What’s the one thing a professional article writer needs to ensure to avoid rejection? Not giving the client a chance to say that “X wasn’t done.” If I was told to do something, I’ll find a way to do it. Well, mostly.
Client temperaments are different. When they ask you to use keywords in a specific arrangement, sometimes you must stick to it even if it wrecks the prose. Sometimes, you’re allowed some headroom because they have a better understanding of how Google ranks pages (not by looking at how many exact queries/keywords are mentioned in an article).
But when it’s your first time working with a particular client, you don’t have that information (assuming it wasn’t clarified already). And that’s happened with me more often than not. We do our best to ask questions, but some clients are simply unresponsive, or actually working on multiple projects or clients of their own to care for each project individually. They still need to order articles.
This guy, let’s call him Mark, wanted me to write about insurance claims in Florida. His brief was very clear: write articles that genuinely help people. But he had a strict set of keywords to fit in. Without clear instructions and proper responses to our queries, I did what any sane person would do.
I chose not to write a sentence like, “ … and that’s why you need an insurance claim attorney Florida.” What is this? Am I telling Florida itself that you need an attorney? So, keyword soup type of stuff is something any sane article writer tries to avoid. Yes, if the client specifically mentions that exactly X, Y, and Z keywords must be present this many times in the piece, then you have no other choice. You know that keyword stuffing like this stopped working decades ago. They don’t. Or maybe it’s not a super important piece; maybe it’s a guest post, and having this keyword soup outweighs quality control considerations.
But in this project, I had a lack of communication and briefing. That’s the problem. I went ahead with slight tweaks: “ … and that’s why you need an insurance claim attorney in Florida.”
When Mark received the articles, he was furious, to say the least. Without even threatening us first, which is typically how this works out, he left negative reviews that instructions weren’t met. Only the instruction to add exact, grammatically incorrect keyword phrases, mind you.
He had a lot to say when we tried to defend our position. Telling him that we asked about this didn’t solve the issue. “I’m so busy, do you think I have the time to answer questions after I have already given the instructions?” Well, he did have a point.
See, you can’t change the perception a client has about how SEO works. Mark thinks stuffing keywords (and we were able to confirm this over our post-anger conversation with him) is exactly what causes a page to rank higher, completely regardless of what value the final piece of content provides a writer.
We’re proud article writers. We’re not bottom-of-the-barrel content writers who don’t feel the need to write something they’d read themselves and love. They just want to get the project done with so they can move on to the next one. In this exact situation where the keyword-tweaking headroom wasn’t clear, they’d have fitted in those exact keywords at the expense of making their sentences grammatically incorrect.
If you think about it, I matched his brief. There was no other issue. The articles were well-researched and did their best in converting something dull and monotonous into something worth reading. I pulled insurance claims facts from all over the place and stitched them together to write proper, solid articles that actually impart value to the reader.
But he still got super angry because something that a) made the piece better, b) followed his original brief to write valuable content, and c) read really well didn’t follow his instruction of stuffing exact, grammatically incorrect keywords into sentences, even though we asked if that’s how he wants it or not.
The lesson?
If you’re a client, don’t be like Mark. As I said before, Google has stopped ranking pages based on exact keywords and queries. Let’s give it that much credit: they can tell if you’re just trying to rank or actually providing some value. That was a very early-internet hack. Find out what people are entering in the search box and mention exactly that stuff in your articles to rank higher. That used to work like a charm back then. But the internet, Google, and SEO were all fairly nascent things back then.
It simply doesn’t work that way anymore.
Phil has been writing professionally for over 12 years. He specializes in well-researched, high-quality content across niches. Over the years, he has developed a vast wealth of knowledge across topics, and tackles any brief confidently and expertly. In his free time, he’s big on collecting limited edition Hot Wheels and other die-cast model cars.