Story and photos by Kim Herrington
When asked about her views on women working in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry Rebecca Haden replies, “No client has ever said ‘I don’t know, I’m hesitant. After all, you’re girls!’”
Rebecca is the owner and creative director of Haden Interactive, a content marketing, SEO, and website building and management firm based in Fayetteville, Ark. I work as a professional blogger and link builder for Haden Interactive.
Rebecca and I both are in a field in which few women work and even fewer are thought leaders. While this isn’t due to the fact that women aren’t capable of working in the Internet tech industry, Rebecca says, it’s because they seem to be interested in different things. Line up attendees at a local WordCamp conference, she tells me, and you’ll see all the women are mommy bloggers. It’s the men who do development and design.
Rebecca started out on the Internet as a writer for Rootsweb and the Arkansas Encyclopedia of History and Culture, doing a style of writing more similar to that of print publications than online outlets. She eventually became a hobbyist mommy blogger, just like the countless women who dominate the lifestyle blogging niche whom many young women aspiring to write for a living see as role models. But that’s where the similarities end between Rebecca and most women bloggers. Her path to owning her own firm has a lot more to do with her skills as a writer-for-hire and her technical knowledge of SEO than her ability to make photos “pinnable.”
Back in pre-crash days in 2006, Rebecca worked for a bookstore and was asked to manage their website. One day she commented aloud that she didn’t understand why their website wouldn’t come up on Google when she searched for it, one of the most common problems business owners face when dealing with the Internet, and her daughter’s boyfriend told her to look up the word SEO. At the time, she didn’t even know what a server was and had a 1970s computer science skillset.
When the bookstore closed and she lost her job, Rebecca lamented that she would have to stop running the website but the owner urged her to try providing the same services for other business owners.
“He said ‘We couldn’t have done it without you’ and I scoffed at his comments that I should try to continue,” says Rebecca, a mother of four who had two kids in college at the time. She had a lot to lose. For the first two weeks after losing her job, Rebecca collected unemployment but quickly freelance writing gigs replaced unemployment. Every day Rebecca spent freelancing she thought would be the last and that she would have to take the most recent job offer and give up writing. After six months of turning down other less exciting job offers, Rebecca finally decided being a writer-for-hire was a real job with a real income on which she could rely.
Rebecca worried about her success a lot in the beginning, but you wouldn’t know it now with Rebecca’s confidence in her abilities and immense knowledge on the industry.
“There’s no such thing as a saturated market,” Rebecca now notes. “They need new words all the time.”
Writers who have knowledge in SEO, Rebecca believes, have ample opportunities to make a living writing online because of the huge demand for well-written material. After writing for the likes of the Kennedy Center and being featured in the Wall Street Journal, Rebecca is continuing to expand Haden Interactive into the consumer packaged goods industry, due to their proximity to Walmart’s Home Office in Bentonville.
Most days you’ll find Rebecca in her office in her Fayetteville home, two dogs at her feet, writing for a wide range of clients across the globe and managing her seven-employee business. She advises that women who want to break into the writer-for-hire market heed those basic tenants of writing we’ve all heard before—have real writing skills, always meet deadlines instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, pay attention to the needs of the audience, and constantly build technical knowledge for online writing.
Kim Herrington, a graduate of Hendrix College, is a professional blogger and link builder for Haden Interactive and lives in Arkansas. She writes on her personal blog, The Made Thing, about blogging and SEO, food, and life in Arkansas.