ from writing for Google?

The research differs less than the marketing suggests. Both reward clear structure, accurate facts and answering the question early. What genuinely differs is that an AI engine lifts a passage out of context, so each section has to make sense on its own, and roughly 44% of AI citations are extracted from a page’s opening section.

How do I know if content is working?

Set the measurement before you publish, not after. For search that means impressions and position for the target query set, not total traffic. For AI it means share of voice across a fixed prompt set, sampled repeatedly. Total pageviews will tell you almost nothing about whether a specific piece did its job.

The rest of the library

Related guides

• SEO Copywriting: How to Write Content That Ranks on Google and AI
• How to Write Content That Gets Quoted by AI (Answer Capsules)
• The GEO Guide: Generative Engine Optimization, End to End
• The Technical SEO Guide: Crawling, Rendering, Indexing and Speed