Search engine optimization is what drives most of online businesses. But how much do freelance writers need to know about it to do their job?
Do freelancers need to learn SEO? SEO is a valuable skill for freelance writers. It makes your writing more valuable to clients, since your content is more likely to attract more readers and rank higher in search results. So I recommend that all writers learn the basics of SEO.
In this article, I’ll explain why I think freelance writers should learn SEO. Then I’ll go over some of the basic SEO techniques you should master.
Should Freelancer Writers Learn SEO?
If you’ve never explored it before, SEO can seem quite daunting and technical. But the truth is, I don’t think the barrier to entry to learn it is actually that high.
I think learning SEO is a great complementary skill that most freelance writers should pick up.
You don’t necessarily need to become an expert in it. There are a few basics that will get you most of the way there for what clients may expect of you.
It’s just another skill that you can add to your resume.
Plus it’s one more additional service or add-on that you can charge clients extra for.
While I don’t think learning SEO is absolutely necessary to become a freelance writer, I do think that you’ll likely get more work because of it. And also higher paying work.
Who Is SEO A Must-Have For?
If you’re working for clients, then they’ll likely have their own specific ways of how they want SEO done.
Either they’ll do it themselves, they have someone else to do it for them, or they’ll let you know exactly what they expect of you.
For writers, when SEO really becomes a necessity is when you’re trying to publish your own content.
If you’re starting your own blog, or putting any of your own writing out there, then I think SEO is a must-have.
SEO Tips And Tricks For Writers
Here is a quick overview of some basic SEO things that I think all writers should know.
Just reading through this alone should get you most of the way there in terms of what clients may expect from you in terms of search engine optimization.
A big part of why clients hire you is to get their content on the first page of Google search results. Or if you’re writing your own content for the web, that should be your top goal.
Do Keyword Research
If a client is expecting you to come up with your own titles, then keyword research is a must.
It allows you to better understand what people are searching for, the number of people searching for it, and what format they want to receive the information in.
It’s also important to understand long tail versus short tail keywords.
Sure it would be great to rank for huge search terms like “burgers” or “mattress.” But the chances of doing that are slim, especially for smaller websites.
Instead you want to target more long tail keywords like “how many calories in a hamburger” or “most comfortable mattress in Canada.”
Write Great Titles
A great title can be the difference between someone clicking to read your blog post or article.
In most cases, you just want to make it something that somebody would directly type into a search engine. But you can also mix it up a bit.
Learn some of the popular title formats.
You don’t have to get too clickbaity and make it like those “1 Amazing Trick Dentists Don’t Want You To Know!” titles, but it should at least have a bit of appeal and intrigue to it.
Master Headings
Learning to use H1, H2, and H3 headings properly has several benefits.
Google often looks to these headers to explain what the page is all about. More weight tends to be given to what you write in these headings. So be sure that all of your headings combined provide a good overview of what your article is about.
It also helps visitors who come to the site in terms of readability. It breaks up writing into easily digestible chunks instead of just a huge wall of text.
A lot of the tips in my How To Format A Blog Post will boost your SEO automatically. Check it out!
Focus on Readability
I’ll have an entire separate post about how to improve your readability.
But you can get a lot of the way there just by not using paragraphs that are too long. Keep your writing casual and conversational.
I recommend using a free tool like HemingwayApp to help fix hard to read sentences, remove passive voice, and find simpler alternatives in your writing.
Craft Meta Descriptions
Clients might ask you to write a meta description to go along with each post that you write.
This is a short snippet that will appear in Google search results. Usually it’s only about 150 characters long.
URL Slugs
You only really need to worry about a URL slug if you’re uploading content directly into WordPress, either for yourself or for a client’s site.
The slug is the text that appears after the main site.
For example, on this page the slug is do-freelance-writers-need-SEO.
Most of the time, just make it the title but take out some of the less necessary words to shorten it up.
You want to avoid having your URL structure based on the date, or just a random number.
Make sure that your blog post isn’t too short! See my article How Long Should A Blog Post Be? to learn what the right length is.
Design your content in a way that invites people to share it on social media.
Someone is much more likely to share a “Top 10 Reasons Why X” post, as opposed to a more informational post that’s just explaining a topic.
Internal Linking
Try to provide links to other existing articles on the website you’re writing for. They should relate to each other in some way, so don’t try to force it if you can’t find anything that seems connected.
Having these links throughout a post invites people to click through to read other posts on the site. So it gets people to stay on the site longer, and read more pages.
External Linking
You can link out to external websites. I like to do this whenever referring to a statistic or something that an expert has said. Using reputable sources can help your site to look more reliable to Google.
Conclusion
I think all freelance writers should learn at least the basics of SEO.
Now that you’ve read this article, you should have a good idea of some minor SEO things you can start adding to your writing right away.
There are other more complicated things that a website owner can do to further boost their SEO. But if you can get the things that I’ve mentioned down, you’ll already be doing really well.