Think of each paragraph as a business card. It will be handed to someone who has never met you, in a room you are not in, with no explanation attached. Everything they need has to be on the card.
The eight habits
Not "it", "this", "the company", "the process" — the actual name. It reads slightly repetitive to you because you have the context. To a passage lifted out of the page, it is the only thing that makes the passage mean anything.
"Volumes grew (see figure 3)" is unretrievable. "Port Klang import containers rose 2.3% between the August–December windows of 2024 and 2025" is a fact that travels.
"For FCL imports under 20 tonnes, clearance typically takes two working days" is more useful than the same claim with the condition buried at the end. It also stops the engine quoting you out of context and misrepresenting you.
Somewhere on any page about a concept, there should be a sentence of the form "A [thing] is a [category] that [distinguishing feature]." Plain, almost dictionary-like. It will be quoted more than anything else you write.
Paragraphs carrying three ideas match no sub-query cleanly. Split them.
An HTML table is highly structured, unambiguous, dense with facts, and readable without rendering. It is one of the few formatting choices that is genuinely mechanically advantageous.
"In today's fast-paced business environment…" Delete every such opening. It delays the answer, adds no information, and is the single clearest marker of content written to fill space.
The GEO experiment found plain fluency worth roughly as much as adding citations. Reading aloud is how you find the sentences that do not work. It remains the best editing tool anyone has invented.
A worked rewrite
Before. "In today's competitive logistics landscape, businesses need a partner they can rely on. Our team has been serving clients across the region for many years, and we pride ourselves on our attention to detail. Whatever your needs, we have the expertise to help. This is why so many companies choose us."
After. "What size of importer does DNE handle at Port Klang? DNE filed 3,928 import declarations covering 10,400 containers at Port Klang in 2025, for 56 customer groups — an average of 2.6 containers per declaration. Roughly two-thirds of those containers were 20ft and one-third 40ft, which is the profile of regular industrial importers rather than one-off shippers. Shipments requiring a permit from a controlling agency are handled by the importer's own permit holder; DNE does not advise on or obtain permits."
Fifty-four words became eighty. The first version contains no facts and answers no question. The second answers a real question, carries four numbers, names its evidence base, draws the inference a buyer actually cares about, and states a scope boundary. Every sentence in it survives being lifted out.
On using AI to write the content
You will be tempted, and used carefully it is fine. The rule that keeps you safe is simple: AI is good at structure and bad at substance.
- Reasonable: asking it to restructure your draft answer-first, to draft headings from your list of customer questions, to turn your messy notes into a clean table, to find the passive sentences.
- Not reasonable: asking it to write the content. It has no access to your operational data, your first-hand experience or your judgement — which, per Chapters 9 and 10, is the entire source of your advantage. What it produces is by definition the average of what already exists, which is precisely the commodity content these systems are built to skip.
Google's guidance points the same way: it asks for content with a unique point of view, first-hand reviews and expert perspective, and specifically warns against commodity content. TIER A
Paste one of your pages into an AI tool with the prompt: "Based only on this text, what specific factual claims could you cite, and what question would each one answer?" If it struggles, so will a retriever. This is a free, surprisingly brutal editing test.
Delete every opening sentence on your site that says nothing, and replace it with the answer.