Writing <200 word pieces of content in a 7.5 hour day
-
My employer has a content writer who is currently working on writing unique descriptions for many pages, on the order of around 150-200 words per piece of content. A recurring theme in this content is to write a list of features such as "it does X, X, X, X, X and X", which can sometimes happen a couple of times during the content and takes up a decent chunk of wording.
This content does not require in-depth research over and above reading the about us page of some sites and looking at what services they provide, as well as some quick details like their payment and delivery methods etc.
As well as that the writer also writes the Meta Description and then uploads these to a CMS. There are no other tasks.
Considering the writer is doing this 5 days a week, 7.5 hours a day, and isn't getting paid a poor or trainee-type wage, what would you say would be an acceptable amount to achieve on the average day?
The current average works out to around, or slightly less than 8 of these pieces of content each day.
Thoughts?
-
Thanks Joe,
I would agree that around 30 minutes per article, so around 15/day should be fair, as you say it is fairly straightforward.
I'll see what we can do about using excel and other tools to speed things up. I already worked on something like this to organise keywords and topically relevant phrases so it was quicker to work with when I had input on content, but I'll see how we can optimise and scale up this current project.
-
Thanks for the input EGOL,
Just a bit of feedback;The content is a kind of an overview and is something that makes very little difference to conversions.
The written content is replacing pre-exisiting content that is usually taken from the about-us pages of the sites the content is about, so the purpose of this is to remove duplicated content from the pages, rather than to fill a gap.
From our testing, there appears to be no difference to conversions whether the site's about-us content is used or this unique content is used. Cues and triggers are not generally used apart from stating what benefit the visitor will get from our site, which is a little bit generic (the same benefit is stated using similar wording across all several thousand of these pages).
In essence, this particular content is more of a commodity, at least in its current form.
For personal experience, I have worked with this department but generally focused on writing larger and more extensive guides and blog posts. My content required more depth and research from numerous sources, so obviously took longer to write, but my role wasn't to write multiple pieces of content 5 days of every week, every month.
Based on word count, I could achieve 3-5x this writer's volume, but they are working on multiple topics every day, whereas I might have only worked on one topic maybe once or twice a week.
-
Sit down for three days and try doing the job. Then compare your work with theirs.
It's really easy to think that a writer is not producing when you have no experience doing the same work.
So, get to work. Write 50 of them. It will be good for your soul. More important is that your experience might streamline the process, discover quick and easy methods, learn how to improve quality.
And, is this worker just blathering features or including cues and triggers that stimulate sales? I've spent entire days just tweaking three or four important pages.
We must avoid considering a page of content as a commodity. There are enormous differences between bad, pedestrian, great, and kickass work. One has very little value to your business. Another can MAKE your business.
-
Really hard to know for sure without knowing the industry/vertical, but it sounds like you've started somewhat of a system for scaling this up.
I would estimate a half-hour per article with time to upload to the CMS included in that, so around 15 pieces I would estimate is fair. Again a lot depends on the research and ultimate quality of the content, but it sounds like it's fairly straightforward.
One thing you could do to help is identify what features are being identified over and over, and see if you can help with some Excel spreadsheet magic.
I managed a project like this in the past for golf course descriptions, and since there were about 1,500 of these, using Excel came in clutch.
Yes you want quality content, but if you're listing features over and over, then you should use tools to help speed up the work!
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
-
Duplicate Content for Non-SEO Purposes
Duplicate Content for Non-SEO Purposes There are a few layers to this question, but at the most basic level the question is... -Will having the same article (in the form of archived e-newsletter issues) on multiple different websites' newsletter archives HURT those sites? I'm fairly sure it won't HELP any of them in terms of SEO, but will having these back issues of their e-newsletters archived on their websites get them penalized? For the purpose of this question, these are not clients we are doing SEO for, just hosting and their e-newsletters. So it's fine if the archives provide no SEO benefit, we just don't want to leave them up if they will become LIABILITIES for the websites. -If having the same article in archived issues of e-newsletters on multiple different websites WOULD be harmful, would moving these archives to a sub-domain change anything or would it be best to simply take the archives down altogether? -Alternately, would spinning these articles make any difference in whether or not these sites get penalized? -Lastly, would spinning make the articles usable for archived e-newsletters for clients that ARE signed on for SEO services? I have a hunch about this, but I'd love to hear your expert opinions. Thanks!
Content Development | | BrianAlpert780 -
Why is content getting longer?
I find it odd that with the way life is today -- the gotta-have-it-now, instant gratification, can't hold someone's attention span for longer than 3 seconds -- why Google is wanting content to be REALLY long?? I've read articles saying content should be as long as 2,000 words per page. This just seems nuts to me. No one wants to read anymore. Look at how short Twitter posts are and how videos are so prevalent now. Any thoughts?
Content Development | | SEOhughesm0 -
Is there an upper bound on the number of links an url might get in a day?
There are link spammers and programs like GSA and others, that automate linkbuilding, and I was wondering if anybody ever had a penalty because a page on his site is getting too many references (links). I am not talking about spamming here. So provided that the links are coming from relevant, unique sources, but you do an over excessive campaign, and you seem to be getting too many backlinks, can it negatively affect SEO? Alternatively: is there an upper bound on the number of links you try to build in a day when you are doing linkbuilding?
Content Development | | snetface0 -
Any freelance writers with viral content / linkbait experience?
Looking for a great freelance writer to assist in creating linkbait and viral content pieces. Please contact me if you are, or know of, such a person. 🙂
Content Development | | AdamThompson0 -
Evergreen content: Dedicated section or blog posts?
As part of our content strategy we are creating an ongoing series of articles to help both our potential buyers and our users learn about our product and improve their knowledge of industry best practices in general. Internally, we've had some debate as to where we should host this content within our site. We've identified two approaches: Series of blog posts Dedicated knowledge section of the website If we go with the first approach, we would created a dedicated section that indexed all the blog posts. If we went with the second, we'd create blog posts for each of the articles announcing their addition. Is there any difference, SEO wise with the two approaches? What would you recommend? Thanks, Darren.
Content Development | | dgibbons0 -
What are the best content writer sites?
Hi, I'm doing some work on a new blog and wondered if anyone could recommend some low cost content writers? I have only justed started researching this service, so any advice the SEOmoz community could give would be grately appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | RBH0 -
Duplicate content for manually setup blog and wordpress blog
We have a website where the ecommerce will not allow us to host blog. So we created our own manual blog page setup. Will this flag duplicate content on Google? http://www.homesupershops.com/blog and http://www.homesupershops.com/blog-july have same content. How come on a word press the same content on http://www.vizionseo.com/blog/ and http://www.vizionseo.com/blog/2011/05/how-can-your-business-rank-high-on-google-maps/ does not flag duplicate content?
Content Development | | VizionSEO990 -
My WebSite has two sections with overlapping, or redundant articles on the same topics. Google is only listing one or the other article in Search Results. What should I do to have both pages (similiar but unique content ) to be listed?
My Web Site has two sections with overlapping, or redundant articles on the same topics. Google is only listing one or the other article in Search Results. What should I do to have both pages (similar but unique content ) to be listed? Example: http://www.womenshealthcaretopics.com/pregnancy_week_12.htm http://www.womenshealthcaretopics.com/pregnancy_12_weeks.html
Content Development | | docjamesmd0