Hiring a local content writer is not just something you should do to support our New Zealand economy. (Although that’s nice too.) It’s a smart strategic move for your business.
Are you liking the current love for NZ Made products just as much as I do?
I have a long-standing passion for New Zealand products. One that stems from well before our current stormy circumstances.
The love for New Zealand Services and Products
We’re a remote and tiny country that sings to its own tune. We’re never going to be the biggest or the cheapest, which is why we need to be the smartest and the best. Turn our weakest point into our biggest asset. Yes?
But here’s my 5 cents of wisdom: We should not stop with NZ Products. Rather than looking for cheap overseas services (like content writing, copywriting, graphic design, web design, etc), our focus for services should equally be on what’s on offer in our New Zealand backyard. Including local content writers.
But not for the reasons you may think. It makes complete and total sense from a strategic point of view for your own business.
Here’s why.
Playing the Google game
Content writing is more than knitting pretty sentences together. It’s also playing a chess game with Google. It’s called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Basically, it boils down to being smart with how Google reads and values your content and as a result ranks your website during a Google search.
For a long time that was a straightforward game of Keywords. Google would look for the key-word(s) in your content and count the number of times it would occur. The more the better. As a result, people would cram as many keywords as they could in a short amount of text. Nobody cared that the result was an unreadable hotchpotch. But as any business would do, they would look for the cheapest content they could lay their hands on, as long as it had the keywords. Companies offering the services of dirt cheap overseas Content Writers who barely spoke English sprouted left, right and centre.
Times have changed, so has the Google game
But Google moved on. Keywords still matter, although in a very different way. What’s important is that on top of the keywords, Google started punishing websites with badly written content based on keyword stuffing. Instead, Google became ‘smart’. The current algorithms can work out the intent and the context of what’s on your page. Google knows if your content is current or outdated. Google knows whether it’s original or loosely copied from some other site. It gauges the quality of the writing and whether people bother to read your stuff.
As I said… Smart. But here’s the point.
Your content should play the new (with emphasis on NEW) keyword game. But it should also be highly relevant and written for your audience. For New Zealand, that means we should write for Kiwis. After all, we have our own kind of humour, our own unique style of doing business, our own ‘ je ne sais quoi’.
We’re a country of medium to small size business where everybody knows everybody (well… almost). And we are justifiably proud of our innovative can-do attitude.
Only a Kiwi knows how to speak Kiwi
As a result, a copy paste approach of what works somewhere else in the world is unlikely to be relevant to us. So it makes sense to play content writing the distinct Kiwi way for it to be as effective as possible.
And who better to do that than a fellow Kiwi?