…Hello. Hello. Hello, And welcome back to the Canopy, the view from above, where we talk about generative engine optimization, small business, and what is changing in the world of AI search. I'm your host, Jen Shannon, and the founder of Clemelopy. And if you're listening, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your time with me today. This is episode four in our ten part series on the Orchard Ecosystem Framework. So far, we've been underground. We started with the roots, which are the canonical topics your business wants to become known for, canonical being the most important. And then we talked about soil, which is the consistent vocabulary you use to talk about those topics…Today, we are moving above ground and talking about the trunk. And I want to reconnect you to how I'm using this metaphor because this is where the framework starts becoming much more page specific. Your website is one important part of your larger online ecosystem. And for the purposes of this framework, I want you to imagine your website as an orchard made up of individual trees. Each important page is one of those trees. That individual tree still connects back to the larger root system of your business. It uses the soil or consistent language that we talked about in the last episode. But now that we're looking at one individual page, we need to answer a different question. Why does this page exist? That, my friends, is the trunk. The trunk is the primary job the page exists to do. It is what it's meant to do. It's why it exists. Yeah. Pretty simple. Is this page here to teach someone something? Is it helping them find the right place? Is it helping them evaluate whether your service is right for them? Is it trying to encourage them to take an action, like maybe booking, buying, downloading, or contacting…
Every page needs a reason to exist. And when that reason is clear, everything else on the page can grow in service of it. When that reason is muddy, the page starts trying to teach, sell, introduce, explain, collect…you know, all of that stuff, and basically tell your life story all at the same time. And And then we wonder why nobody wants to know about our services, and nobody knows what to do when they land on the page. So by the end of this episode, you'll understand what the trunk means inside the Orchard ecosystem framework, how page intent works, four common types of intent you can use as a planning tool, how to identify the primary job of a page, and why that clarity matters for both humans and AI systems…So let's get into it. Phew. Are we tired yet? Are we already tired just from that mouthful? Well, I certainly hope not because we have a lot to cover today. And if you are not familiar with the Orchard Ecosystem Framework and you did not listen to the last two episodes, I highly recommend that you go familiarize yourself with those at least preferably the last three because we are building on that entire framework. And there is a rhyme and a reason to the order in which I am recording and offering you these podcasts. We started this framework with the roots. Your roots are the five to seven core subjects that help define what your business is about and what you want it to be known for. But there's an important layer underneath that. Your entire business has its major roots, and then its individual pages cover smaller topics that connect back to those larger pillars. We call those pillars. So your core canonical pillars. Five to seven core canonical…
pillars are your roots. So maybe bridal makeup is one of the major roots of your business. You could have a service page about bridal makeup, an article about preparing for a bridal makeup trial, another article about making bridal makeup last in Florida humidity, and perhaps a page showing examples of your bridal work. Those pages are not all doing the same job simply because they connect back to the same root. That distinction is incredibly important. Then in the last episode, we talked about soil. Soil is the vocabulary surrounding those ideas. It's the consistent terminology that helps the relationship between your business and those topics stay connected. Now we have the subject. We have the language. The next question becomes, what is this particular page trying to accomplish? That's where the trunk comes in. nature, the trunk creates the main structural direction of the tree. It connects what's happening underground with everything growing above it. The branches don't just float independently in the air. They grow from the trunk. Your page works the same way. The trunk gives the page a central direction. The supporting ideas, headings, proof, calls to action, and links on that page should all make sense in relation to the primary purpose of the page. So if roots answer, what do we talk about? And soil answers, what vocabulary do we use to talk about it? Then the trunk answers, what is this particular page here to do? So the trunk is page intent. Where specifically, it's the primary job you want the page to accomplish for the person who lands there. And I'm emphasizing primary because a real page can absolutely accomplish more than one thing. An educational article can teach someone and also build trust in your expertise. A service page can help someone evaluate your offer and also lead them towards booking. A home page can orient a visitor while also introducing your services and establishing credibility. That's normal. We are not saying every page is allowed to do exactly one microscopic thing and nothing else. But what we are saying is there should be one single dominant purpose organizing the page. If I asked you, why does this page exist? You should be able to answer me in one sentence without giving me a five minute explanation. Maybe the answer is this page helps brides understand what happens during a bridal makeup trial so they feel prepared before their appointment. Or this page helps couples compare our wedding photography packages so they can decide which one fits them. Or this page explains how our functional movement approach is different from traditional rehab. This page makes it easy for a qualified prospect to schedule a discovery call. Those are trunks. They give the page direction. Notice that the trunk, though, is not the same as the topic. Your topic might be bridal makeup, but your trunk is what that particular page about bridal makeup is trying to accomplish, and that is the key difference here. You could have five pages connected to that main root of bridal makeup, and each one could have a completely different trunk. One could teach. One could evaluate the service. One could show proof. One could answer questions about it, and one could lead someone to booking. Same route, different trees, different trunks. And this is why I also recommend thinking about your trunk before you write a page whenever possible. If you write first and ask what the page is for afterwards, you tend to end up with a page full of things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but is not very clear. And if it's not clear to you, it certainly won't be clear to someone else and certainly won't be clear to AI…
If you define the trunk first, every section has something to answer to. Does this belong here? Does this help the page do its job? If yes, great. If no, maybe it belongs somewhere else. This is one of those distinctions that sounds obvious until you actually start looking at a website. Now let's say I ask a photographer what one of their pages is for, and they say wedding photography. Well, that's not the intent. That's the topic. That would be their route. What is the page trying to do with the topic of wedding photography? Maybe the page teaches couples how to choose a wedding photographer. Maybe it explains the photographer's particular approach, or maybe it helps the couple compare packages or showcase a portfolio. Maybe it exists specifically to get someone to inquire about availability. But all of those are very different jobs, and the reason this matters is because those different jobs require different content. And a page helping someone learn how to choose a photographer should probably spend most of its time answering questions and giving useful criteria and not necessarily showing a gallery of your images…
because its intent is to show someone how to choose a wedding photographer. And then the supporting information on the page could absolutely have a gallery of your images. But a page helping someone compare your packages need to explain the differences, values, inclusions, and fits. A page whose primary purpose is booking should reduce friction and make the next step incredibly obvious. And if you try to make one page do all three of those jobs equally, the experience gets muddy. And this is where small business websites get into trouble because we keep adding things to pages. Someone says, we should add testimonials. Great. Add testimonials. Then someone else says, we need to tell our story. Okay. Add the story. Then someone else says, we should explain the process. Add the process. We need to optimize it for SEO. Add another eight hundred words, all of which are usually keyword stuffing. Then we should promote the newsletter. Okay. Let's add that. Then can we add our Instagram feed? Sure. Why not? Eventually, you just have this digital equivalent of a junk drawer in your kitchen, but on your website. And nothing in there is necessarily bad, but it just stopped having an organizing principle. And the trunk is exactly that. It is the thing that gives you that organizing principle for the intent of that page. So…
that being said, let's talk about the four common types of page intent. The easiest way to remember these or think about them is to recognize them from how you as a human would normally go and search the Internet. So you're either searching for information. You're searching for navigation…you're searching for a business, or you're looking to make a transaction. So the four types of page intent are informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. I don't want you to treat these as four rigid boxes where every page on the Internet must perfectly fit one and only one category because real pages can overlap, but what we care about is identifying which types best describe the primary job of the page. So let's go ahead and walk through them. First is the informational intent. Informational pages exist primarily to help someone learn, understand, or answer a question. These are your how to articles, your guides, your tutorials, your explanations…FAQs, definitions, and probably a lot of your blog content. If you're a makeup artist, you might create a page called what to expect at your bridal makeup trial. The person coming to that page is probably not saying, take my money immediately. They have a question. They wanna know what happens during the trial. What should they bring? How long will it take? Should their hair already be done? Should they arrive with makeup on? Should they bring inspiration photos? That sort of thing. The trunk is, help the reader understand and prepare for a bridal makeup trial. That purpose now gives you a filter for everything you then put on that page. A section answering what to bring? Absolutely. How long the appointment takes? Yep. What kinds of inspiration photos are useful? Definitely. A fifteen paragraph section explaining every wedding package you sell? Probably not. Could you naturally mention that you offer bridal trials and link to your services page? Uh
, yes. You absolutely should do that. But that supporting business goal shouldn't take over an informational page and turn it into a sales pitch wearing an educational trench coat. This kind of content is especially valuable in AI powered search because so many generative queries are informational. Most people are asking things like, how do I, what should I, why does, what's the difference between…and what should I expect when. Clear, well structured content that directly satisfies those informational needs gives AI systems useful material to interpret and potentially surface when answering related questions. So that is what we're talking about with informational intent. The next one is navigational intent. Navigational intent is about orientation. These pages help someone find a person, place, service, category, resource, or whatever their next destination is. Your home page often has a strong navigational role because someone arriving there needs to quickly understand…who you are, what you do, where they are, and where they should go next. A directory page or resource hub is another example. A location finder is navigational. A main services overview page may also have a strong navigational function if its primary job is to route visitors into the appropriate individual services page. I like to think about this as the map function of a website. Your home page does not need to explain absolutely everything you have ever done, every service in microscopic detail, your complete origin story, all sixteen testimonials, twenty seven FAQs, and your entire blog archive. Its job is usually much closer to, here's who we are, here is what we do, here is who we help, and here are the major places you may want to go next. It orients. It routes. It helps someone move. This matters because a well organized ecosystem should be understandable, not only at the page level, but also in how someone navigates between those pages. And the same is true for machines interpreting your site structure. If your home page clearly introduces your major areas of expertise and points towards well defined destination pages, the relationships inside the site are easier to understand than if everything is dumped onto one enormous home page and nothing has a clear home. So…
the next one is commercial intent. Commercial intent is where someone is evaluating. They're considering a purchase. Maybe they're gonna hire you for a service. They're looking for a provider or a solution of some sort, but they still need information before they're ready to act. Service pages are often one of those commercial intent pages. Package pages, pricing, portfolio, comparison content, pages explaining your process or answering why choose this, or is this right for me? These are all examples of commercial intent style pages. Imagine you're a wedding photographer, and you have a wedding photography packages page. That page is not primarily there to teach someone what wedding photography is. They already know what it is. They don't need to be told. They're trying to determine whether your offer fits their needs. What do the packages include? Are there differences between them? How much coverage do they need? Do you have a second shooter or a photographer? Is an engagement session included? You know, things like that that help them make a decision based on your information or your content. So your trunk might be, help couples evaluate our wedding photography packages and confidently choose the option that best fits their wedding. That one sentence tells you a lot about what belongs on the page. The package differences belong, of course. Examples belong, of course. Relevant testimonials, absolutely. Common decision making questions and a comparison chart would be helpful
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Decision. And these commercial intent moments are increasingly relevant in generative search because people are not only asking AI systems factual questions, they're asking for recommendations, comparing providers, asking what they should choose, and asking which solution is best for a particular situation. And oftentimes, the consumer is going with whatever AI recommends over and above everything else. So if your content clearly communicates who you serve, what you offer, where you operate, what makes the service different, and who the service is a good fit for, you're creating much stronger decision making content…And that leads me to the fourth, which is transactional intent. Transactional, well, we probably can infer that it is action. This is where someone is ready to do something. They're gonna book an appointment, schedule a call, uh, complete a purchase, submit an inquiry, download a resource, apply, sign up, all of the things. The trunk of a transactional page is usually very straightforward. Make the desired action easy to complete, and I mean easy. If someone has already made the decision that they're going to either contact you or book you or they're gonna buy something from you, this is not the moment to make them read your entire brand manifesto before they can locate the form. If they're ready to schedule, don't make them hunt for the booking button. If they are checking out, don't suddenly introduce six competing calls to action asking them to subscribe to your newsletter, read three blog posts, follow you on Instagram, and download a free guide. And let me just interject my own opinion here. When I'm trying to check out on something and there's like, oh, and look at this offer and this offer and this offer and this offer. I can't tell you how many times I've chosen not to purchase something because that trail of continued pushing is so irritating. Like, I want…
to just make the sale of what it is that I'm looking for. So when I add something, let's say to a cart or I wanna check out, if there are like a little sidebar or something that says, you know, here are related items you might be interested in. Sure. But don't make it harder for me to give you my money by saying, what about this, and what about this, and what about this? Anyway, that's my my soapbox there. But…
as I was saying, transactional pages should reduce friction. The person has already arrived at the decision that they are going to be taking that action, so just help them complete it. Pages can support more than one intent, as I've mentioned. And because we've already talked about all that intent, as I said, you want one primary, but then you can still have other supported intents. Your informational article can end with an invitation to explore your services, or your commercial service page can contain educational information. Your home page can be a navigational intent while also helping someone evaluate whether your business feels like a fit. All of that is perfectly fine, but the question is whether one purpose is clearly driving the page. Think of it kinda like a movie. Like a comedy can contain a sad scene that doesn't suddenly mean that nobody knows what genre the movie is. The problem is when the page has so many competing purposes that no dominant purpose is left. So don't become obsessed with purity. Become obsessed with clarity. Now let's talk about why this matters so much for AI visibility. When someone asks a question or makes a request in an AI system, there is an underlying need behind it. They might want information. They might wanna find something. They might wanna compare options, or they might be ready to act, which we talked about a little bit earlier in this episode. The AI system is trying to construct a useful response to that need using information it can interpret from available sources. So the clearer your page is about what it covers and what it helps someone accomplish, the easier it is to understand where that page fits. So let's go back to the bridal makeup example. Let's say someone asks, how should I prepare for a bridal makeup trial? That is a pretty clear informational need. Now imagine you have an article titled how to prepare for your bridal makeup trial. The opening paragraph directly explains what the reader will learn. The headings cover what to bring, how to prepare your skin, whether to wear makeup to the appointment, how to choose inspiration photos, and what questions to ask. That page has a strong informational trunk. The entire page is organized around satisfying the question. Compare that with a generic bridal makeup page where someone, maybe halfway down the page, has maybe two paragraphs about preparing for a trial buried between your package pricing, your portfolio images, a biography, and maybe a booking form next to an Instagram feed, then the information, even though it technically exists, is muddied. It's not clear. Nobody understands the larger idea of the page, so AI doesn't recommend it. A strong trunk makes the purpose of the page legible to the reader, the search system, and the AI system…
So…let's start talking about signs that your trunk may be weak. There are a few questions you can ask yourself. Can you explain why the page exists in one sentence? If you can't, it's a pretty good clue. Does the page have multiple major calls to action competing with another? That's another good clue. Do sections feel like they could be removed and dropped onto an entirely different page without affecting anything around them? That may tell you the structure has become disconnected. Do you reach the bottom of the page without knowing what you want the visitor to understand or do next? That is a big one. Is the page trying to speak equally to completely different audiences with completely different needs, Or have you simply been adding content to it for years because there was nowhere else to put that content? These are all signs that your trunk needs attention. One of the most common examples is the giant service page. Let's say a business offers five substantially different services. Instead of giving those services clear individual homes, they put everything on one page. The page introduces the company, explains all five services, answers FAQs for all five services, shows testimonials from all five services, tries to rank for all five services, and then asks the visitor to book whichever one applies. That can work as a high level overview if its trunk is clearly navigational…
Help visitors understand our service categories and choose the right service page. But if the same page is also expected to function as the definitive commercial page for every individual service, that's where we have a problem…A person searching specifically for pool deck resurfacing has very different questions than a person looking for garage epoxy flooring. Or let's say a photographer who offers wedding photography, event photography, newborn photography, portrait photography, and pet photography are all trying to put all of this on the same page. Well, a newborn photography section session is very different from wedding photography, and they're looking for very different Answers to very different questions. This is one of the ways trunks connect back to the orchard metaphor. Not every idea needs to be forced into one tree. You have an orchard, so you for a page? So how do you actually define the trunk for a page? You just start with one question. What is the single most important thing this page should help someone understand? Not everything this page could possibly accomplish. The most important thing. Write that answer down. Then put it into this format. This page exists to help blank. And put this…
blank being, like, parenthesis this person, and then in parenthesis next to it, put accomplish this thing. That format forces you to think about both the audience and the job. So, for example, it might say, this page exists to help, and then in parenthesis, this person would be…brides, and then the accomplish this thing parenthesis would be understand what happens during a bridal makeup trial so they feel prepared and confident. Another example would be this page exists to help…engaged couples…compare our photography packages and choose the coverage that fits their wedding. This page exists to help homeowners understand whether epoxy flooring is a good fit for their garage. This page exists to help qualified business owners schedule a discovery call. Now you have something useful, and that sentence becomes the north star for the page. So identify the primary intent by asking that question and answering it for that page. Then as you begin to fill out the content for that page, continue to audit each section that you make for that page against what you've written down as the job for that page. Does this meet the purpose of the page? Does this help the page do the job? If yes, keep it. If not, then you've got some options. You can delete it. You can move it to a page it belongs to. You can rewrite it so that it actually fits the purpose of the page. It's up to you. But the purpose is that you make it clear and that this becomes the guide for how you choose to put content on this page. Then look at the call to action. The CTA should make sense based on what the page has just helped someone accomplish. If you've written an informational guide for someone who is still early in their research, maybe the next logical step is to read another related resource or download a checklist or explore a relevant service. And if you have a commercial service page for someone actively evaluating you, a CTA or call to action, like view pricing, check availability, or schedule a consultation may make sense. And, hey, extra bonus points if, let's say, you're looking for a bridal makeup trial and your CTA is maybe something like, uh
, book or schedule a consultation for your bridal makeup trial or schedule your bridal makeup trial, something like that, so that you're very specific in that anchor text going back to your soil. If you're a transactional booking page, the CTA should probably be pretty obvious. Book, schedule, submit, purchase, complete the action, that kind of thing. The CTA doesn't have to perfectly match some rigid SEO intent rule. It just needs to feel like the logical next step…step based on what the visitor just experienced, and that's the key. Because AI is all about natural human language and human intent, whereas search engine optimization is based on keyword. So that is something to think about as you are going through this page. Now let's go back to your home page. I wanna spend a minute on the home page because I think business owners put an enormous amount of pressure on this one. Your home page matters, but it does not have to contain your entire business. It usually has a very particular job. It orients the visitor by telling them where they are, what you do, who it's for. It establishes your credibility, and then it helps them get to the part of the site that matches what it is that they arrived at your site for anyway. This connects to something that we talked about in the last episode, which is the soil. Your website serves a purpose that social media cannot completely replace. Social media platforms are wonderful for first time discovery, community, personality, conversation, and attention, but your website is where you have the ability to intentionally organize information and decide which topics get dedicated pages. And those dedicated pages, you can connect within your website to help people navigate from one place to another in a very fluid, easy way that makes sense. You can build an actual information architecture system instead of relying on someone to piece your expertise together from, like, eighty seven different Instagram posts. I like to call that piecemealing. I I don't like piecemealing personally. I don't know about you, but I don't like piecemealing…
Another benefit is that the trunk benefits the user experience. It's that when there's a clear intent, it makes the user feel more comfortable on your website, and, like, they can actually get to where they need to go. And that's why you should care because the information…is what they came to your site to find anyway, and they're not having to hunt or decipher or, like I just said, piecemeal things together to create a picture of whether or not you can serve them. And the same structural clarity that makes a page easier for a human to understand…also gives machines stronger information about what that page contains and how it fits into the larger ecosystem. And that's one of the reoccurring themes you're going to hear throughout this series. A lot of good GEO is simply good communication…
Phew. We made it through that section. Now it's time to…kind of look at it from a bird's eye view and connect the trunk to the rest of the Orchard ecosystem framework and see how it plays a role with everything. The trunk grows from the roots because the page should connect back to the expertise of the larger business. If bridal makeup is one of your roots, you can have several different pages with different trunks growing from that subject. One page educates. One page helps someone evaluate the service. Another gets someone to book. The trunk is surrounded by soil because the terminology you use on the page should remain consistent with the language you've established around the root. Then the trunk supports the branches, which we haven't gotten to yet, but we're still gonna talk through how the trunk fits into the rest of the Orchard ecosystem framework. If your page is what to expect at your bridal trial, the trunk might be helping a bride feel prepared for the appointment, but your branches might include what to bring, how long the trial takes, how to prepare your skin, how to choose inspiration photos, and what decisions you'll make during the appointment. Those branches make the page more complete, but every one of them still serve the trunk. Then we have the leaves, which are the clarity signals on the page. Headings, formatting, structure, schema, and other elements that make the information easier to understand and interpret. Good leaves make the purpose of the page more visible rather than obscuring it. Then there's the fruit. The fruit is proof. Testimonials, results, case studies, demonstrations, and reviews. The proof you choose should make sense for the job that that page is doing. So if you have a commercial page helping someone evaluate your service, testimonials explaining the client experience may be extremely useful. If you have an informational page, supporting evidence or expert sources may be more relevant. Next, we head underground to the underground network. These are the internal links that connect each tree to one another in the orchard ecosystem. An informational article can help someone understand a problem and then naturally connect them to the commercial service page where they can evaluate your solution. That commercial page can connect to a transactional booking page when they're ready to act. And so we're not just creating isolated pages. We're creating a journey through the orchard. And then lastly, we have pollinators. The pollinators bring outside credibility into the ecosystem through external mentions, citations, links, recommendations, and other sources that help reinforce what the page and business represents so that everything is connected. So let's do some practical practice and define your trunks, shall we? Here's your homework for this episode. Pick three to five important pages on your website. I like to start with the home page, so that's where I would recommend you start, and then move to one major service page, one informational article or resource, and whatever page someone uses to contact or book you. For each one of those, I want you to ask, what is the primary job of this page? And then write…
basically one sentence that says this page exists to, then insert the kind of person it exists to help, and then write what it accomplishes. And then after that, identify the dominant intent. Is it informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional? And then does the headline support that purpose? Does the opening paragraph or subtitles, uh, support that purpose? Do the sections support that purpose? Is there a call to action that makes sense based on that purpose? These are all things that you need to go through each page and evaluate. And if you want a structural place to work through this, I created a free worksheet for this episode. It will help you identify the primary purpose of your key pages, think through their intent, right, your one sentence purpose statements, and identify places where the existing content may not be aligned with the trunk. And then from there, just fix one page. Pick the page with the weakest trunk and strengthen it. Remove or relocate content that doesn't serve the purpose and clarify the call to action. And, hey, if you want a structured place to do this work, I've created a free worksheet for this episode. It walks you through defining the trunk for each of your pages, identifying intent types, and auditing your content for alignment. I also included an AI prompt you can use. You just plug in your website URL and a specific page, and it'll help you identify what the page is currently trying to do versus what it could be doing. You can download this for free at clemelopy.com/trunk. Alright. So what's coming up next? In the next episode, we're talking about branches, the supporting topics that extend from your trunk. Here's the thing. Once you have a clear trunk, you need content that adds depth and dimension, and that's exactly what the branches do. They're the subtopics, the related ideas, the secondary content, and all of that that makes your page comprehensive without losing focus. So we'll talk about how to identify the right branches for each page, how branches create topical depth that AI loves, and how to balance breadth and focus. It's going to be a good one. I know I say that every time, but, hey, I love what I've created. So to me, it's always a good one. This episode is brought to you by Clemelopy. If you wanna start optimizing your website for AI search, I've put together a free resource called the twenty twenty six GEO Playbook. It walks you through how to make your content AI friendly step by step and in plain language. Download it free at clemelopy.com/playbook. Thanks for spending this time with me, and until next time, keep growing forward
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