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
-
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 -
Could this be an issue with duplicate content?
Hi everyone, I am working with a business consultant in the HVAC industry and doing SEO for 8 of his clients (all HVAC businesses from around the US and Canada). Each website is essentially a mirror of the business consultant's website with really the same information-- it applies perfectly well to each individual website, but it IS nearly, if not, identical. I'm getting ready to implement a blog on the original HVAC page and have been considering using the same content (customized to reflect each business-- but still the same information) for blogs for my other 8 clients. My questions are: 1. Is the mirroring of the website a duplicate content problem? Example if you're interested: http://www.mcair.com (original) and http://www.jpsheating.ca/ (client). 2. Is using the same blog across 8 different website (customized for each client but the same basic information) a duplicate content issue? For example-- a blog about getting your air ducts cleaned... the information is going to be the same (and relevant) with each business and each business could benefit from sharing that information with their customers. Thanks so much for your help and explanation
Content Development | | KaitlinNS0 -
Duplicate listings content
I've been listing our business on various business and wedding directories most of which require a short description of the business. I've written up a "boilerplate" description which is fairly similar to one we have on the site. If I use this content on multiple listings sites will it cause me issues with google seeing it as duplicate content and finding it difficult to decide which pages to rank?Most of these sites are supplier directories so I don't expect people to site search them for our business they are much more likely to browse categories but will it affect organic results for our actual website? Should I be writing a different piece of copy for each listing which requires a company description to avoid any issues?
Content Development | | EdoubleD
Any help is greatly appreciated!!!0 -
Is it possible to aggregate news content?
Currently all of our content is produced internally, but I would like to expirement with aggregating 50% of our content from external publishers. The content wouldn't be full articles, but instead the excepts with a link back to the source. Is there a way to aggregate content without being penalized? We are using wordpress.
Content Development | | ejovi0 -
2 URLs pointing to exactly the same content
Hi guys As far as I know if you have 2 websites with exactly the same (100%) content with 2 URLs which are not pointing to any other URL should attract penalisation from google, right? well, there is such a case and it was online for long time but the bad guys are in top of organic search and it does not seem to bother google at all! I don't want to list them here; it is extremely annoying and frustrating as I worked hard to get in higher search but seeing this thing is extremely frustrating! any advice on this? thanks
Content Development | | photoion0 -
Hosted eCommerce with Outstanding Content Management
Can anyone recommend a hosted eCommerce solution that makes blog/article creation very easy and seamlessly integrates the content into the storefront? If the solution also offered great social media tools, also, that would be great.
Content Development | | DenverKelly0 -
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 -
Duplicate Content Penalty
If our pages are to have roughly 30% of non-original textual content, can we be penalized by Google? Or are we OK as long as this non-original content is relevant to the pages?
Content Development | | Quidsi0