SEO advice for copywriters – What every freelancer should know before hiring an SEO

As you probably know, hiring a SEO company or specialist to optimize your website can be a difficult and nerve wracking experience. There are 1000s out there and how do you pick one? How can you be sure they’re going to do a job? Now you know how it feels for clients and agencies when they have to pick a freelancer. Paul Robbins, a SEO specialist based in Austin Texas – who has advised The Collective of International Advertising Freelancers and other leading ad freelance figures – highlights some potential pitfalls you should be aware of.

Here’s some good SEO tips for copywriters everywhere.

How to choose an SEO company?

Having established that you should go pro in a preceding post – SEO advice for freelancer’s own websites – the next step is who to choose. Firstly, as with every service provider, getting a friend to recommended you the one that helped them successfully is the best way. Ideally from a fellow freelancer, then you can be sure they know the freelance advertising industry. Secondly, try to get one local to you, or at least in your country, not because you want to have coffee with them, but because you want local links.

What do you want from them?

If they can guarantee you a No. 1 Google rating, put the phone down. Here are seven realistic things you can expect from a reliable SEO company:

1. More traffic: the be all and end all. More traffic = more freelance jobs
2. Know where the traffic has come from: is it real traffic from your locality or just random surfers?
3. Which techniques are working: so they focus on the campaigns that really work for you
4. Management of your sitemap.xml file
5. Link building: to make your site more popular and build more traffic in future
6. Keyword optimization: if you haven’t done this yourself
7. Analyze your niche competitors: And put you above them

Success depends on you

Just like a freelance advertising job, the quality of the work often depends on the quality of the brief. If you brief them on the wrong keywords or highlight the wrong competitors. Remember: you know your business and USPs better than they do. Give them a specific, measurable and realistic target and your chances of success are much better. You should have set up Google analytics as discussed in the post: Where are you now in Google? Now you’ll want to sit with them to convert that data into actionable points that you can get them, you or your web-designer to improve.

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