You would be working with me, not an account manager

Robert Kidd — Content Strategist, based in British Columbia, Canada.

I have been editing other people’s words professionally since 1998, when I started EditFast. It has delivered more than 10,000 editing, writing and translation projects since, and running it meant recruiting, testing and supervising over 4,000 freelance editors and 500 translators. The client list runs from Google, IBM, Kodak and Nokia to Ford, Caterpillar and Hitachi, and from the governments of Canada and China to the United Nations World Food Programme.

From 2006 to 2011 I worked under contract for Google as a quality rater. The job was writing assessments of how well pages actually answered the keywords people searched for, and identifying the techniques sites used to distort their rankings. Five years of looking at the gap between what a page claims and what it delivers is the reason I am sceptical of most SEO advice, including advice that sounds sophisticated. I also wrote some of the earliest AdWords advertisements, in October 2000.

The editing has ranged well outside marketing: construction specifications for the Three Gorges Dam, CANDU reactor documentation for the Government of Canada, a 700-page MRI manual rewritten for Massachusetts General Hospital, food chemistry papers reviewed for the University of California, Davis, and ten years in Japan editing for NKK Steel and IBM. An honours degree in English alongside a diploma in industrial electronics is an odd pairing, but it means technical material is straightforward rather than daunting.

What that adds up to for you: I have read a very large amount of writing that was supposed to do a job, and I can usually tell within a page or two whether yours is doing its job — and if it is not, which part is at fault.

How I work

• I tell you what I actually think, including when the answer is "do less".
• Fixed price agreed before work starts. No surprise invoices.
• If I am not the right person for the job, I will say so on the first call.

What I do not do

• Volume content for its own sake.
• Promises about rankings. Nobody who makes them can keep them.
• Long contracts you cannot leave.