A 30-to-60-day content project moves through a fixed order of work: it captures what the business knows, then how the business sounds, then what its buyers ask, and only then writes and publishes. At Hudson South those four steps are Authority Asset, Hudson Twenty-One, Market Intelligence and AEO Creation, run end to end and then finished. You end with published pages and posts, not a folder of drafts.
The order matters more than the calendar. A project that starts writing on the first day usually ends with polished pages that could belong to any competitor, because the writer had nothing specific to work from. A project that puts the knowledge work first gives every later page something only your business could say.
This page describes the shape of a content project for owners and marketing leads in any industry. Hudson South states the overall window, 30 to 60 days, rather than a week-by-week schedule, so the sections below describe the sequence and what each step produces rather than dates. In regulated fields, the licensed professional or compliance staff approves what is published, and nothing here is legal, medical or financial advice.
The order of the work at a glance
These are the same four steps behind all of Hudson South's AI search content work. The last column is a check you can apply to any provider's version of the step.
| Step | Question it answers | What it produces | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Authority Asset | What does the business know that its website does not show? | A written record of that expertise | Does it contain things only your business would say? |
| 2. Hudson Twenty-One | How does the business communicate? | The Twenty-One profile, which you keep | Would your team recognize themselves in it? |
| 3. Market Intelligence | What do buyers ask, and what have competitors left unanswered? | A researched map of questions in priority order | Do the priorities match real conversations? |
| 4. AEO Creation | How should each answer be written and structured? | Published pages and posts, reviewed by you and live on your site | Is each piece live, accurate and approved? |
Step one: capturing what the business already knows
A useful content project starts with knowledge the website does not yet show. That might be the process the business has refined over years, the explanation every salesperson gives on the first call, or the answer to a question nobody ever wrote down. Hudson South's first step, Authority Asset, finds that expertise and turns it into a written record, the raw material everything else is built from. The reasons it comes first are covered in what an Authority Asset is.
In any project, this is the step that depends most on the people who do the work, because the knowledge lives in their heads, their sales conversations and their documents. Skipping it is a common way for content work to go wrong. A writer should not have to invent what your team explains every day, and a provider that starts drafting without asking has quietly decided to guess.
Step two: recording how the business sounds
Once the knowledge is gathered, the next question is voice. Hudson Twenty-One analyzes how the business communicates across 21 dimensions, such as sentence rhythm, vocabulary, how it handles objections, how it opens and closes, and how it explains something complicated to someone nervous. The output is the Twenty-One profile, a written specification of how the business sounds, and the client keeps it at handoff.
Voice comes second for a reason. Tone is easy to describe and hard to apply. A list of adjectives is not a voice specification. A profile written once the business's own explanations are on the table can describe how the business actually talks about its work, not just how it would like to sound. Hudson Twenty-One is also offered on its own as a standalone voice engagement.
Step three: researching what buyers ask
Market Intelligence researches the market the business competes in: what people there ask, what competitors have already answered, and what nobody has covered. Local businesses get city pages with real local detail; national brands get the same work across segments, product lines or buyer roles. The output is a researched map of the questions to answer, in priority order.
This step decides what the project actually builds, so review the map against your own experience. One useful test is to hand the list to whoever answers the phone and ask, "Which of these did someone ask us this month, and which have we never heard?" Questions nobody has asked yet may still matter, but they should be on the list on purpose. For a method you can run on your own, see how to find the buyer questions missing from your website.
Step four: writing, review and publishing
AEO Creation turns the first three outputs into content. Hudson South structures each piece so AI systems can pull from it: clear answers near the top, specific evidence, named expertise, and the technical setup that lets a machine understand what it is reading. One common form of machine-readable setup is structured data, which Google's documentation describes as a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. The same documentation says that structured data which does not follow its guidelines might be ineligible for rich result display, and it speaks of eligibility rather than placement, so markup is not a promise of any particular appearance in search.
Before anything goes live, every factual claim is checked against a primary source, and then the piece goes to the client for review. Hudson South publishes the approved pages and posts on the client's site. That last point is worth confirming with any provider. A project that ends with drafts in a shared folder leaves you to do the publishing, linking and technical setup yourself, which is often where the work stalls. Ask too who links the new pages to your existing ones, since a page with no links pointing to it is harder for readers to reach from the rest of the site.
A fictional example: one project from start to handoff
Here is how the sequence might play out for a fictional HVAC company in Ohio that wants its site to answer what homeowners ask before booking. The first step turns up an explanation the owner gives on every replacement call, about when repairing an older system stops making sense, that appears nowhere on the site. The voice step notices that the owner explains costs plainly and never uses urgency language, so the profile says so. The research step finds that nearby competitors cover installation at length but say little about maintenance plans or what happens on a first visit.
The finished project is a set of published service pages and posts built around those gaps, each reviewed by the owner before it went live. At handoff the company holds the pages, the written record of its expertise, the research map and its Twenty-One profile. Its next decision, whether to keep publishing in house or move to ongoing work, is covered in what happens after a content project ends.
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- Intro to How Structured Data Markup Works. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-17.