Write the answer, not the article

Most business writing on the web is structured to delay the answer. There is an introduction about how important the topic is. There is a section defining terms. Somewhere in the fourth paragraph the actual answer appears, followed by a call to action.

That structure exists because of a decade of advice about word counts. It is now actively working against you, for two reasons.

The first is that humans have always hated it. Nobody arrives at a page about whether a permit is required for a six foot fence hoping for a meditation on the history of fencing. They want yes or no and then the detail.

The second is newer. The things reading your page increasingly are not people. They are systems assembling an answer, and they are looking for a sentence they can lift. A page that front-loads its answer is a page that gets quoted. A page that buries it gets skipped for one that did not.

So write like this.

Ask the question the way it gets asked. Not "Fence Permit Regulations" but "Do I need a permit for a fence in Putnam County?" That is what somebody types and it is what a system matches against.

Answer it in the first sentence. Completely. "Yes, if the fence is over thirty six inches in a front setback." Do not make anybody hunt.

Then earn the rest. Now give the detail, the exceptions, the local quirk that only somebody who has actually pulled the permit would know. That is the part that makes the page worth citing rather than replaceable.

Be specific enough to be checkable. Vague pages are safe and useless. Numbers, place names, and real conditions are what separate a page written by somebody who knows from a page written to fill a slot.

The whole approach fits in a sentence: write the thing you wish had come up when you searched for it.