If your business is like most industries today, you want to optimize the content on your website to improve search engine rankings, conversion rates and your bottom line. In a survey of more than 5,000 marketers operating in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) operations, Content Marketing Institute found that 58 percent of B2Bs and 61 percent of B2Cs were making content optimization a priority in the next year.
About 95 percent of small businesses, which employ 10 to 99 employees, use content marketing. Large B2C companies are more likely to have a content marketing team under the direction whatever department is in charge of product marketing. Content marketers in smaller businesses, however, are more likely to report to the owner of a business.
That’s you. That means you, not some SEO expert, are in charge of content optimization and marketing.
The freelance writer you hire may or may not already understand effective content optimization strategies. It will be up to you to develop these strategies and explain them in a way that helps your writer create optimized and engaging content.
Here are some quick content optimization tips you can share with your freelance writers for hire.
Optimization Tips to Share with Your Freelance Writers for Hire
Identify your target audience and their online habits. Determine their general demographics, geographic locations, search patterns and preferences. Your Google Analytics account can help you with this. Describe your target audience to the writer so the freelancer can create content that attracts interested readers and qualified buyers.
Create objectives – determine what you want visitors to do on your website. Do you want to visitors to learn about you, give you information, sign up for something or purchase merchandize? To make sure your content always drives your web visitors towards that objective, always provide a call-to-action to your writer or ask that he create one for each piece he writes.
Provide keywords to your writer. While your freelance writer can probably find keywords herself, keyword choice can make or break your content optimization strategy so you will want to handle that job. You can use Google Keyword Planner if you have an AdWords account but there are free tools available to help you determine the best keywords for your particular enterprise.
Direct the writer to use keywords once or twice in the body of the content. “Keyword stuffing” makes content difficult to read and can negatively affect your content optimization strategies. Instruct the writer to put the most important keyword towards the beginning of the first paragraph, when possible, and to use a keyword in a heading.
If you are in charge of marketing for your organization and use freelance writers for hire, integrate these tips into your content optimization strategy to keep your website – and the content on it – on the right track.
Lynn H has been a leading SEO content writer for more than 15 years. She specializes in creating informative and engaging content for readers of all levels, from patients to researchers and everyone in between.
https://plus.google.com/+LynnHetzler
