Service pages get their own brief writer and writer

Service page content now has a brief in front of it, the auditor counts ignore rules across every page an issue touches, and one website carries one ongoing SEO campaign.

Nothing moved on the surface today. The work was all underneath: two new content agents, a clearer rule about how campaigns attach to a website, and a long sitting with the agents that write geo pages.

For our partners

Nothing changed on the surface today. Everything below is work you will feel later rather than see now.

Behind the scenes

1. Service pages now have a brief writer and a writer of their own, the last content kind that was still being drafted without a brief in front of it.
2. The auditor adds up ignore rules across every page an issue touches, so an issue that appears on five pages closes once all five are handled.
3. One website carries one ongoing SEO campaign, and a second is refused with the name of the one that already exists.

1. Service page agents

Every other content kind we produce goes through a brief first: someone (now something) decides what the piece is about, who it is for and what has to be in it, and the writer works to that. Service pages were the exception, drafted straight from the task. The two new agents close that gap, built from the pair we use for location pages and then cut back to what a service page actually is: one service, for the business as a whole, or for one place when the keyword names a place. The place-specific parts only apply in that second case; otherwise the supporting material is what a customer actually weighs when choosing that service.

Both agents are off until the lab reps are read. We clone, then we test, then we turn on.

2. Issues that span several pages

Some findings are not about one page. A placeholder string left in a template, an image with no alt text in a shared block, a duplicate cluster: the issue is one thing, and it shows up on every page that uses the thing. Our rules for telling an agent to leave something alone are written one page at a time, on purpose, which meant an issue spanning five pages stayed open even after all five pages had been handled. It now adds the coverage up, and closes when the whole set is covered. Identical rules also collapse into one row instead of being written again each time.

3. One campaign per website

An earlier version of the services model let a client carry two ongoing SEO services at once, with machinery to keep them from colliding. Nobody wanted that. What people actually wanted was clients with more than one website, and the website model handles that directly: each website gets one SEO campaign. So the second plan is refused, by name, with a suggestion to widen the scope of the one that exists or end it first. One-time and custom work is unaffected, and the extra machinery that existed only to keep two plans apart is gone with it.

The rest of the day was lab work: reps on the geo brief writer and geo page writer, both now live, and the start of notes on the two new service page agents. Each agent’s notebook now ends with a list of optimisations we know about and have not done, with the measurement that shows the gap, so the next session picks one up instead of rediscovering it.