Bringing a library forward

A small consultancy in energy performance, fire, asbestos and the rest of the commercial property compliance list. Good at the work, no marketing department, and a website with 70 articles, 19 news pieces, 9 service pages and 48 FAQs, most of it written to the standards of the year it was written. Search had moved on. The answer engines had arrived. Nobody had the time to bring the library forward.

I audited every page against three lenses: traditional search, AI search readiness, so ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews can actually quote them, and answer engine readiness for the snippet boxes. Then I built the audit into a system so it wouldn’t need doing again. A daily job syncs the site into a database, a content-type-aware rubric scores every page, and anything below the line becomes an action in an inbox. 31 posts came back with out-of-date regulation in them, which nobody had spotted because nobody had read all 89 in one sitting.

Then the pipeline for new work. The client writes two insight pieces a month and I drop them into WordPress as drafts. Overnight they’re rewritten in place: title, body, meta description and the LinkedIn version, UK English, acronyms expanded, a featured image sourced, categories set, and a change log raised for me to review. Published pieces are never touched. I read the rewrite in the morning, set the publish date, and send the monthly mailshot to five and a half thousand people myself. The system does the part that used to take the hours. The judgement and the send button stay with a person.

The site earned its first answer-engine citation this year and sits at number one on Google in its field. The traffic moved too: monthly sessions from June to August ran about fifty percent up on February to May, once the audit fixes and the pipeline had been live for a few weeks. A regulation announcement in June went out to the same mailing list and hit a 60 percent open rate, roughly double the usual.

This is where the multi-tenant platform came from. It was built for one client, then refactored so that a second client is a row in a table, a few credentials and a sync. The autonomous content engine on my own site runs on the same functions with a different config. And the audit that found the 31 out-of-date posts also found what the answer engines were rewarding, and that became the drafting prompt.