Write the page you went looking for and couldn't find

When Geraldine DeRuiter came on WojCast, I expected to talk about travel. She writes The Everywhereist, and her first book had just come out. The part of our conversation I come back to most, though, is about a search she did before she had brain surgery.

"You're looking for someone who's going to say something about what it's actually like," she told me. What she found was the Mayo Clinic, WebMD and "all these very clinical sites that are not helpful at all. But no one actually talks about the real experience of it."

So she wrote it herself.

"I'm not finding that search result. I'm going to create that content myself."

Those posts became, in her words, "consistently the most trafficked pages on the blog". That isn't how she judged them, though. "These people had the same question I did, and I was able to at least tell them about my experience."

Pretty good content brief, and it came from a travel blogger.

She nearly didn't publish

The detail I like most is that she almost didn't write them. Her blog was "tangentially about travel", she said, and this wasn't, so she figured it didn't belong. It took her husband, Rand Fishkin, asking what she was talking about.

She also had a theory about why pages like hers are rare. The Venn diagram of prominent bloggers and people who've been through brain surgery doesn't have much overlap. The people with the experience usually aren't the people with the publishing habit.

Most businesses have exactly the same gap. The marketing team writes the blog. The experience sits with the installer, the support person who answers the same email every Tuesday, the salesperson who hears the real objection. And the most useful page is often one that sits just outside what the website is "about", so nobody writes it.

Google went clinical, then added an E

When I interviewed Lily Ray in 2022 (the written version is on kwasi.com), she was the person I most wanted to ask about E-A-T. She explained that after 2016, Google "injected their algorithms in a really big way" to fight misinformation, and the E-A-T push was "so, so, so aggressive". For anything touching health, she said, "you're just gonna see the Mayo Clinic and the New York Times and the CDC and the World Health Organization."

That's more or less the list Geraldine hit. For "what is this condition", those are the right results. For "what will the first week feel like", they aren't, and nobody at the Mayo Clinic can write that page for you.

Lily said something else that turned out to be a hint. "I really believe that Google is getting better at understanding E-A-T through the language." She also mentioned the quality rater guidelines had "literally just changed last week". A few months later, in December 2022, Google added Experience to make it E-E-A-T. Search Engine Land's write-up quotes the new question for raters: was the content "produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced". Google's own example of low E-E-A-T was a restaurant review by someone who'd never eaten there.

Why it matters more with AI answers

In 2026 a lot of people get the summary before they ever see a page. That's fine for the clinical question. But an AI answer can only summarise what's already written down. If the web only has the clinical pages, you get a clinical page with better manners.

Google says as much in its AI optimisation guide for Search, last updated in July: "a first-hand review provides a unique perspective based on personal experience, whereas a summary of existing content simply restates information already available elsewhere." Its example of the good kind is a homebuyer post called "Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line". Nobody writes that title from a keyword tool.

Jason Acidre said the same thing about links years earlier. The sites that earn the most, he told me, are "the ones who break something, like discovered something, then publish, be the first one to publish it. They become the instant resource for that particular thing." Jason was doing GEO before it had a name.

Larry Kim explained where his best WordStream content came from, and it wasn't keyword research. "A lot of it has to do with like these unusual things that I see during the day from working on so many different accounts," he said. He was noticing things. He was also honest that even then only one or two out of ten did well, which I find reassuring. (His kwasi.com interview has the rest.)

How to find the page nobody has written

Lily's favourite tool for this was Google Question Hub, which surfaced questions people had asked Google and not found an answer to. It closed in January 2023. Her reason for using it still stands: she liked "tools that illuminate really low-volume long-tail questions", because "people really need Google's help on really specific topics". You just have to do the digging yourself now.

If a question turns up in two or three of those places, and your team has lived it, that's your page. We made a similar case years ago about giving each real question its own page instead of burying it in an FAQ.

Writing it from experience

Finding the question is the easy half. When I write the answer, I try to:

1. Start with what happened to you. When, where, what you did, what you expected.
2. Put in the part a clinical page leaves out. What it felt like, what surprised you, what you'd do differently. That's the bit Geraldine couldn't find.
3. Name the person who lived it. A byline and one line on why they know. Lily's point about Google reading E-A-T "through the language" cuts both ways: vague writing reads as secondhand.
4. Show your working. Photos you took, the numbers, the mistake. Nobody can copy a photo of your own sewer line.
5. Don't wait for it to fit the brand. If it helps your customers, it's on topic. Geraldine nearly talked herself out of her most useful pages.
6. Judge it the way she did. Count the replies, the emails, the "this helped". Traffic tends to follow, but it's not the point.

The page only you can write

Lily described the core skill for SEOs as "putting yourself in the shoes of the searcher", which is understand the context put another way. Geraldine went one better: she had been the searcher, remembered what it was like, and wrote the page for the next person. That's showing you care, and it's why her posts became the ones people linked to.

If you want to read what she wrote, her posts are collected on The Everywhereist, and her kwasi.com interview has more of our chat.

If you've got a question like that sitting in your inbox, write the page. And shout out to Geraldine for the idea.