If the figures from official sources can be trusted, the freelance gig economy has only gone from strength to strength since Covid hit. Good news then, because a booming freelance market means more choices for you.
But, if you’re looking to hire a freelancer, you still need to know that they have the credentials and the experience to contribute to your project as well as a reliable member of staff would. So, where do you start?
But first, why choose SEO copywriting services?
To take it back to basics, when you have a copywriting project and you’re ironing out your goals, they will include things like:
Communicating key messages.
Getting the tone of voice right.
Delivering on time, on budget.
High-quality work that requires minimal or no edits from you.
These should all be fulfilled by your freelance copywriter as a given. As one experienced freelancer said to me when I was starting, those are the basics. But if you also tie in the SEO part, you’ll be making that high-quality writing work harder, and pay its way a lot more effectively.
SEO copywriting leverages the right keywords to drive more organic searches to your website. That means looking for keywords that match search intent, that you could rank for, and drive as much traffic as possible.
All this is a specific skill in itself. Certified SEO copywriters have spent thousands of pounds and months of training in the specific skills required to deliver effective SEO copywriting. This includes:
Understanding how to use a variety of keyword tools.
They will also be paying for at least one subscription-based tool to aid their writing.
Learning how to write SEO copy without keyword stuffing or making the copy sound unnatural.
Studying how to define a keyword strategy for anything from blogs to entire websites.
Incidentally, depending on where you earned your qualification, you’ll also need to renew annually. The nature of search and tech is that it’s changing constantly, so the study is never really over. You are continually learning and mastering new skills as you go along.
The question is, how can all this contribute to the success of your next web copywriting project? Here are five big ways a freelance SEO copywriter can help your brand.
1. Structuring your landing pages for maximum impact
SEO writers are masters of online content. Unlike other kinds of copywriting (say advertising, or offline for instance), freelance web copywriters spend their days creating targeted, optimised online copy.
Things can get geeky fast when someone dedicates their work to one area like this. If you also choose a writer that specialises in your industry, as I do as a lifestyle copywriter, the geek levels go up a few more notches.
What does this mean to your project? If you’re hiring a freelancer to work on your landing pages, they’ll have insights like no other on how they can be structured to both stand out to your audience and make an impact on search engines.
They’ll be able to advise on things like including the right keywords in headers, structuring content to direct readers through the page and onto other areas of your website. This will be based on what your competitors are doing, and your own messaging, to create something unique.
2. Helping you choose the right blog topics
I’m a big fan of blogs. I believe that optimised articles can contribute to your overall online marketing positively. It’s cost-effective, it’s not salesy but it can generate sales with the right internal links. It’s just feel-good and hardworking.
But you need the right topics and the right longtail keywords for maximum impact. We’ve talked about choosing the right keywords bit, but what about the topics in the first place?
Keyword tools are one useful way of identifying relevant longtail searches. This can inspire ideas. Freelancer copywriters will also check out things like forums, Google’s Autocomplete and other simple, free tools.
A consummate SEO copywriter can use all this to create a blogging calendar. And it doesn’t end there. They’ll also look at your Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see what other keywords you’re ranking for and which blog posts have landed best, to continually optimise your calendar.
3. Giving you a per-page keyword strategy to drive organic traffic
I mentioned keyword strategies earlier. In simple terms, SEO people will aim for keywords that you could rank for with the highest search volume possible.
If you’re a new business with a brand new website, you’re unlikely to rank for competitive keywords. So, you might see the perfect keyword that drives thousands of searches a month. Hooray! But if it’s impossible to rank for, you’re likely to end up hundreds of pages down in the search.
A good freelance SEO copywriter will balance up things like this. They’ll look at your domain to see what kind of score you have, they’ll look at keywords and work out the ones you’re more likely to rank for. Then, if they’re writing your website copy, they’ll allocate specific keywords to specific pages to create a journey for the customer. Certain keywords will send that person to the page that’s relevant to their search query.
A word on search intent here. SEO writers should always road-test their chosen keywords too. Yeah, sometimes a keyword looks great on the face of it, but you might type it into google and get a page with some weird results that are irrelevant to your business and message.
4. Giving you a creative and a strategic spin
All this is a bit of jiggery-pokery. It’s developing a strategy that’s based on data. But it’s also using our intuition to understand which keywords would best fit each part of the website.
I know from regularly speaking to other SEO people, that it can all get mega involved and techy. I believe in keeping this in perspective. For me, the creativeness of writing comes first, always.
The strategic plans are the backbone, but if you start writing your copy and those keywords sound clunky, get rid of them immediately. Your brand should have a natural-sounding copy for two reasons. First, it appeals to a human audience. No one enjoys staying on the page if the writing is rubbish. Secondly, Google agrees. They champion copy quality over keywords.
So, when I talk strategy to my clients, I always reiterate that the creativeness of the copy comes first, always.
5. Taking it slow with freelance copywriting and editing
One of the strange quirks of being an SEO content copywriter is that it can be tempting to tell your client that they need to do everything now. That means overhauling their website content, writing a load of optimised blogs, basically targeting every area of their website.
The reason for this is that there’s the belief that you need to optimise a whole website for it to rank well. There is some truth to this, but it’s a rather reductive way of thinking. John Mueller at Google has gone on the record saying that it can be helpful for rankings to make improvements on your site overall.
The problem is that recommending a whole website overhaul is quite often out of reach for some brands. The budgets just might not stretch, or the client may not have the time to manage everything in one go. Perhaps this is why so many SEO’s have reported that their strategies haven’t been implemented.
But you can still make an impact. A smart approach can be to work in stages, offering a combo of freelance copywriting and editing to repurpose old content by giving it a quick facelift and optimising for keywords. It doesn’t have to be everything now. With the right conversations between freelancer and client, you can work out a plan and prioritise tasks.