heartharmony.com.au

Copywriting, like all service industries, have people at all ends of the financial spectrum.  You can find budget writers in India and Indonesia, and you can find $20,000 a letter plus a % of all sales in the USA.  In Australia the fees vary dramatically – ranging from the VAs who moonlight as writers, right the way through to highly qualified direct mail marketing writers.

We are unashamedly at the mid-high end of the industry. And here’s a little case study to help you understand why you get what you pay for.

Over the past few weeks I have been working with a very talented and successful natural therapies practitioner on revising her website content. She  understands the value of being found in search engines, so we invested time on conducting a range of searches for her so she could get an idea of how many people per day were looking for particular services relating to her industry.

We used this information when creating her copy. This is termed SEO copywriting and includes creating the metatags, H1 & 2 tags and on-page links that her web designer can then just upload onto her site, as well as keyword rich copy.  Her copy will be on-page optimised before she loads it – meaning step 1 of SEO has been completed when her site goes “live”. SEO copywriting is a unique niche – and one we love!

But, in researching her copy we found she used two machines in her business. We did a quick research scan to see what other businesses and the manufacturers said about the machines – and found all used basically the same copy.  (In most cases the copy was identical. This is termed “duplicate content” and has SEO implications, as well as breaches of copyright implications, but we won’t go there).

We then went back and re-read all the Australian legislation and guidelines from the Therapeutic Goods Administration Act to determine what could be said about these machines.

We did further research to find out the specific wordings of the TGA approvals for each machine – as the wording is unique to each machine. “TGA approved” just doesn’t cut it legally – we wanted to state specifically what each machine was approved to do.

We also checked out legal case law to see if there had been any claims made against the advertising of these machines, and discovered a recent case where the “standard wording and claims” used by most practitioners and the manufacturer had been blasted by the courts. The standard wording and claims had been banned from being used, the person before the courts had to withdraw their ads and print a retraction.

Of course, this also means most of the other websites out there that mention these machines and use the standard wording and claims are in breach of the legislation.

Using all of this data and case law, we presented it to the client, to educate her on the situation. We very carefully crafted her web copy to comply with the legislation, guidelines and case law (… yet still sell her services and use of the machines). Of course we advised her to seek competent legal advice to confirm our draft.

What is the point of this post? Budget basement copywriters or newbie copywriters don’t do the research and don’t “get” the legal and SEO side of things.

Of course in every business you need to adopt a risk management approach to your work – but as one of the USP’s of this client is her wonderful honesty and ethical dealings, we made sure her copy was in line with her USP.

Yes, we do things a bit differently … but we also can sleep at night, comfortable in knowing we are protecting our clients while making their businesses highly successful. And yes, we do charge accordingly.

Until next time

We put your business into words

Ingrid Cliff – Freelance Copywriter