A couple of years ago I wrote for an accounting company. I had written their primary content (homepage, services, etc.) but the website wasn’t generating much traffic. The problem was not with SEO because you cannot optimize beyond a particular point if there are just 12 pages on the website and there is already lots of competition. I advised them to create a blog but they were clueless regarding what they would publish on the blog considering it is an accounting firm? They didn’t want educational content on their blog because they thought if they educate their visitors they might start maintaining their own accounts resulting in loss of business.

I told them that first, there was nothing wrong in publishing educational content because if it were this easy to maintain accounting almost everybody would do it (lots of educational content already available on the Internet) and second, even if they end up losing 1-2 odd clients, due to traffic increase and better engagement they will be getting many new clients. I gave them my own example: I write lots of content on content writing and content publishing but still I get business. The vertical content that I write convinces my clients that I know what I’m doing. The more I talk about my business the more convinced they get. On the contrary, if I don’t write such content, my business decreases and this has been the case with many businesses.

Since it was a new idea they were reluctant, understandably. But they weren’t anyway getting much business from the website so I asked them what would be the harm? This made sense to them and they asked me to go ahead. The next problem was, making them pay me for the work I was going to do despite the fact that they weren’t sure whether it was going to benefit them or not. I don’t do free work so I told them to take their time and when they were ready they could contact me again. After a couple of months I got an email from their representative and they were ready to pay me for 20 blog posts.

They wanted me to start with their most competitive terms and phrases around which I was supposed to create the blog posts but I told them that it would be better if they started with the least competitive terms. When writing content for the purpose of increasing traffic I always follow the bottom-top approach. Target the least competitive search terms first because it’s easier to get content from them with little effort. As you begin to get traffic, increase the scope and start including the more competitive words.

Anyway, here I’m not talking about whether to target most competitive search terms or least competitive search terms, here I’m talking about writing educational content.

I started with generic topics like what difficulties a typical firm faces while trying to hire an accounting service and how to overcome these difficulties. Why should you hire an accounting service rather than managing accounts in-house? What are the meanings of different accounting terms and what are their implications on your business? Why is accounting important for your business and why your business cannot do without accounting? What is the history of accounting? How did accounting evolve?

Some of the topics that I covered even accountants of the firm hadn’t thought about. After I had written 20 blog post for them they didn’t see any improvement in the traffic but they liked the topics that I was covering so much that they commissioned me to create 40 more blog posts. By the time they had published around 50 blog posts they started getting queries. The person who wrote me was thrilled like a kid. Once we had published more than 100 blog posts (my frequency was publishing 4 blog posts every week) they started getting one query from their website almost daily. Although not regularly, on and off I still write for them and they are doing brisk business from their website. All because of the educational content they didn’t want me to write.