Client Can't Write His Own Articles
-
Hello,
I'm helping a client put together an FAQ and 5 thorough, graphically stimulating, articles.
The client can easily write his FAQ articles.
However, he's not knowledgeable enough to write the 5 thorough articles, and hiring an expert to write them from scratch would cost a huge chunk of money.
Should we have a writer put together an outline or rough draft and present that to the expert for editing? The client can afford that. Or what's the best way to move forward without costing a huge amount of money?
-
I see companies run into this all the time, and it gets me as well. The question is "How do I differentiate myself or my client from everyone else out there?"
You can still cover the same topics as the competition, but put your (client's) own spin on things. I think it's time to define some strategy - who is he targeting, and how does he want to interact with that group? Is he a young, hip guy? An older pillar of the community? That's where to start. Once you get those two aspects down, then the writer will have something to base the content off of, and you all can jointly develop a brand and tone.
Good luck!
-
I agree with you on the way to produce top content. I agree that not everyone can - but we need to do what's best for our clients and that's not always going to be the theoretically "perfect" answer.
-
I just realized what we were doing wrong, I'd like some feedback. We were going to go after the informational side of the client's ecommerce site where we have very little experience. I think we need to be unique and draw on the client's strengths. A little bit of those informational side articles would be good, but everyone in this industry is already providing that information really well. I think we need to focus on the client's products themselves, and the client has more experience with that than almost anyone.
-
Hi David,
That's a very price-conscious way to go. If I'm understanding this it would cost about 10 times less than EGOL's method. However, I very highly respect EGOL's methods. It's a bit confusing since you're an authority.
David, could you explain when it's important, in your opinion, to hire a content writer that's an expert in his field as we are planning on doing and when it's appropriate to simply go back and forth between the client and a good writer. Keep and mind that the client doesn't know everything about the topic in this case and the good writer that we have contacted will pull everything off of every credible piece of the web she can find.
In our case the content writer we could afford would be the right graduate student at an accredited university. Maybe that's not good enough, I don't know
-
"This answer completely eliminates at least 70% of small businesses from creating great content."
I think that if you go out on the web and look at who is producing "best on the web" content.... less than 10% of small businesses are participants.
-
"If you want good stuff you gotta pay the price."
This answer completely eliminates at least 70% of small businesses from creating great content. There are always ways. We do SEO profitably at a level that you would not even talk to the client. It's all about the goals.
The question posed is "what's the best way to move forward without costing a huge amount of money" and you say "there isn't." 99% of the content on the net isn't written by a team of 6 people taking 10 days to write 500 words. Hiring a professional copywriter is a LOT better than writing it yourself, hiring a content expert is a great choice when the budget allows. In everyone's "perfect world" this is a great answer - but here in the real world, you have to make some choices. It's not "squandering" your money if you're putting out the professional content in your niche because everyone else is writing it themselves.
Of course, you'd never hire a single general copywriter to write technical manuals on computer systems they don't understand. But to write some articles for a small business? C'mon.
-
Get the client to give you the outline/topics and have a writer put it together and then have client tweek
-
I don't think that I would hire a "copywriter" where a "content expert" is needed... and at the same time a "content expert" might not be the best person to write the copy.
I think that a collaboration between them might yield a "start" at a good article if the copywriter is pliable and the content expert has a lot of patience.
The process will take an awful lot more time than a content expert who is able to write effectively.
Missing in the mix still is a source of photos, images, data tables and graphs that clearly illustrate the topic.
A lot of the best content on the web requires several days of work from multiple people - for a couple thousand words with images.
"Hiring an expert to write them from scratch would cost a huge chunk of money."
If you want good stuff you gotta pay the price.
The few people who are willing to pay the price will get the rewards and the people who try to compete on the cheap will squander their money.
-
It depends what is a "huge amount of money" I guess.
We get our in-house copywriter at a great rate. She is a talented writer we found on Twitter. We charge her out at $10 per 100 words so if you wanted 5, 500 word articles, it would cost $250. That's middle-level pricing. Super expensive would be hiring a full time copywriter who knows what they're worth for a half day. Could be $600-1000 easily. I have one we use sometimes for big jobs b/c she knows what those clients want. On the other end, you could easily get someone on Fiverr to write the 5 articles for $25 but you will need to edit them and pretty them up. It just depends whether their structure would work for you. Also, you could probably find someone to go the other way - present an outline and have them do the writing bits and then you just edit again based on that.
Other than Fiverr, other low cost places to get writers (high chaff ratio though) are oDesk, Elance and Guru.
Hope that helps and happy new year!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
If a the site doesn't have a true folder structure, does having subdirectories really help with hierarchy and passage of equity?
If a website doesn't have a true folder structure, how much does have the page path structured like
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchStan
/shoes/rain-boots/ actually help establish hierarchy and flow of equity?
Since /rain-boots/ doesn't actually live in the /shoes/ folder? Will you simply have to use internal linking to get the same effect for the search engine?1 -
Can't support IE 7,8,9, 10\. Can we redirect them to another page that's optimized for those browsers so that we can have our site work on modern browers while still providing a destination of IE browsers?
Hi, Our site can't support IE 7,8,9, 10. Can we redirect them to another page that's optimized for those browsers so that we can have our site work on modern broswers while still providing a destination of IE browsers? Would their be an SEO penalty? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dspete0 -
My "search visibility" went from 3% to 0% and I don't know why.
My search visibility on here went from 3.5% to 3.7% to 0% to 0.03% and now 0.05% in a matter of 1 month and I do not know why. I make changes every week to see if I can get higher on google results. I do well with one website which is for a medical office that has been open for years. This new one where the office has only been open a few months I am having trouble. We aren't getting calls like I am hoping we would. In fact the only one we did receive I believe is because we were closest to him in proximity on google maps. I am also having some trouble with the "Links" aspect of SEO. Everywhere I see to get linked it seems you have to pay. We are a medical office we aren't selling products so not many Blogs would want to talk about us. Any help that could assist me with getting a higher rank on google would be greatly appreciated. Also any help with getting the search visibility up would be great as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjaminleemd1 -
How to provide value when clients slow at executing
Hi guys, Been working at a large media agency for the last couple of years, on quite big brands doing their SEO_._ Its getting to the point where i'm becoming frustrated by the lack of action taken by my clients in executing simple things like - basic 301 redirects, creating new content/pages, improving existing content, implementing basic meta descriptions, push back against CRO, etc. It can take 6+ months to a couple years for them to implement our recommendations. I literally feel like my role has become simply reporting on a monthly basis or doing audits (content, technical, etc) which i know won't even get implemented. I love getting result and providing value. But unfortunately its difficult and SEO becomes uninspiring when clients are slow at executing. I was wondering if anyone has similar experiences, or suggestions. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey0080 -
Google is ranking the wrong page and I don't know why?
I have an E-Commerce store and to make things easy, let's say I am selling shoes. There is: Category named 'Shoes' and 3 products 'Sport shoes', 'Hiking shoes' and 'Dancing shoes' My problem: For the keyword 'Shoes' Google is showing the product result 'Sport shoes'. This makes no sense from user perspective. (It's like searching for 'iPhone' and getting a result for 'iPhone 4s' instead of a general overview.) Now what are the specifics of my category page (Which I want Google to rank): It has more external links with higher quality It has more internal links It has much higher page authority It has useful text to guide the user for the keyword It is a category instead of a product All this given, I just don't know how I can signal Google that this page makes sense to show in SERPs? Hope you can help with this!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
How can we improve the seo on our site?
Hello everyone. I have been reading through this site for a while and tried to put everything together that I have learned so far. Would any of you mind looking at our site and providing any pointers or areas we can still improve on or areas I completely missed. I appreciate any feedback you can give! Our site is faithology.com Thanks again! Brandon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
How to get around Google Removal tool not removing redirected and 404 pages? Or if you don't know the anchor text?
Hello! I can’t get squat for an answer in GWT forums. Should have brought this problem here first… The Google Removal Tool doesn't work when the original page you're trying to get recached redirects to another site. Google still reads the site as being okay, so there is no way for me to get the cache reset since I don't what text was previously on the page. For example: This: | http://0creditbalancetransfer.com/article375451_influencial_search_results_for_.htm | Redirects to this: http://abacusmortgageloans.com/GuaranteedPersonaLoanCKBK.htm?hop=duc01996 I don't even know what was on the first page. And when it redirects, I have no way of telling Google to recache the page. It's almost as if the site got deindexed, and they put in a redirect. Then there is crap like this: http://aniga.x90x.net/index.php?q=Recuperacion+Discos+Fujitsu+www.articulo.org/articulo/182/recuperacion_de_disco_duro_recuperar_datos_discos_duros_ii.html No links to my site are on there, yet Google's indexed links say that the page is linking to me. It isn't, but because I don't know HOW the page changed text-wise, I can't get the page recached. The tool also doesn't work when a page 404s. Google still reads the page as being active, but it isn't. What are my options? I literally have hundreds of such URLs. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeanGodier0 -
What do you do with outdated news and articles?
What do you guys do with your old content/news/articles? Do you just leave them on your site forever for historical reasons? It goes without saying that you wouldn't delete an article that has links pointing to it. But if there aren't any links, it doesn't rank and it doesn't receive traffic… do you just scrap it? How say you? Update: I would also like to throw in that I have a client who in 2006/2007 used content from another site. What would you do with that content after this amount of time? Bother with it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0