By Giuseppe Colucci, Chief Growth Officer at Textbroker
Small businesses face countless digital challenges every day. SumUp makes things simple. The global payment solutions leader has built its reputation on a simple promise: making it easier for small merchants to get paid, manage inventory, and gain business insights, tools that were once the exclusive domain of enterprise giants.
SumUp had built trust with its payment solutions. Now they wanted their content to earn that same trust. But how do you create content that both search engines and business owners actually trust?
The content credibility crisis
Picture this: you’re a small café owner searching for advice on digital payments. You’re bombarded with generic articles that sound authoritative but feel hollow, written by someone who’s clearly never stood behind a counter during a lunch rush, watching customers fumble with contactless payments while a queue builds behind them.
This is exactly the problem SumUp wanted to solve. In financial services, where a single piece of bad advice can cost a business dearly, content goes way beyond ranking well: it needs to be genuinely helpful. Google’s EEAT framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) has made this even more critical, rewarding content that demonstrates real-world knowledge over keyword-stuffed articles.
SumUp’s content team knew they needed experts in their field. That was manageable. But transforming that knowledge into compelling, search-friendly content that maintained their merchant-first voice? That was the real challenge.
When expertise meets storytelling
Rather than chasing the latest SEO tricks, SumUp took a different approach. They partnered with Textbroker to build something more meaningful: a content ecosystem where genuine experts could share their insights in a way that felt authentic and actionable.
Our strategy was straightforward. Instead of starting with keyword lists, we began by listening to the actual questions small business owners were asking. What keeps a tradesperson awake at night when thinking about digital payments? How does a market stall owner build trust with customers who’ve never seen them before?
Each piece needed to carry the weight of real experience, insights from people who had actually walked in their readers’ shoes rather than theoretical knowledge.
Voices that matter
The collaboration produced a series of articles that read less like corporate content and more like conversations with seasoned mentors:
- The invisible fintech revolution Chris Skinner discusses how fintech has transformed small business finance, from instant digital payments to AI-driven accounting tools. He stresses that the most powerful innovations are not necessarily complex, but the ones that “just work” for everyday businesses.
- How fintech is empowering tradespeople and booking-based businesses Remco Veenenberg shows how digital payments, booking apps and invoicing tools help independents get paid faster and earn trust. With stories from tradespeople across the world, he demonstrates how simple tools are transforming work that once relied on cash and paper.
- Beyond the transaction Carry Somers explores how small shops, markets and pop-ups use storytelling and craft to build deeper connections with customers. She argues that these spaces are places of meaning and cultural continuity as well as points of sale. Even the smallest retailers can use storytelling to create authenticity and trust in ways online platforms often cannot.
- The power of the collective In a second article, Carry Somers examines how entrepreneurs gain resilience and ideas through collective networks. She draws on her Fair Trade background to show why independence does not have to mean isolation and how community can be a survival strategy.
- How SMEs can thrive in the new ‘SuperApp’ era Ahmed Sheikh outlines practical steps for small businesses adapting to conversational search, in-chat payments and AI-driven discovery. He advises SMEs to prioritise clarity and authenticity over budget or technical tricks to stay visible in this new SuperApp landscape.
The ripple effect
What emerged was a scalable approach to thought leadership that other companies could learn from, along with better content. By prioritizing authenticity over optimization tricks, SumUp created articles that work for both search engines (AI or not!) and real people.
The workflow they developed, bringing together expert authors, editorial refinement, and SEO optimization, proved that you don’t have to choose between ranking well and providing genuine value. When content comes from people with real experience and is crafted with care, it naturally earns the trust signals that search engines reward.
Building for the future
SumUp’s approach offers a blueprint for any company wrestling with content credibility. In an age where AI can generate thousands of articles in minutes, the ones that stand out are those with a human heartbeat, written by people who’ve lived the challenges they’re addressing.
The model is already expanding across markets and languages, ensuring that small business owners everywhere can access advice that feels relevant to their specific challenges and practical enough to implement immediately.
This is thought leadership with a purpose, proving that when expertise meets authentic storytelling, everyone wins: the business, the reader, and even the search engines.