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Every day cheap content writers are hired by local businesses, affiliate marketers, and content marketing agencies to produce content for websites. This article is going to explain why this is an unfortunate mistake that needs to stop.
The vast majority of websites don’t get any organic traffic. One of the main reasons is because they simply don’t have enough content on their pages. It is not uncommon to see business websites with less than 400 words on the homepage. Even worse, these same businesses will often have even less words on their service pages.
The highest ranking websites have thousands of words on each page. You would think that business owners would look at the websites of their competitors out of curiosity and put two and two together. A simple glance at the top websites in search results should be revealing. It would be logical to assume that more content must be one of the reasons why they are ranking higher.
The question must be asked, why aren’t businesses putting more information on their websites? Surely, business owners have enough knowledge about their industry to come up with more than 250 words on each page.
There are a few main reasons why these businesses don’t have more content on their websites. First of all, they might not know what to put on there. Business owners also may not feel comfortable typing a lot of content on their website. They might not have confidence in their ability to use proper grammar or spelling. Business owners simply might be unaware that they need a certain amount of content. They might think anything other than the name, address, and phone number is unnecessary. Finally, they just might not have the time to worry about writing content when they have a business to manage.
Sometimes, businesses believe they need more information on their website but want someone else to do it. This opens them up to a trap. This is how businesses sometimes end up hiring cheap content writers.
Any time one option costs less than the other, the cheaper option is going to garner consideration. If a business doesn’t understand the value of high quality content, it will be harder for them to pay more for a service they don’t understand.
Some business owners might know that content has something to do with SEO, but they aren’t aware of how sophisticated search engines have become when it comes to detecting spam. They may still be thinking about how ten years ago they put their target keyword in transparent text and placed it on their website. They don’t realize that the competition is so fierce, low or medium grade content is as good as having none at all.
Search engines are designed to produce the most relevant content available when someone makes a search query. Search queries are often made by people seeking expert information on how to perform a task on their own. For example, how to swing a golf club, or what to do if an electrical outlet isn’t working. A content writer is not going to be able to deliver value to readers if they aren’t an electrician or golf professional.
Notwithstanding, content writers are hired to write about these topics every day resulting in useless information, wasted advertising dollars, and cash in the pockets of amateurs. When readers do click on pages with this type of content, most of them are able to detect that the information is bad. Others may fall prey to the content writer’s false information. This is not to say that content writers purposely provide bad information. It’s just that information from a content writer will never be able to match that of a professional who has been in the field and experienced the topic first hand.
The only situation where hiring a cheap content writer is a good investment is if you are a content marketing agency. If someone offers topic research in their $5 or $10 content package, you could purchase it just to see if any of the information provided is useful and possibly add it to what you get from a professional. It is never a good idea to take the content and move it straight to your website.
When anything is cheap, you have to ask the question why. It is well known that cheap content writers often plagiarize content from other sources. Sure, there are tools you can use to check for plagiarism, but sometimes these tools miss things.
A lot of the cheap content writer gigs on websites such as Fiverr are provided by people that can not deliver content fluently between languages. Their profile says they are fluent but it is clear from reading the content that it is not the case. There can be different dialects within the same language that can also make things sound weird. Sometimes you can go in and clean up some of these issues yourself, but you still have to deal with the fact that the content may not be of high quality.
The best way to add high quality content to your business website is come up with the information yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to decide what it should be about and it doesn’t mean you have to write it.
To begin with what you need to do is hire a professional who knows how to do keyword research. The last thing you want to do is invest time into making content about something no one is searching for.
Once topics have been decided based on keyword research, further research should be done to find out what type of questions are being asked about these topics. This can be done by seeing what other information is ranking at the top of Google. It is reasonable to believe that whatever is ranking on page one must be relevant. You can also use a keyword research tool that provides phrases that are typed in question form.
Next, you need to be the one to provide the content and answer questions based on what the research has revealed that it should be about. You can do this by either typing it yourself, or simply using your phone to opine on the topics as you record. If you choose to record, you or your digital marketing professional can use various tools to transcribe the recording to text and transfer it to your website.
This strategy allows you to use the highest quality content possible because it came from someone with firsthand knowledge about the topic. This will without a doubt cause your website to rank higher on search engines and provide more value to readers and potential customers.
In the end, cheap content writers are not a good option for increasing the value of your website. In fact, you might be hurting yourself more by hiring them than you would be if you just had no content at all. Showing up on page 7 is often the same as not showing up at all. That is about as high as you are going to get optimizing low quality content. There are creative ways to get good information on your website. If building your online presence is important to you, it is going to take a little bit of time and you might have to invest a little money. You don’t have to break the bank, but $5 for 500 words of content just isn’t the way to go for a legitimate business.