Nearly 80% of the leads you generate as a freelance writer will never convert into paying customers. Another 61% of marketers struggle to generate leads at all. With search engine optimization (SEO), you can use your freelance content writing skills to generate clients.
Are you a freelance writer struggling to generate organic traffic to your online content? With these SEO and content writing tips, you will quickly learn all the tricks to attract quality leads and climb through the ranks.
From keyword research to content audit, you can learn how to create SEO-friendly content with ease.
Generate more website traffic with SEO optimization today.
Keyword research sets the foundation for your entire SEO strategy as a freelance writer. The purpose of keyword research is to identify the terms and phrases that people use when they search online for something related to the content you're discussing.
Fortunately, several tools can help with this process:
Understanding and utilizing these tools for your research gives you a competitive edge, as it adds value to your content and helps position your content higher in search rankings.
An important tip for freelance writers seeking to maximize their content for SEO purposes is to employ longtail keywords. Longtail keywords are made up of several words strung together, and they are more specific than single-word keywords. For example, if you're writing an SEO blog on "how to optimize your website," you can use the phrase "best practices for web optimization" as a longtail keyword.
Such longtail keywords are often more reflective of what people are searching for (their search intent), since they are typically more specific than single-word keywords. Additionally, longtail keywords tend to be less competitive, meaning they are easier to target and can help you get better and higher quality search engine traffic that is more valuable and convert better. Utilizing longtail keywords to optimize content for search engines will result in increased visibility and better chances of ranking on the first page of SERPs, which is essential for writers looking to maximize their online reach.
Before writing your content, choose a primary keyword and a few secondary keywords. Using secondary keywords can help you avoid keyword stuffing. Otherwise, your content could get penalized, resulting in low website traffic.
Once you have a list of keywords, you need to choose the ones that are most important to your business. Consider the following factors when choosing keywords:
Once you have chosen your keywords, you need to create content that is optimized for those keywords. Create content that provides value to your readers.
While using these content writing tips, make sure to include your target keyword strategically within the content. For example, it should appear in the:
When editing, confirm that your content is user-friendly and easily digestible. Optimize your content for crawl bots and promote user engagement to enhance your overall SEO ranking.
Your meta description should contain your primary keyword. It should provide a clear and concise description of what the reader can expect to learn from your content. This 150-160 character description often appears under the page title on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Make sure your SEO titles and meta descriptions are compelling enough to encourage clicks. You'll ultimately improve your clickthrough rate (CTR), reduce your bounce rate, and enhance memory recall as people visit your site.
Optimizing images is a crucial component of an SEO optimization plan. Search engines crawl websites, including images. If the alt tags aren't optimized, then crawlers won't rank your photos.
Consider updating the existing photos on your site. Updating existing blog posts with fresh content and images can boost organic traffic by 111%.
Keyword-optimized alt tags can provide another channel to market your inventory. Naming image files using descriptive language with alt text improves the reading score of crawlers' indexing capabilities. It can also help readers better understand complex content.
Leveraging text-relative imagery can enhance associations with the semantic context of your content and provide an additional layer of keyword-defined optimization.
As a freelance writer, incorporating a social media promotion component is often unavoidable. Sharing your content on social media platforms extends your reach to potential customers globally. Adding images and embedding tweets can help maximize content reach, promotion, commenting, and backlinks.
Through hashtags, tagging people, pinning great imagery relevant to the content, and live engagement, social media creates signals and boosts brand recognition.
Determine which social media platforms your clients use most. Share your content and use call-to-action language to encourage them to visit your website. Add a form to your landing pages to convert your website traffic into leads and paying clients.
Overall, search engine optimization is an invaluable step for freelance writers. It can help boost SEO, get more eyes on your work, and even increase the amount of work you get. Use your freelance content writing skills and SEO to expand your reach online.
Try these tips today and see the difference it makes for your freelance business.
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