Experience

Many copywriters assume that they are qualified to write SEO copy. This is not the case. An efficient SEO copywriter relies on not only the skills of a copywriter but those of the SEO professional as well. Blending these two skill sets can be difficult. Be sure to ask potential providers about their experience. Review content they have provided for previous customers and ask for references. This is the best way to ensure they have experience in the field of SEO copywriting and can actually provide you with the service that you are looking for.

Their Website

The best proof of a talented SEO copywriter is often their own website. How did you find them? Did you perform a Google search that led you to their site? If so, their content is optimized. The skills they used to propel themselves to the top rankings and make themselves visible to you, as a potential customer, are exactly the skills you need.

Fees

Paying for professional SEO copywriting can be expensive. Many professionals offer a variety of packages. Be sure to thoroughly review fees and plans. Some copywriters may offer you completely unique articles while others may offer you ‘spin ready’ articles. While both have their place, unique articles are often more effective and, as a result, more expensive.

Niche

Carefully consider your product. Is it important that your copywriter have an understanding of your particular niche market? If your product is dog food, chances are you do not need an SEO copywriter with industry knowledge. If your product is organic dog food for miniature poodles, you may want someone that knows more about your product and your targeted demographic.

One other question to ask yourself is whether you want to hire a freelance SEO copywriter or a company that specializes in optimized content. Both have their own distinct strong points. If your project is relatively small, a freelancer may be what you are looking for. If you have a large project or wish to have regularly updated content, a content company is probably a better bet.

SEO copywriters offer you the chance to increase your rankings with search engines. The pre-qualified traffic that is generated by this natural increase means a resulting increase in conversions. If your rankings, traffic counts or conversions are not where you would like them to be, consider speaking with an SEO copywriter to see how their services can help you grow your business.

Search Engines and Content

Search engines look at a wide variety of factors when ranking websites. While some of these are unknown, SEO experts have come to realize that content is critical. Search engines utilize bots or ‘spiders’ to ‘crawl’ websites. These bots focus a lot of attention on SEO and content, reviewing for keywords, freshness, relevancy and more. In short, one of the best ways to attract search engine spiders is by having content that is written specifically to attract them. The trick is writing content that attracts both search engines and human readers.

Writing for Search Engines

When writing SEO and content for search engines there are several rules to keep in mind:

1. Content should be rich with keywords.
2. Keywords should appear naturally in the appropriate density
3. Content should be fresh and regularly updated.
4. Content should be relevant.

In order to appropriately use these guidelines, writers must spend a good deal of time researching keywords, understanding what makes their site unique and relevant and ensuring that the keyword density meets the criteria of the various search engines.

Including Appropriate Content

It isn’t enough to simply string together a series of unique keywords. Instead, the content must be written with both the human reader and the search engine in mind. The content needs to be free of grammatical flaws, spelling errors and should be laid out in a visually appealing manner. The content must also be relevant.

In short, creating content that is designed with website optimization in mind is a careful balancing act between the science behind search engines and their formulas and the creativity of a marketing specialist. Because of this and the need for regularly updated and fresh content, many online business owners are turning to content writers or SEO copywriters to provide the content they need for their websites. This can be the most effective way to optimize the content on your site and maintain it.

If you choose to handle your SEO and content management yourself, be prepared to put in a lot of work researching keywords, competitor content, relevant blogs and more. Carefully reviewing the guidelines of the search engines you would most like to attract is crucial as well. Writing content that meets all of the needs of a business isn’t easy so be sure to include content management in your marketing budget or discuss the matter with your SEO specialist.

To start, you need to have a topic, keywords, and word count.  The keywords will be repeated once or several times throughout the body of the article, without making it obvious they are purposefully thrust into the article.  Sounds easy, right?  Consider this:  What you are reading has already used the phrase “how to write an article” twice, the word “write” three times, and the word “article” four times.   For SEO content pieces, the word count is usually 500; occasionally 300 or 1000 words will be required.

The next step is to research your topic.  Spend a little time finding some credible Internet sources, and copy and paste content into your Word document.  You will not be using these words to plagiarize!  Write your own copy, every time, but use the content to pull key dates, sources, or even the general tone of your article.  Never use the exact words expressed by another writer.  If you are going to plagiarize , find another business.  While you do not need to reference sources if you have sufficiently altered the text, attribute any direct quotes or stats to the source, as you would with any other publishable document.

Don’t spend a huge amount of time on research.  While you do want to sound educated on a topic and pass along correct information, you are not creating a scientific treatise on how to best treat lymphomas.  Your topics will generally be non-scientific, and not terribly technical.  Those types of articles are necessarily left to experts in the field, and if you are not comfortable imparting “wisdom” about a given subject, then either pass the assignment along to someone else, or make sure you give the subject the critical eye to detail it deserves.  Sometimes, even though writing SEO content does not pay a lot of money, you have to bite the bullet and do a little bit more research work than you had intended.  Hopefully, your professional integrity is such that you won’t pass off bad information as good; and that any statements used can be proven as fact, not fiction..

Articles shouldn’t take a ton of time to write.  If you are even marginally adept at stringing together sentences, you can learn to write around three or four 500-word articles in an hour. Each article should be researched, edited for spelling and content, and saved and attached for your employer.  You can expect revisions on the part of your editor; so do not necessarily have a hand in the finished product.  Hopefully, your raw text was adequate and does not demand a large amount of editing from your employer or proofreader.

Checking the competition is one of the best ways to find out what’s going on in the industry you’re involved with. What kinds of things are your competitors doing? What are they talking about? What are their worries and fears? If you know these things, you can use them to your advantage by telling your clients why your company is not worried about the fears of your competitors or why you can offer more than your competition can. Don’t just rely on your competition, though. Check unexpected places for sources, like the library. The internet is an incestuous place for information, because so many people borrow easy data from other sources. That’s why you can really bring something to the table by injecting new statistics and new lines of thought than what’s currently available.

You never know what you might find until you look. You might locate something that your competition didn’t bother to look for or locate. That could really make a difference in your SEO content research, what keywords you use, and how you present your company to potential clients. Be sure to use your newfound information to tell your clients and potential clients why what you offer is better than what others offer. It can be very difficult for some people to tell what’s different about one company’s product or service versus the product or service of another company. Don’t wait for them to figure it out. Tell them, instead.

Remember, if you don’t tell them why your company’s offerings are better than those that the competition has, your competitors will step in and explain why theirs are better. You don’t want to give them a chance to do that, and you want to be sure to counter anything that they’ve already said about their products with your own information about your products. If you’re offering a service, you can do the same thing – tell why yours is better, more reliable, less expensive, etc. Be creative with it. Consumers don’t want to read the same old boring things about company A, B, and C. They want to be entertained and enlightened at the same time, and you can give them that with good SEO writing and proper research.

Don’t slam another company if you find research that says it has done something wrong. Attacking your competitors isn’t the way to go. Instead, just show how your product or service is higher quality and/or better in some other way. You can’t always do that without solid research, but if you look around and make sure that you’ve gotten a great grasp of your competition’s offerings and the state of your industry, you can impress your clients and potential clients with a lot of interesting knowledge and get sales in the process.

Take a moment to check out some of the content that is currently on the internet. There are several excellent article resources like Ezine that online business owners use in their article marketing.  After reading just a few, you are likely to begin to notice the difference between quality copy, and downright horrible copy. This difference occurs for several reasons:  the author of a poor article is either not trained in SEO copywriting or does not speak English as a native language. The good copy is easy to read and conversational in tone. In fact, you are unlikely to even realize just what keywords the article is based on. This is the type of content you should include on your site. It takes a talented SEO copywriter, skilled in the art of content writing to create this sort of content.

While there are literally thousands of copywriters available on the internet, many of them are not qualified to write SEO copy.  When searching for a copywriter, consider a few important facts:

1. English must be their native language. Unfortunately, in most cases, English written by those who have learned it as a second language is often stilted and difficult to read. Even native level English may not be enough, however. If, for example, your audience is chiefly in the United States, British English and punctuation may be distracting to readers.
2. A complete understanding of keywords and keyword density is a must. It isn’t enough to simply sprinkle an article with keywords. Your SEO copywriter will be able to research relevant keywords and select unique words and phrases that will help drive traffic to you.
3. Engaging style and tone will make for better copy. Read several pieces written by a potential copywriter. The more engaging their style, the better.
4. Proper grammar and spelling is a must.

Many online business owners are hesitant to hire a ‘lay’ person to write their copy.  It is a mistake to think that only an expert in your particular field can write your copy. SEO copywriters will research a subject and break it down into common language that anyone can understand. You will find that it actually works to your benefit to hire an SEO consultant. Their ability to write for the masses can make even the most complex subject easily understood.

At its heart, SEO copywriting is based on science. Understanding how spiders crawl content and how people will search for you is all information that can be researched and proven. Truly great copy is more than just research. It is creative, thoughtful, engaging and easy to read. Finding a copywriter that can write copy that meets these criteria will make you and your company stand out from the crowd.

In order to take advantage of a content writer to benefit your website or blog, you must understand what a content writer is.  A content writer is a person who composes various types of material to post online.  This material could be marketing material, advertisements, product descriptions, blog posts, and many other different types of writing.  Many content writers are also called ghost writers, blog writers, and article writers.  These descriptions help us to understand what type of content they write.  Ghost writers are generally writers who assist someone in taking a concept and turning it into a story, website, magazine article, handbook, etc.  Ghost writers very rarely get any credit for the final product, other than payment.  Blog writers can either have their own blog that they write on or they can contract out their services to write for someone else’s blog.  These blogs can cover a wide range of subjects, to be determined by the blog owner.  Article writers write informative (and sometimes entertaining) articles for magazines, websites, online databases, etc.

In order to hire a content writer from a content writing service, your first step is to obtain a list of content writing services and research them thoroughly.  An important thing to do when hiring a content writer from a content writing service is to find out what the customer per word or per article and how much they pay the content writer.  This knowledge can assist you in establishing the ethics level of the company.  When hiring ghost writers, blog writers, or article writers from a content writing service, you should always be sure to hire from a company that values its writers.  This is the best way to ensure you will get a valuable piece of writing.  Ghost writers, blog writers, and article writers who are treated well by their company will produce top quality work for their customers.

Once you have chosen a company, the next step to hiring a content writer (whether you are looking for a ghost writer, blog writer, or article writer) is to determine how much work you will have for that writer.  Generally, when purchasing articles in bulk, you can get a discount on the services.  This is good for you and good for the content writing company.  It is equally good for the writer, because it ensures that there will be work to produce.

Now is the time to be absolutely clear about what you are looking for.  The more specific you can be to the content writing company, the better your chances are for getting exactly what you want the first time.  Many ghost writers, blog writers, and article writers spend just as much time (sometimes even more) researching their assignments as actually writing them.  This is a benefit to you because it ensures that you will have a well researched, well thought out and well written product for your money.

These are the most important steps to hiring a content writer from a content writing service.  Follow these steps, and you will be sure to obtain a written product you can be proud to display.