Doing research is an integral part of content writing because often, clients don’t give you all the information you need to write convincingly.
What does research for content writing mean?
I will give you a small example.
I don’t have an accounting background. My search engine rankings for “content writing services for accounting businesses” have suddenly come to the first or second position on Google. Lots of accountants are approaching these days.
Top Google rankings for my content writing services.
Most of the clients expect me to find relevant information on the net from other websites and then come up with the relevant content and make it “unique”.
Of course, I make it unique, but I need to find the meanings of all the services that are alien to me, for example SMSF auditing or BAS accounting, or different ways of accounting in Australia, Canada and the UK. How do I find that information? I research.
There is another company, or a group of individuals, who have gotten hold of some scripts, who want to build DEFI platforms (decentralized finance) or NFTs (non-fungible tokens), or general blockchain applications. Sometimes I feel that the terms that they want me to use in the content, even they don’t know them, but maybe it’s just my skepticism. The thing is, whenever I ask for some clarification, they ask me to look up on the Internet. I research.
There are no special tools for researching. Yes, if you want to research keywords to write optimized contents, there are many specialized SEO tools such as Ahrefs, but if you want to find information to write content, you need to use the good old Google or Bing.
I use Google for research purposes. I set it to various countries to find diverse information. In Firefox I open a “Private window”. I go to google.com. Then I go to settings. In the settings I change the name of the country for displaying the results. This way, suppose I set the country to Australia and then search for “crypto wallet development company”, it is going to show me companies from Australia and not India, from where I’m doing the search.
Your ability to research as a content writer must also include your ability to recognize useful information. How do I do that?
When I’m looking for information, my main purpose is to find information that would be useful to my client’s readers (customers and clients). I look at the information from their perspective. If I feel that they would find the information useful, I use it. Otherwise, I keep looking.
Do I charge extra for research when I’m writing content? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends on how much time I need to spend researching. If I feel that I need to research a lot, I add it to the time that I spend writing content. I let the client know, and if he or she is not ready to pay for the extra time, I insist that he or she give me the right information.