One of the things we have been very proactive about in the past year or so is writing content for our SEO clients. Hugo Guzman once commented to me that if he could hire one job skill to his SEO team, it would be a copywriter. Everybody (search engines, SEO agency’s, bloggers, my mom) preaches the mantra of “content is king”, but it’s been my observation that few people do anything about it.
SEO agencies aren’t subject matter experts on the clients’ products or services, no matter how close, or long, a relationship they’ve had. Clients don’t have time; they’ve hired an outside SEO agency for their expertise and to relieve their workload, not increase it. Bloggers want to spend time promoting their own agendas. The search engines find it easy to say “write relevant content”, they don’t have to do it (how about all that relevant content on the Google home page!). And my mom has better things to do.
Compounding the problem is that the bigger the company the more bureaucracy gets involved in getting anything new on the website. Marketing approval, product manager approval, web / IT approval, and of course, the dreaded legal approval that single handedly can add months to a posting timeframe.
The approach we have taken is to be very proactive and create content for clients and let them tell us they don’t want it. It never happens! They realize they need fresh content, they know they don’t have time and they appreciate the effort we put in. As for being subject matter experts, often we find that our ‘layman’s’ version of their products or services are much more in tune with their prospects than their internal ‘corporate speak’.
We always start with just using the content as link bait for our link building teams since this usually requires less approval and then after we show this success, it becomes easier to get them to add content on the web site.
How are you helping clients build content?
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