Algeria AgencyDigital marketing
Four pages that have to stay true
An owned page goes on answering after the answer changed. How to write the four that matter, and the hour a quarter that keeps them true.
The article accompanying this one argues a simple point: the only content you own is the content living at an address of yours, and the pages worth writing are the ones answering the questions you get on the telephone — the price, the delay, the area you cover, how it actually works.
It stops there, and that is where the real work begins. A post is consumed and forgotten; a page goes on answering indefinitely, including after the answer has changed. It is read by somebody who will quote it back at you, and by a search engine that offers it to people you will never meet.
This article is about the upkeep of those pages: which ages fastest, where to find the material to write them, how to write without being a writer, who should read them back, what becomes of a price page nobody maintains, what translates and what has to be rewritten, and the hour a quarter that is enough.
The number of pages is not the subject and never will be here. Four pages kept true beat forty abandoned, and for a reason the next section develops: a false page does not cost nothing, it costs more than an absent one.
An owned page makes a dated promise
This is the property separating a page from a post, and it is rarely stated. A post is visibly dated: nobody holds it against a two-year-old message that it announces a price that has changed. A page carries no date at all, and everything it says is read in the present tense.
That inverts the arithmetic completely. A failed post disappears into the feed and costs nothing; a false page stays, gets found by search, and becomes an argument for somebody calling you. An absent page loses you an opportunity; a false page loses you a discussion you had already won.
It is also why the number of pages is not an objective. Every page added is a commitment to keep it true, and a forty-page site is forty commitments made by somebody who will not keep half of them. Four accurate pages beat forty approximate ones on every criterion, including the search ones.
The rule that follows is short and is decided before writing: do not write a page you are not committing to review every quarter. If nobody will take it on, the page should not exist — an uncomfortable decision, and the right one.
The corollary works the other way too, and it is encouraging: a page kept current for three years is an asset few of your competitors will have the consistency to build. It is not a writing talent, it is an hour a quarter, and it is precisely what most businesses will not do.
The four pages, and which ages fastest
The four pages that do the work are always the same, because they are the four questions asked on the telephone before any purchase: how much, how long, how far do you travel, and how does it actually work.
They do not age at the same rate, and knowing that changes the order of review. The price ages fastest and without warning. The delay comes next, because it depends on suppliers and seasons. The area moves rarely but abruptly, when you open or close a city. And the process page is nearly stable, which makes it the one you can write at greatest length.
That hierarchy has an immediate practical consequence: write the process page first. It takes the most work, it serves the longest, and it is the only one of the four you can write without committing to watch it closely.
The price page is handled separately and section 6 returns to it, because the real question is not how to write it but whether to write it at all — and the answer depends entirely on the ability to maintain it.
Add a fifth page if and only if a fifth question keeps recurring. The list of four is not sacred; the criterion is: a page exists because a question is asked, never because an editorial plan called for a section.
The material is in your conversations
The difficulty people think they have is finding what to write, and it is almost never the real difficulty. The material already exists, complete and phrased, in the conversations you have all week — on the phone, in messages, over the counter.
The method fits in a sentence: for two weeks, note every question a customer asks, one line each, in their words. Not your professional rephrasing: their words. A thirty-line list builds itself effortlessly and already contains everything that needs writing.
The exact words matter, and it is the one technical point in this section. People search with the words they use, not with the trade vocabulary. A customer says "how long does it last" where you would say "durability", and the page using their phrasing is the one they will find.
That list also gives you the frequency, which is the selection criterion. A question asked twelve times in two weeks deserves its own page; a question asked once is a paragraph inside an existing page. Without that count, you write about what interests you rather than what is being asked.
Writing without being a writer
The block is real and it is misplaced. People who say they cannot write can explain their trade perfectly well — they do it ten times a day on the phone. What they cannot do is write a first sentence in front of a blank page, which is a different problem and has a mechanical solution.
The solution is not to write first: dictate. Take a question from your list, start the phone recorder, and answer out loud as if the customer were in front of you. Two or three minutes. What you get is disordered and already contains everything that matters, because it is the explanation you actually give.
Then you do not compose, you cut. Transcribe, remove the hesitations and repetitions, put the direct answer first — it always arrives last when spoken — and break what remains into short paragraphs. A page takes forty minutes this way, of which thirty-five are cutting.
One thing is added afterwards and one only: what the answer assumes and you did not say because the customer in front of you already knew it. In writing nobody is in front of you, and that unsaid part is almost always what the reader needed in order to decide.
On help from a language model: it is excellent at cutting and reordering a transcript, and poor at producing the material, because it knows neither your prices, nor your delays, nor how things work at your place. Use it at the shaping stage, never at the content one.
The only reader who counts
Proofreading is usually given to whoever writes best, and that is the wrong criterion. The right reader is whoever answers the telephone, because they are the only one who knows what customers misunderstand.
Their reading is not about style. It is about one question put to each paragraph: could somebody understand something other than what we mean? That person has heard the misunderstandings, recognises them in a phrasing, and sees them where the author sees a clear sentence.
The second check is factual and it matters more than the first. Every figure, every delay, every city name has to be confirmed by whoever is responsible for it today, not by the memory of whoever is writing. It is the check that gets skipped because it seems obvious, and it is the one that leaves an old price on a page for two years.
Do it once and note the date of that validation beside the page in your tracking document. That date is what makes the quarterly review possible: without it, each review restarts the entire verification instead of covering what has moved since.
The price page: maintain it or do not make it
This is the page everybody wants to read and few businesses publish, and the hesitation is legitimate. A published price sets an expectation, is compared by competitors, and becomes false at your first cost adjustment.
So the question to settle is not "should we publish our prices" but "will we commit to correcting this page within a week of a change". If yes, publish: it is the most effective page on the site, it filters out enquiries beyond budget and saves you hours of calls that would never have converted.
If not, do not build it, and above all do not replace it with a page pretending to give prices without giving any. A table of ranges so wide they exclude nothing is worse than an absence: the reader leaves feeling led around, which is exactly what a price page was meant to prevent.
There is an honest middle form, and it is the one we most often recommend: publish no rate, but publish what makes the price vary. The four or five factors, with concrete examples of situations costing more or less. The reader can place themselves, nothing becomes false when your costs move, and the call starts much further along.
Whatever the form, date it visibly. A rate marked "current as at" with a month and a year is never a broken promise: it is either accurate or visibly old, and both are defensible. A rate with no date is deemed current for ever.
Delay and area: what changes without warning
These two pages have a property the others do not: they become false because of decisions taken by somebody else. A supplier who lengthens lead times, a carrier who drops a destination, a driver who leaves — three ordinary events, and none of them triggers the update of a web page.
For the delay, write what is true in the bad month rather than what is true in the good one. A stated forty-eight hours met nine times out of ten produces more dissatisfaction than a stated four days met every time, because the customer does not compare against the market, they compare against what you wrote.
For the area, the usual fault is the list of wilayas. It is long, hard to read, and false the day you add one without thinking. A rule in a sentence — which regions, on what conditions, and what to do if you are not in one — ages far better than an enumeration.
And always give the way out for those outside it. "We do not deliver to the South" leaves the person at a closed door; "we do not deliver to the South, but we ship by carrier, allow this much" turns a refusal into a quotation. It is the most profitable line on the page and the one that gets left off.
The quarterly review: one hour, four pages
This whole method rests on one habit, and if a single thing were to be kept from this article it is this: one hour a quarter, in the calendar, with a person’s name beside it.
The review is not about rereading the pages. It is about asking four questions: have the prices changed, have the delays changed, has the area changed, has the way of working changed. Three answers out of four are "no" and take ten seconds; the fourth is worth the whole session.
The trigger has to be the calendar rather than an event, because events do not announce themselves. Nobody says "we have just changed our lead times, the site needs updating"; but an hour booked quarterly does happen, and that is where the question gets asked.
Record the review date beside each page each time. That tiny document — four lines, one date per line — does two things no tool does: it shows at a glance what has not been looked at for a long time, and it makes the work transferable to whoever picks the file up.
And if a quarter is missed, do not catch up by doing twice as much: simply resume next quarter. An interrupted habit is resumed; a habit carrying a backlog debt is abandoned.
What translates, and what has to be rewritten
A page existing in two languages is not a translated page, and that is the most expensive confusion in this work. Some parts translate honestly; others describe a reality that is not the same for the two readers, and translating them produces text that is accurate and false.
What translates: the description of the process, technical explanations, definitions, the presentation of the business. Those are facts that do not change with the reader’s language, and a good translation is enough.
What gets rewritten: anything that assumes a situation. Examples, because one that speaks to a reader in Algiers does not to a reader in Adrar; the objections handled, because they are not the same; and sometimes the delay and the area themselves, when your conditions genuinely differ by region.
Never publish a page mixing the two languages, including when it looks practical. It is unreadable for both audiences, it stops the search engine knowing who to offer it to, and it gives the impression of a job half done — which, in this particular case, is exactly what happened.
When somebody else writes for you
Delegating the writing is reasonable, and it fails almost always in the same way: the text comes back correct, fluent, professional and empty. It contains nothing the reader could not have guessed, because the writer does not know the facts only you know.
The cause is structural rather than a lack of skill. An outside writer does not have your prices, your real lead times, the objections you hear, or the three special cases that make up most of your trade. Faced with that void, they produce what they can produce: plausible, general text.
The correction is to change what you give them. Not a brief describing a tone and some keywords, but the recording of you answering the question, plus the list of facts — the figures, the delays, the limits. The writer then becomes what they are good at: somebody who orders material they could not have invented.
Keep two things in-house in every case: the factual validation, and the sentence saying what you refuse to do. The first commits the business, the second is what distinguishes the page from your competitors’, and nobody outside can write it for you.
The page with no owner left
After two or three years there is almost always a page nobody claims any more. It was written by somebody who left, it describes a service that changed hands, and at each review everybody assumes somebody else is dealing with it.
That page is recognisable by one sign: nobody can say when it was last verified. It is the only diagnosis needed, and it is more reliable than reading the content, because a false page reads perfectly well.
The rule that prevents it is to assign each page to a person, by name, in the tracking document — not to a department, not to "the team". A department does not review a page; a person does or does not, and in the second case you know who to ask.
When somebody leaves, their pages are explicitly reassigned on the same day as their access. It is a thirty-second act which, omitted, produces exactly the situation in the first paragraph — and no leaver’s checklist ever thinks of the pages on a website.
What we do, and what we refuse
What we do is bounded. We collect the questions actually asked, we record your answers and shape them, we have the facts validated by whoever is responsible for them, and we keep the tracking document carrying each page’s review date.
We refuse to write a price page for a business that will not commit to correcting it within a week of a change. A wrong price page costs more than no page: it is found by search, it is quoted on the telephone, and it turns a won conversation into an argument about a figure you no longer charge.
We also refuse to translate a price, a delay or an area. Those three are rewritten for each reader, because the constraint is not the same depending on where they are reading from; a faithful translation would produce text accurate in its words and false in its facts, which is the worse of the two possible errors.
And we do not promise a position in search results, for the reasons the neighbouring article sets out. What we commit to is that the four pages tell the truth on the day of the review, and that the date of that review is written down. There is also work only you can do and it is worth more than the writing: note, for two weeks, every question a customer asks, in their words.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages should we write?
Four, not forty: the price, the delay, the area, and how it works — the questions asked on the phone before any purchase. Every page added is a commitment to keep it true, and a false page costs more than an absent one because search finds it and people quote it back. Write nothing you are not committing to review each quarter.
Should we publish our prices?
Only if you will commit to correcting the page within a week of a change. If so, it is the most effective page on the site. If not, publish what makes the price vary instead — four or five factors with concrete examples: the reader can place themselves, and nothing becomes false when your costs move. And always date a published rate visibly.
We cannot write. How do we do this?
Do not start by writing. Take a question, start the phone recorder, and answer out loud as if the customer were in front of you — two minutes. Then transcribe and cut: remove the hesitations, put the direct answer first, break it into short paragraphs. Forty minutes a page, thirty-five of them cutting rather than composing.
Who should read the pages back?
Whoever answers the telephone, not whoever writes best. They are the only one who knows what customers misunderstand, and they spot it in a phrasing that looks clear to the author. Add a factual check by whoever is responsible for each figure today — that is the one that gets skipped, and the one that leaves an old price online for two years.
How often should the pages be updated?
One hour a quarter, booked in the calendar with a person’s name. The session is not about rereading but about asking four questions: have prices, delays, the area, or the way of working changed. Three answers out of four take ten seconds. The trigger has to be the calendar, because a change of lead time never announces itself.
Can we translate our pages into Arabic?
Partly. The process, the technical explanations and the presentation translate. The examples, the objections handled, and often the delay and the area get rewritten, because they assume a situation that is not the same for both readers. Never publish a page mixing the two languages: it is unreadable for both audiences.
Where we come in
One hour a quarter with a name written beside it is the whole method. What breaks is the quarter in which that person is somewhere else.
- We hold that hour when it slips, and show you what changed.
- We read the four pages against your prices and lead times as they stand today.
- We rewrite the zone and the lead time per language instead of having them translated.
If your four pages are already true, take no subscription: set a quarterly reminder, and come back the day it slips twice running.
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