The Benefits of Outsourcing Blog Writing
If you’re new to leveraging organic search traffic for business growth, outsourcing blog writing to an experienced SEO agency is a great option.
Here’s a few reasons why you should consider hiring a content production team:
Lower Risk: Any SEO agency worth their weight will have strong in-house processes for keyword research, content planning, blog writing and editing. If you wanted to produce blog content for your business on your own, you’d have to develop these same processes from scratch, which comes with financial risk because you’re bound to make mistakes in your early days of writing blog content. It’s extremely likely that at the very least, your keyword research won’t be as strong as an SEO agency’s, leading to content that doesn’t rank and ultimately, doesn’t bring in new business.
Time and Cost Savings: Hiring, training and managing new staff doesn’t come free, unfortunately. In addition to developing in-house processes like the ones we described above, you’re going to (inefficiently) expend resources to get the same quality results. While the cost of hiring a single content writer might be cheaper or similar in price to hiring an agency, you have to also consider the time costs associated with going in-house. Editing content requires time and so does managing your writing staff.
Scalability: When outsourcing blog writing to professionals, you can easily scale the campaign up or down depending on and available marketing budget. This kind of flexibility allows you to optimise your SEO campaigns on the fly. If you produce blog content in-house, it’s much harder to make these kinds of adjustments since you have staff who have quotas to meet and are locked into contracts.
Quicker SEO Results: Working with a specialised team results in stronger results in terms of both quantity and quality of blogs written. This leads to stronger search engine rankings, increased organic traffic and improved conversions on your website.
Why Blogs Matter for SEO
Producing new pages (ie. blog content) for your website can be seen as widening the net of total keywords you can rank for.
Simply put, you can’t rank (well) for keywords that you don’t produce content for. While you might be able to rank for keywords related to the focus keyword of a page without explicitly writing content about it, you still need to produce content that tackles the focus keyword in the first place in order to rank.
How Much Does In-House Blog Writing Cost?
According to Glassdoor, the average blog writer makes $53,766. On average, you can expect an in-house blog writer to publish 1,000 words per day (about 1 blog). In annual terms, you can expect 250,000 words (250 blogs) at a rate of $215 per blog based on an average of 250 work days per year.
In addition to hiring a blog writer, you’ll also need to hire an editor to handle quality assurance so that your content not only ranks on Google, but converts visitors. Glassdoor cites an average annual salary of $56,719 for a blog editor.
Adding these 2 salaries together, you’re looking at an average of $110,485 per year to produce 250 blog articles for your business. Breaking things down, you’re looking at an average of $441.94 per blog!
If you took that same $110,485 budget and put it towards outsourcing blog writing to an experienced SEO agency, you’d produce more blog content of the same or better quality since the average rate would be lower.
For example, if you outsource your blog writing to us at Spacebar Collective, we only charge $300 per blog so you’d get 368 blogs for the same price. That’s an additional 118 blogs you’re losing out on by writing blog content in-house!
Preparing Your Site for Blog Content
Indexability: Ensure your website is visible to Google and properly indexed. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and address any errors it identifies, if necessary.
Accessibility: Accessibility compliance will make your website available for everyone, and in turn, make it easier for search engine crawlers to understand as well. Since Google puts weight on the user experience, this is a crucial aspect of SEO that doesn’t get discussed often enough.
Easy Navigation: For optimal user experience, ensure that every page on your website is accessible within just 3 clicks. This means that your menus should establish logical connections that lead visitors effortlessly to all the valuable content you have to offer. You can use tools like Screaming Frog to get a visualisation of your website’s pages to fix any navigation issues.
Fix Technical Issues: Make sure your website has a strong technical SEO foundation. Page load speed is especially important for the user experience and should be prioritised before publishing your library of content.
What to Look For in a Blog Writer
When shopping around for a writer to outsource your on-page SEO efforts to, it’s crucial that you ask the right questions. We’ve identified 3 key areas that you’ll want to dive into before trusting your content budget to a blog writer.
Proven Experience: Ask to see samples of their writing, preferably from your specific niche. Writing for a particular industry requires finesse in using the right language and tone. For example, when writing for B2B SaaS companies, writers should make sure to refer to conversions as signups.
Pricing: Not too low and not too high. You’re looking for the Goldilocks of blog writing. If a writer prices themselves too low, it’s likely they’re churning out high volumes of content using AI rather than giving proper TLC to the blogs they sell. If a writer prices themselves too high, it’s likely they’re gouging you for an absurd profit margin.
Transparency: Since low quality blog content is unlikely to rank and can actually hurt your SEO, you should seek out blog writers who are transparent about how they operate. What is their process for writing? You should understand this at a basic level, from blog research to on-page SEO practices.
Professional Blog Writing Services
There are 2 pricing structures for blog writing services: monthly retainers and à la carte per blog. Monthly retainers are great for ongoing SEO efforts, while paying per blog is better suited if you have a specific number of blogs you want to publish.
Blog Writing Subscriptions: Paying for blog writing on a subscription basis is ideal if you want consistent results over the long-term. Agencies or freelance writers will commit to writing a minimum amount of words (or blogs) every month for a monthly subscription fee. When spread out over the course of a year or several years, the savings from this payment model can be massive. Working on a monthly subscription also allows the writer time to better understand your brand voice, which often results in higher-converting content.
If you’re interested in a monthly blog content writing subscription, contact us today and we’ll get you a quote that fits your specific needs.
Paying Per Blog: If you don’t have complete buy-in from the leadership at your company to tackle SEO as a growth channel, paying per blog is a great option because you can treat it as an experiment before committing a larger budget.
For those that are ready to tackle outsourcing blog writing today, we have 3 tiers of blog content packages available on our content production service page.
