Divine Write Copywriting Blog

I was recently asked if I’d be interested in writing some articles to increase a company’s search presence. I had to turn the job down, though, because the client was only prepared to pay US $10 per 500 words. (Actually, in light of my article PR experience, they generously upped their offer to $15 per 500 words…) This wasn’t the first time I’ve been asked to work for peanuts.

It blows me away that anyone would think they’d get any real return out of this sort of investment. For your article marketing / article PR to be effective, you can’t rely only on quantity. If your articles are crap, few webmasters will want to publish them, and even fewer readers will want to read them. You also need quality. That means:

• an excellent command of spoken and written English; AND
• a sound understanding of the needs of the target audience; AND
• a sound understanding of the needs of the client’s business; AND
• consistency in style; AND
• thoroughly researched, logical arguments; AND, AND, AND…

In my humble opinion, there’s just no way you can get both quantity and quality without investing in it appropriately.

Here’s why:

In my experience, a good 500 word article takes around 3-8 hours to research, write, optimize and edit. Add another hour or so to implement changes arising out of client review, and you’ve got a total of 4-9 hours. (Many take even longer.) That works out at between $1.11 to $2.50 per hour. Based on a 40 hour week, 47 week year (and no benefits), that’s a grand total of $1,087 to $4,700 per year!

I’d wager there isn’t a good copywriter in the world who’d work for that sort of money.

You might argue that the work could be outsourced – maybe to somewhere like India? I agree that it could, but you still wouldn’t get a good writer.

A cursory scan of Indian job search site Nakuri (http://jobsearch.naukri.com) reveals that a half-way decent copywriter can earn around 4,00,000 to 8,00,000 Rupees per year. That’s around USD $9,390 to $18,780 per year + benefits. So why would they work for $4,700 (much less $1,087) per year????!

They wouldn’t.

Sure there’d probably be plenty of unproven writers willing to have a crack at it, but that’s exactly my point. How many of them would be able to research and write a quality article as outlined above. Just as importantly, how many would stick around for more than one or two. Very few.

The upshot could only be pulp. Meaningless articles churned out for keyword density and nothing more. In fact, they’re probably just re-wording existing articles. Hardly a long-term SEO strategy…

Just my gripe for the day!

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I’m working on an SEO copy job for a natural therapist, at the moment. They’re doing their own keyword analysis (with a little help from me along the way). Over the weekend, they spent a lot of time thinking about and researching their keywords. Having never done any keyword analysis before, they found this process fairly confusing, and they came to me for some advice this morning. I thought I’d post their question and my answers. Hopefully someone will find the exchange useful.

Client: Using SEOBook’s Keyword Tool, we came up with a list of possible keywords:

• “Digestive system” - 3336 hits from google
• “Digestive disorders” - 74
• “Natural health” - 205
• “Step by step” - 391
• “Naturopath” – 158
• “Naturopaths” – 61
• “Natural therapy” – 30
• Specific words - ailments and conditions - got higher hits and may be included on a specific page. E.g.: Autism, ADHD, Coeliac disease, Irritable bowel.

My Response:

1. I can combine “digestive system” and “digestive disorder” into “digestive system disorders”. Google is smart enough to recognise this combination, and would index you in searches for both. (Note that all things being equal, a site that targets the exact phrase “digestive disorder” will outrank you, but all things are rarely equal! This sort of approach makes very little difference to your overall SEO presence.)
2. I wouldn’t target “step by step” at all. Not in isolation, anyway. People who search for “step by step” could be searching for anything; if you managed to rank no.1 in the world for that phrase, the vast majority of your visitors wouldn’t be interested in natural therapies at all. They’d be interested in all sorts of things. However, because we still use “step by step” in the copy naturally, you’ll be indexed in searches for “digestive system disorders step by step”, and things like that.
3. I’d recommend targeting “naturopaths” over “naturopath” (see reasoning for combinations discussed in point 1 above). You’ll notice if you search for either, there are results for all sorts of similar words, including “naturopathy” and “naturopathic”. This shows you that Google is smart enough to find relevant sites even if the word isn’t EXACTLY what the user searched for. The only time it isn’t is when the user actually includes the quotes in their search. This would happen very rarely.
4. With only 30 searches reported, “natural therapy” might not be a very good phrase to target. There is a lot of competition for it. Do a worldwide search and you’ll see there are approx 10.5 million results. That means you’d have to work quite hard to rank for it, and you’d only get a very small reward (’cos not many people are searching for it).
5. Specific conditions - I’d recommend targeting only the ones that you’re really keen to win work from. i.e. If you really want to attract a lot of the traffic that’s searching for “autism”, then by all means target it. But if it’s only incidental, I’d think twice. There would be HEAPS of competition for this word. Probably for most specific conditions. So only choose the ones you really want. You can include the others, of course, but don’t make them your primary or secondary keyword phrases. Concentrate on the phrases that will bring you the most qualified traffic.
6. A note on using targeting specific words on specific pages… Generally speaking, targeting words or phrases on one page only will be pretty ineffective. Normally you need to have a lot of content related to the keywords you’re targeting – a lot more than just one page If google sees a lot of content, it assumes there must be something useful in there.

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