A Quick Guide for Freelance SEO Content Writers

Hiring a freelance content writer in India via Elance can be easy, but you need to consider many important aspects including the skills and previous experience of a writer.

Being in the content writing industry for over seven years, we understand how challenging it can be to manage freelance content writers in India, especially the ones that have little experience in content writing. This is not to say that each and every freelance content writer in India lacks the essential skills in Web content writing, but many of them do. According to Elance, freelance content writers in India are among the top service providers, second only to the US. freelance content writer in India Courtesy: Global Online Employment Report by Elance

As per this post in Entrepreneur.com, the U.S. has the largest number of Elancers with nearly 716,000. While India is second with more than 359,000 freelancers; Pakistan is third with more than 113,000 and the Philippines are fourth with more than 89,000 freelancers working for Elance. There are many other online platforms that offer lucrative opportunities to many ambitious content writers in India. Incidentally, this encourages many to enter this industry when they are least prepared for it.

Common Challenges of Managing a Freelance Content Writer in India

It’s not possible to find freelancers who can take care of everything. They make mistakes over and over again. It depends on whether they are doing anything to improve their writing on a daily basis. If they are simply using all their time in completing content writing projects, then they are leaving very little scope for self-improvement. Unfortunately, many freelance content writers fall in this trap and undermine the importance improving their skills unless and until someone specifically points out the inherent issues in their writing over a period of time. On another note, Web content writing is not only limited to writing content in proper grammar – it’s much more than that.

Here are some of the best practices in SEO content writing

Don’t Just Write a Copy, Address the Queries

Writing an article is essentially about addressing queries of your prospective readers. Therefore, the freelance content writer must have the intention to “address” the queries of their readers to begin with. This is where the research becomes helpful. I would rather write one exhaustive article in 2000 words that fully addresses the queries of my readers than write 4 shorter articles that don’t really serve any purpose. Let me put it this way – not all 2000-word articles are informative and research-driven, but it’s usually true the other way round. But it’s not even about the word count. Unless one has the intention to conduct an in-depth research on the topic and capture all aspects of a topic, it doesn’t make any sense.

Let Your Copy Have Emotions

Research oriented articles usually contain references to authority websites which offer credence to the information. It does take time to write a research-oriented article but that makes perfect sense. Research oriented articles contain links, images, infographic and even videos to make the discussion interactive.

Optimize Your Copy for Search Bots, but Naturally

The freelance content writer should have a sense of SEO while writing the content. A good SEO copy is not about keyword stuffing – it’s about knowing where to place the keyword (and its derivatives) that blend naturally with the text. Ideally, no article should be just one-keyword rich.

Improve Your Grammar Skills

Finally, the quality of grammar, vocabulary, flow and presentation matter a lot. If the readers are educated enough and they find the opening paragraph has basic grammar issues, the copy will lose its credibility straight away and the readers will simply ignore the copy. Even, Google would not value a copy much if it has grammar issues. It’s one of the 200 signals Google take into account before evaluating the strength of a copy. If you’re a freelance content writer in India and reading this post, please, let us know your thoughts.

Also Read: 5 Qualities of a Rock Star Freelance Writer

About Susanta Sahoo

I'm the founder and content marketing head at Top League. Our team can help you build great content that helps you rank high on Google and generate high-quality leads. Get in touch with us and let's discuss your project. I'm on LinkedIn & Twitter, just so you know.