2015 – Wordapp, the journey
The writing tool for online content
What would Google, Facebook, Ebay and Amazon be without words? The answer is obviously images and links. This is not very useful. The two trillion dollar e-commerce industry is in other words, dependent on text. But so far, no one seems to have given this much thought, because the best tool we have come up with is Microsoft Word, which is essentially a tool for producing printed documents.
Wordapp is about to change that by making writers and publishers way more productive at producing online content. More than 10 times better. Wordapp, which is is currently in private beta, will be totally free for all freelancers and teams producing or publishing content. Although it is still early, the data is very inspiring.
“The number of words on the Internet in 2014, was more than all the words spoken by the human race so far. “
Improving on a tool designed for printed documents is hard and encompasses a lot of different aspects. Below we’re highlighting a few of the points (of many) that we’re tracking and are actively improving upon.
Some of the basics. Obviously not having to manually check files for plagiarism or having to do task management in Dropbox is giving some very clear advantages over the ‘traditional’ way of working. Aside from these chores being quite ‘boring,’ it is more importantly, a huge time-saver shaving off minutes from each and every task both for writers and also in terms of general admin work.
“New writers traditionally spend 5x more time on a new text than an experienced writer – Wordapp improves that +100%! “
For a new writer, learning how to write texts that have the correct on-page SEO standard is extremely difficult. Writers usually spend 5x more time on each of their first five texts compared to their ‘writing speed’ after 20 texts. With Wordapp they are a +100% faster right off the bat.
The big question of course is, what happens when we start taking in consideration different parameters? The answer…
It becomes SUPER interesting! We’ve always played with the idea that, while longer texts are better for SEO (our 500 word standard SEO texts generally generate a 30-70% boost in SERP), it is way more productive to write shorter texts (blue = shorter, red = a longer text). The data above proves our initial assumption. What we will do with this information? We’ll show you in a couple of weeks…
“Shorter texts seem to be way more productive to write than longer texts“
“Writing” is only half of the story of course. All our texts are edited as well to make sure that in addition to it being SEO technically correct (Wordapp guarantees that), the language is also correct. We obviously track how much time it takes in total to deliver a text. At the same time we compare the ‘writer multiplier’ with the corresponding ‘editor multiplier’ to see where our focus has to be for our upcoming sprints, and which lessons we can learn from our users’ experiences.
What’s a ‘multiplier’?
Basically, we’re aiming for a multiplier of 2.2 on all our improvements (that’s a 120% improvement – yeah, you can only do that with software!). A multiplier of 1, in these graphs, is what is generally expected from an experienced SEO writer writing with ‘traditional’ tools. Three important notes:
- We’re not ‘discriminating’ between ‘experienced’ and ‘non-experienced’ in these graphs
- Like ‘general’ onboarding, a project also has an onboaring time. In the last two graphs we don’t discriminate between projects – we’ll show you some more info on this later, because switching between projects is something that is very important for a freelance SEO writer (ergo, is very important for Wordapp)
- Projects have different difficulty levels as well, so sometimes an ‘expectation’ of 1 is actually not correct – aiming high is what we do though; if you base your assumptions on the highest standard and work on improving the lowest outliers you do good for everyone.