Talk to 5 users before you write a word: research for content that converts

UX researcher prescription for the SEO hamster wheel: before the brief, five 20-minute calls. Not surveys, calls. You will hear the exact sentence customers use, and that sentence is your H1, your intro, and your CTA.

Example: a client sold "async standups". Users called it "the thing that killed our 9am meeting". Guess which phrase converts. The brief wrote itself after call three. Rankings followed because the page finally matched intent instead of keywords.

Five calls, twenty minutes, one month of content direction. Cheapest brief upgrade available.

Co-signed by the slow-SEO establishment. The briefs that rank fastest always contain one verbatim customer sentence. We now require one quoted sentence per brief. Writers resist ("it is not polished!"). Unpolished converts.

Customer researcher here: the resistance to unpolished quotes is universal and universally wrong. Verbatim is believable. Polished is advertising. People skip advertising and read people.

Copywriter confession: I used to polish the life out of testimonials. Now I edit for clarity and stop. "It saved me two hours every Friday" beats any headline I could write. The customer is the copywriter. I am the janitor.