A good piece of content requires planning, writing, editing, proofreading, and last of all marketing. But, thanks to the thing called SEO, we can sometimes stop thinking about marketing the content, because due to SEO’s nature, it markets itself. That’s why we need SEO writers – knowledgeable, skilled individuals who can provide our business with two essential components: content and promotion.
In today’s article, we will take a look at how you should choose your perfect SEO writer that can help you boost your website in terms of awareness, branding, and sales. Here are the top 6 tips on how to choose an SEO writer for your business.
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1. Your SEO Writer Needs to Be a Skilled Web-Writer
An SEO is important indeed, but what is more important is the quality of the message itself.
Your writer has to have the necessary qualities in order to write for the web, which means providing awesome, engaging content that will represent your business.
After all, there is no point in brining visitors to your page only to offer them poor and unsatisfactory content.
When people search for something, they usually expect to solve a problem. They will keep looking until they find it. If your writer can present the best advice in the field, and that advice can bring value to your readers, you’re on the right path. On the contrary, if your content is written for SEO purposes only, your business will really have a hard time keeping your potential customers satisfied.
Tip: Whenever you’re hiring an SEO writer, pay close attention to the quality of the content itself. Is it engaging? Informative? Put yourself in the target customer’s shoes – will that content satisfy your needs and make you pursue it a little bit longer?
2. Your SEO Writer Needs to Be Knowledgeable and Passionate in Your Field
Back in the days, content marketing was quite easier. Most of the marketers were focusing on filling up their website with tons of articles. It didn’t matter if those articles were brining in value or not – they just had to be there. And back in the days, it worked. Now? The market has evolved, and this strategy no longer works.
People nowadays can recognize good and bad content. Once they detect poor quality, they’d rather go back to the search results and look for another article or website. This is relevant to you because your writer can decide whether they stay or they leave.
When you choose your SEO writer, you’d better make sure he’s knowledgeable in your topic. More than that, he also needs to be passionate, because when a writer does his job with passion, he is transmitting trust to your readers.
For example, if your website is about making money online, and your writer doesn’t really know much about this topic, it will be so easy to detect that X article from your website is total crap, outdated, and not useful.
Tip: Before hiring an SEO writer, ask him about his passions, his expertise, and kindly ask him whether he’s interested in your topic or he’s just looking for a job. Sometimes you’ll get genuine answers, sometimes you’ll have to figure that out by yourself.
3. Your SEO Writer Needs to Have In-Depth Knowledge About Search Engine Optimization
After all, you’re looking for someone who can rank your chosen keywords, so he has to be good at what he does. If you know few things about SEO, it will be easier for you to differentiate a good SEO practitioner from a poor one.
The way I approach every SEO writer:
I give them a simple quiz regarding SEO in general, and then a few more personalized question that I believe that are important for my specific business.
In case you have no clue about what SEO is, and how it is done, here’s how I would go: I would ask the writer to lead me to some of his references and websites that contain some of his latest works. Every skilled SEO writer will keep a list of websites and keywords he ranked, so there shouldn’t be a problem sharing them with you.
In addition, if he provides you with some links of his published articles, scout for some of the main keywords he’s using during the article, then go back to Google, or Yahoo, or Bing, and find out if they’ve ranked. Give it a few tries, not all keywords rank, but if he’s good, and worth hiring, he should at least have some keywords and pages ranked.
4. Your SEO Writer Needs to Respect Turnaround Times and Deadlines
If you want to run a stable business, you must run a stable team of writers. The single most essential thing about most of the successful business in the world is that they won’t tolerate workers that don’t deliver what they promise. In our case, hiring and keeping a professional writer is not an easy task. Yes, maybe they promise to meet the deadlines just so you can hire them, only to cause damage to your business later on.
In order to avoid these things, before hiring an SEO writer, you should make it clear to him that you will not tolerate late turnarounds, and when a deadline is established together by you and him, that deadline must be respected.
Another good tip would be to establish a good communication between you and your writers. Encourage them to communicate their needs, let them know that you have their full support, and tell them that whenever they’re overwhelmed with the amount of work, instead of just missing the deadlines, they should let you know first.
5. Your SEO Writer Needs to Be Available
If you’re serious about providing consistent content to your readers, your writers must be available to work each and every day. The problem with availability comes whenever you and your writer lack communication. For example, he may just go for a sudden holiday, and not return your messages for days. In that case, it’s not only his mistake, it’s your also for not making clear when he needs to be available.
When you’re hiring your writers, get to know them a little bit. Ask them to let you know more about how they work, when they work, how much time will they be available for your job, and how much you can rely on them. You should hire a writer according to your business needs.
If you need daily content, then start looking for people who can work every day. In case you only need a few articles each week, then you’re looking for other type of writers. Most of the times, writers also have expectations. They need to work in order to make a living, and if you can’t give them what they need, they will quickly drop you.
6. Your SEO Writer Needs to Provide You with Results (Cost vs Profit)
Whenever you’re hiring people, or outsourcing services, you first need to decide the minimum profit you expect from your investment. It very much applies to the process of hiring writers. Of course, you can’t instantly figure out whether they will be good or not for your web business, but that can change in a matter of days or weeks.
If you hold the false belief that you can get big profit out of low costs, you’re very wrong. Of course, you can try buying one hundred $1 articles and post them all on your site, but that can only lead to two things: people will stop following you, and google may deindex your website. Instead, you can opt for hiring a human article writer for $30-$50, and you’ll see a much different result.
Tip: Decide how much you want to obtain out of your investment, and figure out how much is it worth paying for an article. Test it for a few weeks, analyze your traffic and sales using many different tracking tools, and then decide again whether you should keep paying your current writer or not.
Conclusion
Hiring a great SEO content writer is a huge part of your business success. Besides increasing your overall business awareness, your writer also plays to role of connecting your prospects with your business idea. That is why it is truly indicated to pay close attention to who you’re hiring. They will be the ones to lift or lower your business.
Overall, it takes a lot of patience and testing until you find the perfect candidates, but believe me, the whole effort is going to be worth it on the long term. Do never lower your expectations when hiring SEO writers, there are tons of them out there, and you just need to find them!
New to SEO? Learn more about Search Engine Optimization!