SEO Article Writing With Named Sources and Bylines

Every article we hand over carries at least one fact that appears on none of the ten pages currently ranking: a figure from your own data, a quote from someone accountable for the thing, a screenshot of a process only your team can take. That is the standard, and it is why the work is slow. A piece takes eleven to fourteen days from brief to delivery, and most of that is waiting on the interview and the fact-check rather than drafting. Who writes: Two people. Both have written in this field for over a decade, and both have been wrong in public and issued a correction. Neither is a coordinator passing your brief to a freelance pool. If you want to know which of the two will write a given piece, ask before you commission it and we will tell you. The interview: Forty minutes, recorded, with the person inside your company who owns the subject. We do not accept a proxy — not the head of ops instead of the ops manager, not the marketing director instead of the category buyer. Nearly everything that makes a piece worth reading arrives in that call as an aside, and the aside is what the article gets built around. If the interview cannot be scheduled, the piece pauses rather than proceeding with a hole in it. Bylines: We write under one of your subject experts' names only when that person has read the piece, can defend it in a room, and has agreed in writing to be its author. We do not invent authors. We do not build profile pages for people who do not exist. We will not attach a real employee's name to something they have not read. This has cost us work and the position is not moving. Editing: Two rounds. The first is substantive: tell us where the argument is wrong, where the numbers are wrong, or where your legal team cannot live with a claim. The second is line-level. What we will not do is a round whose notes are keyword density, headings that must contain an exact phrase, or a request to reach a length. Those notes make the piece worse, and we will say so and decline rather than apply them quietly and let you believe the result is what we would have written. Languages: English and Mandarin, as originals rather than translations. A Chinese-language piece for a Singapore or regional audience is researched against Chinese-language results pages and Chinese-language sources, because those results barely overlap with the English ones and a translated article ranks for nothing while reading as imported. For Bahasa, Thai or Vietnamese we will introduce you to people who do it properly and step out of the way. Not included: Design, illustration, and CMS entry beyond a clean document with headings and links marked. Social and newsletter versions. Ongoing performance reporting on pieces we wrote — we will read the results with you at the end of an engagement, but a monthly deck covering eight articles is theatre and we will not bill for producing it. Wrong fit: Anyone comparing on cost per thousand words. The arithmetic here is bad against a content agency built for volume, and you should use one, without hard feelings. Anyone who needs a publication count to satisfy an internal target, because the count will be the first thing our process breaks. And any subject where nobody internally can be made available for an interview inside a fortnight; that constraint sits in your calendar rather than ours, and we would rather not start than write the generic version.