Are you interested in becoming an SEO freelancer? If so, then you have come to the right place. In this article, you will learn about the six essential skills all SEO freelancers need to succeed in today’s freelance digital marketing industry.
What Does an SEO Freelancer Actually Do?
Before we dive into the skills you need as an SEO freelancer, let us clarify what an SEO freelancer does exactly. In short, an SEO freelancer helps a business (or multiple businesses) to create and optimize website content in order to gain more targeted traffic from search engine users. An SEO freelancer’s main goal is to help businesses gain more visibility on search engines through increased search engine rankings.
Common tasks that an SEO freelancer performs include the following:
- Content creation in the form of blog posts and core business pages, such as the “About us” and “Contact us” pages;
- Developing and implementing a link-building strategy, including collaborating with other webmasters for guest blog post opportunities;
- Keyword research for content opportunities; and
- Citation management (if providing local SEO services).
Skills All SEO Freelancers Need
Now let’s discuss the six major skills all SEO freelancers need for success.
SEO Auditing Skills
After a client signs up for SEO services, the first thing that an SEO freelancer should do is conduct a thorough SEO audit of the client’s website. Being able to analyze and audit a website’s SEO is one of the most important skills that you need to develop as an aspiring SEO freelancer.
Sure, there are many SEO audit tools such as SEOptimer to automate this process.
However, you’ll still need in-depth knowledge of SEO ranking factors, what could be preventing a website from achieving a high ranking, and what needs to be done to improve rankings.
Technical SEO
Common tasks that all SEO freelancers need to perform are checking and improving a website’s technical SEO. Technical SEO is the process of improving a website’s loading speed and making it easier for search engines to crawl and index the site. One essential aspect of technical SEO is understanding how to master your crawl budget, which ensures that search engines prioritize the most important pages on your site. By optimizing your crawl budget, you can enhance the visibility of key content and improve overall site performance.
Keyword Research Know-How
All SEO professionals need to master the keyword research process. Conducting keyword research forms the basis of producing targeted content that is able to rank in search engines.
The basic premise behind performing keyword research is to find keywords that have high levels of monthly search volume, but low to medium competition. The lower the level of competition, the better.
To find these keyword opportunities, you can use SEOptimer’s keyword research tool or any other keyword tool of your choice.
Link-Building Capabilities
You can create the best-written content and optimize a website’s on-page SEO to the best of your abilities, but without links, you will probably not be able to achieve the rankings you’d like. Building high-quality backlinks and implementing a link-building strategy are keys to the success of any SEO campaign.
Guest posting forms part of any link-building strategy. It entails finding high-quality domains or websites to collaborate with, reaching out to webmasters, and producing the content.
Writing Ability
All SEO freelancers need to create targeted content backed up by keyword research. Because of the nature of SEO content creation, SEO freelancers need adequate levels of writing ability.
Now, this doesn’t mean you need to be a published author. However, an understanding of blog post structure, keyword usage, grammar, and SEO writing is a requirement.
Even if the actual writing of the content is outsourced to other freelancers and you’re simply managing them, you’ll still have to check their work to ensure that all is satisfactory.
Report Creation Abilities
The last essential skill that all SEO freelancers need for success is the ability to create reports for clients. Sure, this technically isn’t an “SEO skill”, but it is essential that a freelancer create monthly reports that give feedback to clients on how their websites’ search engine performances have improved.
An SEO report gives feedback on the following:
- Movement in the position of search engine rankings for target keywords;
- Improvements to technical SEO factors such as page loading speed, fixing any indexability issues and broken links, etc.;
- On-page SEO checks, including the usage of title tags, adding of meta descriptions, keyword consistency, etc.; and
- Backlinks built and the authority of the domain.
Creating weekly or monthly reports for multiple clients can be challenging and a time-consuming process. For this reason, SEO freelancers can consider using an SEO audit and reporting tool to help them send automated reports at scheduled intervals.
Conclusion
If interested in becoming an SEO freelancer, then make sure that you develop the skills that we discussed in this article.
Learning how to increase a website’s search engine rankings is not a one-time thing. SEO is an ever-evolving field and new algorithm updates get pushed regularly. Therefore, it is important that you stay up to date with all the latest industry trends, news, and updates by reading popular SEO publications and following relevant content creators.
