I was a kid when chicken nuggets were introduced, so of course I loved them. That is, until I bit into one and came across a slimy piece of organ meat. The whole bread coating came off like a veil, and I found myself staring at this glistening, rubbery piece of something, and I suddenly realized in my own viscera the truth of that Wendy’s commercial that had been playing.
If chicken nuggets don’t inspire the same visceral response from you (either loving or loathing), think to the more recent controversy about “pink slime.” The lesson is the same: You don’t make good food by jamming together the reject parts of animals. Instead, you end up with what a federal judge described as a “McFrankenstein,” a creation thrown together for convenience and profit.
If you hire a service to provide content and optimization, they may also be turning your site into a McFrankenstein by stitching together pieces of uneven quality by many different writers. Here’s how getting a writer of your own can help more than the randomly-selected content parts used by your content service.
The SEO Value of a Dedicated Writer
Let’s face it, one of the main reasons why you want to add more content to your site is to aid search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The effectiveness of content for SEO depends heavily on the quality of that content. If you want a detailed explanation, you can read this blog I wrote for my former employer on the subject, but here I just want to focus on a couple ways that having a dedicated writer can improve the impact content has on your search results.
First, Google and Bing are both clear that quality matters, and that consistency of quality matters. Google goes out of their way to note that having a few pages of poor quality on an otherwise good site can drag the ranking of the entire site down significantly.
Second, the search engines tell us that they want your writer to care about the quality of your content. Who is more likely to care about your content: a dedicated writer or someone who just picked your site off the top of the job queue?
In reference to the Panda algorithm update, Google highlights the following as potentially problematic: “Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?” To me, it doesn’t get any clearer than that. For maximum effectiveness, your quality content has to be made by one or at most a few writers.
Branding and a Writer’s Voice
A passionate writer will write like no one else. Although talented writers can mimic one another’s voices and take on a number of styles, there is
nothing quite like the unique voice of a writer. When you want your website to speak with your brand’s voice, your best bet is to find a quality writer and stick with him.
Working with a dedicated writer means you won’t have to constantly be explaining what elements are vital to your brand identity, nor will you have to worry that they’ll just be neglected. Any qualified writer can write generic content for just anyone, but a dedicated writer will write content that is specifically for you. They will include important elements like how long you’ve been in business, what types of special training, products, materials, and affiliations set you apart from your competitors. They will also know how to target the customers you are looking for.
Consistent Quality Helps Conversions
When I bit into that piece of organ meat, it turned me off chicken nuggets for many years. How do you think potential clients, customers, or patients respond when they come across the textual equivalent of organ meat on your site?
When people want to do business with you, they will not just look at one page on your site–they will likely scan many pages, clicking around on the site to read a little here, a little there. If you have a significant amount of McFrankenstein content on your site, they will find it. And then they will judge you based on it. After all, your website is speaking for you.
There is a legal concept that sums up a lot about how people make judgments about others: “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,” or “False in one, false in all.” If a witness is found lying in one particular, who’s to say the entire testimony isn’t just a string of lies? When people find inconsistent content on your website, they make judgments about your work. It’s not fair, but it’s how people think.
Having a dedicated writer who cares about your content and will dedicate himself to giving you the best every time sends the message to your potential clients that you will do the same, and can increase the conversion rate on your website.
How to Tell Whether You’re Being Fed Pink Slime
When you’re working with an optimization or content service, they are likely very adamant that the content you’re receiving has the necessary quality to get you the results you desire. However, it’s worth the effort to figure out whether your site has a dedicated writer or if you’re being fed a bunch of disconnected parts.
Ask: If you have an account manager or other contact person you trust, you can just ask whether your site is being handled by a dedicated writer.
Read: If you don’t have an account manager or other contact person you feel you can trust, then you’ll have to do some sleuthing on your own. The simplest investigation you can do is just read your content. Click around between older and newer content and look for style markers that distinguish between the pages. It could be subtle things like word choice, sentence length, or other style markers. It could be major things like the presence or absence of subheadings or particular sections of the page. A common one left out when you get generic writers is the section about why people should choose you rather than your competitors–it helps to make the pages more generic and easier to write.
Investigate: If you don’t like reading or just want a shorter route, you can look for the marks put in content about its writer. If you get your content in files, you can look for initials on the files, or codes like “ed” for “edited.” You can also right click on the file, and open the “Properties” pane, then click on the “details” tab. This may show the original creator of the file. This can also be found if you open the file in Word, then look on the file menu for “info” or “properties.”
Once you’ve figured out that you have multiple writers, you’ll not only be able to ask for a dedicated writer, you’ll be able to ask for the one you like by name.
But What about Sausage?
Yes, it’s true. Sausage is a tasty food made up of all kinds of random reject parts ground up and blended.
The truth is that, like sausage, there are times on your site when it’s okay to utilize multiple writers with multiple voices, such as on your blog or your social media account. But, to be effective, it’s important to have a good strategy, and to make it open and acknowledged that you have multiple writers, such as one who is doing regular content updates and another who is doing specific posts related to events in the office. These posts by different authors in different styles adds texture and personality to these less formal, more conversational areas of your website.
But when it comes to the main pages of your website, it is important to make sure that they are all of one piece for quality, not just a slurry of words stuck together with salt and fat.
If you want consistent, quality content for your website, please contact Writer MC today for more information.