The Fastest Path to Engineering Your Brand’s Visibility

TL; DR

• Run 10→5→2: list 10 buyer questions, choose 5, focus on 2 priorities.

• Ship two lite pages now—plain-English answers your sales team can send to buyers today.

• Keep it simple: one link, one CTA, human voice; expand into full anchor hubs later.

• Don’t write for algorithms—write like a prospect asked yesterday.

Visibility Engineering: Do Your 10→5→2 

We know that most of the buying journey happens before anyone talks to you. 

We discussed this in more detail two weeks ago, when we addressed our collapsed funnel, and last week, when we explored how to engineer visibility so you’re at the top of the list when a prospect is making a decision. 

Now I’d like to help you focus on exactly how to execute your own visibility engineering plan so you command AI search.

And it all begins with answering the questions buyers ask up front.

If you don’t have content that answers those questions, the algorithms—and the humans—move on. 

Over the next five Tuesdays, I’ll provide you with easily executable tasks to increase your brand’s visibility by January. 

If you follow along, you’ll have everything you need to increase your visibility among AI answers by January. 

Zero jargon. Zero dashboards. Zero math. 

Just the moves your team can actually make in the time we have left to get things done before the holidays.

How Do You Decide?

We know that most of the buying journey happens before a human ever talks to your team. That’s not new—but what is new is that buyers now ask two groups for help first: people they trust (which can often include strangers on the internet)…and machines. 

If you aren’t answering the first five questions they have—in plain English, in one place—you don’t make the shortlist. 

The algorithms move on. So do the humans.

Think about your own behavior. When you’re choosing a tool, an agency, a beauty product, a car, software, new tech, or even a restaurant, you do a fast gut-check:

• Do I recognize this brand?
• Do I trust what I’m seeing?
• Can I find a simple answer to my most basic question?

Your audience is doing the exact same thing. And in an AI-shaped world, that “fast gut-check” happens even faster because AI summarizes what it can trust. 

If your answers aren’t easy to find—or they sound like marketing mush—you’re invisible when the decision gets made.

This is why we’re starting with questions, not content. Questions force clarity. They keep us honest. And they turn brand from arts-and-crafts into recognition and reputation: Oh yeah, I’ve heard of them… and I believe them because they show their work.

Truth be told, we’ve always started with answering questions, but it’s now more important than ever.

Your goal after reading this article is to define the five questions buyers ask before they’re ready to buy from you, see which ones you can answer well right now, and pick two you’ll tackle first. 

Let me walk you through how to do that.

The 10 → 5 → 2 Exercise

Let’s make this simple and fast. Open a shared doc, a whiteboard, or even a Slack thread, and pull in one person from sales and one from customer success. 

Tell them you need 15 focused minutes.

At the top of the page, paste this question: “What do prospects ask before they’re ready to buy? Write the exact question, as they say it.” 

Set a ten-minute timer. Then brain-dump as many questions as you can into the document. 

They should be in buyer-voice only, such as, “How do I…?” “What happens if…?” “Why you vs. X?” 

If your mind goes blank, you can cheat.

Skim last week’s emails. Look at the notes in the CRM. Dump your proposals or RFP responses into AI and ask it what questions you’ve answered. Look at support tickets. Go to Google and search for your industry, product, service, or brand and then scroll to the “people also ask” box. Ask AI what questions people ask about your industry, product, service, or brand.

For instance, if I Google “What is the PESO Model©?” and scroll down, I see the following questions:

• What is the concept of the PESO Model?
• What is an example of a PESO Model?
• What is the full form of the PESO Model?
• What is a key to success in the PESO Model?

Some of those I definitely wouldn’t have on my list, so it’s great I looked!  

When the timer dings, put your collective pens down. Then, to agree on the top five or 10, you’ll use two filters: revenue and frequency.

Filter for Revenue

The first filter, revenue, is the most important. If you spend time creating an anchor hub for each question, will it help you move or close deals in Q1 of next year? 

If the answer is yes, move to the second filter. If the answer is no, move it to the bottom of the list. Don’t delete it, though. It may become useful later.

Filter for Frequency 

For the questions that have revenue fit, ask how often sales or customer service hears it. If you’re torn, bring in someone else from sales and ask them to break the tie.

By the time you’re finished with this exercise, you should have five questions that are both instrumental to the business and common among buyers. 

Decide on the Top Two

With your five selected, give them each a quick score:

• We already have a helpful, sendable page or article that answers the questions and we’re genuinely proud to share.
• Something does exist, but it’s dated, shallow, or scattered across five places.
• We don’t have anything that we could send to a hot prospect. 

If you have questions that fall into the first camp—you have a great answer for it somewhere on the page, go ahead and move that to the bottom of the list and choose another question. 

You want them all to fall in either something exists but it’s not great or it doesn’t exist at all.

Once you have five that fall into one of those two camps, choose two to focus on for the remainder of this year. 

These will become your anchor hubs that will publish in January. 

Finally, assign simple owners. For each question you’ll answer with your anchor hub, write down exactly two names: one marketing or comms owner (responsible for getting it published) and one subject-matter expert (responsible for accuracy and examples). 

No committees, no eight-person review chains. Two humans per topic. Done.

That’s the 10 → 5 → 2. 

In one short working session, you’ve captured real buyer questions, prioritized the ones that matter to revenue, exposed your coverage gaps, and chosen the two answers you’ll publish first in January—each with clear ownership.

Turn Your Questions Into Working Titles

Now that you have the two questions you’ll focus on, let’s give them names your buyers will actually click.

Take each question and rewrite it as a working title you could publish tomorrow. 

No buzzwords. No clever-for-clever’s-sake. No clickbait. No Gini humor that makes only me laugh.

Ask yourself, would a buyer understand this in three seconds, and would your team be proud to paste it into an email?

Think about combinations such as:

• The first 90 days of X
• How X is different from X?
• How do we do X?
• How to do X without X
• The X playbook for X
• The X checklist

Keep the headlines short enough to fit on a phone screen (60ish characters long), strong enough to make someone say, “Yes, that’s what I need.”

Under each title, add a single line about who it helps. Make it feel like a label on a door your buyer wants to open

For instance:

• For mid-market B2B teams with a small budget and a big Q1 target.
• For comms leaders who need executive buy-in and measurable outcomes.

That’s it. Two working titles. Two one-line audiences. 

You’ve just turned vague questions into concrete content your team can rally around—and your buyers can recognize at a glance.

Give Sales Something Now

Now, because sales has Q4 quotas to meet, you don’t want them to have to wait until January to be able to answer buyer questions. 

While you’re working on your anchor hubs (which we talked about at length last week, so go back to that if you missed it), give sales and customer success a single link to the website that includes credible, one-sentence answers they can send today.

This could be FAQs, a quick blog post, or a lightweight resources page. 

The key is that it looks good in an email, lives on your site, and takes less than two minutes to skim. 

This is the page that will eventually become your anchor hub, so use the title you’ve given it. While you’re creating the content—this can be written, audio, or video—make sure you keep the buyer in mind. 

On this page, you can answer the five questions directly, or you can have one page for each of the two questions you’re going to focus on for your anchor hubs. How you handle it is entirely up to you, but if I were to make a recommendation, I’d publish two pages—one for each question. This way, you can keep going back to that page as you create your anchor hub.

If you’re in a regulated space, keep to approved claims and add your standard disclaimer; you can expand in January. 

If you have an SME who’s camera-ready, add a 60–90-second selfie video at the top with the same one-sentence answer underneath. It humanizes the page without adding production time.

This gives your team something credible now, and it sets the table for something stronger next—without making anyone wait.

Keep It Simple, Ship It Fast

Before I let you go, I have a few quick watch-outs.

First, don’t over-engineer this. If you need a tool to make this work, it’s too complicated. 

Don’t choose ten questions—choose two. You will have your list to go back to for new anchor hubs next year. You’ll eventually get through them all!

Don’t write for algorithms. Write like you’re answering a real prospect who asked you this very question yesterday. 

By the end of this week, you should have your top five buyer questions, your two January priorities with owners, and two working titles you could publish tomorrow. You should also have something live you can send today—either two lightweight pages (one per January question) or, at a minimum, a single link with five one-sentence answers your reps can paste into replies.

That gives sales momentum now and sets you up to expand into full anchor hubs in January.

Next week, we’ll give your answers a human face. We’ll build author footprints—mini-bios for your SMEs and a simple byline plan—so when those January guides publish, they’re attached to real experts your buyers (and the machines) can trust.

For now, get started on the 10 → 5 → 2 exercise and you’ll be ready to roll with next steps next week.