Hiring an SEO Content Writer: 4 Things To Look For
5 minute read
Let’s say you need a writer to help you ramp up your content and keep it up to date with the latest search engine optimization tactics. There are some obvious things to look for: are they familiar with SEO best practices? Do they have content marketing experience relevant to your industry?
But core competencies are just part of the equation.
Do they have practical experience, or are they just throwing out a bunch of buzzwords? Are they familiar with how searchers explore their needs online? And most importantly, do they understand the needs of your audience?
Let’s take a look at some of the qualities to look for in a writer who can help you create actionable content that reflects your company voice, expands your reach, and engages your audience.
1. Keeping Up With (and Practicing) SEO
SEO best practices are constantly changing, adapting to search engine algorithms that are themselves adapting to searcher behaviors.
Marketing writers need to be aware of the ongoing changes and how to leverage them in the content creation phase. For instance, there was a time when on-page SEO was as simple as formatting your subject matter and throwing in some keywords here and there But that time has passed; search engines are getting better and better at surfacing content that is actually useful.
To an SEO-savvy writer, this means that keywords come second to defining your target customer’s needs and addressing them with informative copy.
Yet the words and phrases you choose still help your content compete and remain a crucial part of on-page SEO, as long as they amplify your message and help your reader accomplish their goals. The bottom line, for content creators, is to write economically — every word should be there for a reason!
Of course, that doesn’t mean that copy needs to be technical and impersonal. The popularity of conversational search has driven changes to search engine results pages (SERPs). The most obvious change is featured snippets, the excerpts of content that appear on the results pages themselves. When writers structure their work to answer searcher questions in the format that search engines like to deliver, your content is more likely to appear in results.
When you’re interviewing a potential SEO content writer, don’t get sucked in by jargon—instead, ask questions that get at how they plan to use SEO tactics for your brand, and why they suggest those specific approaches.
WHAT TO ASK THE WRITER:
Describe your approach to SEO. What’s your process when you’re creating new content?
What SEO authorities or websites do you follow? Why?
How would you improve our existing content?
2. Writing for Your Audience
While on-page SEO is a necessity, meeting the needs of your audience should be every content marketer’s first priority. Make sure your writer is asking the right questions in order to produce content that can attract visitors and convert them into leads, including:
What are the problems they are trying to solve by web searching?
What questions, specifically, did they type which led them to your site?
What questions will they develop while reading your material?
How will their problems be solved by reading this copy and, more importantly, your services?
One helpful trick here is to remove your business from your buyer’s journey—just imagine their needs being met. What motivated them to move to the consideration and decision stages? Then imagine your website as the setting where all this took place. Visualize a successful narrative as part of your content strategy, and share that vision with your creators.
Another quality to look for is the ability to write clearly and decisively. Subject matter can be complex, but it doesn’t need to be communicated in complex terms. Your first priority is to supply content that is relevant to your reader’s needs, and you can’t meet their needs with content they can’t understand or get frustrated trying to read.
WHAT TO ASK THE WRITER:
How do you research the target audience?
How do you balance the reader’s needs with the company’s goals?
3. Writing for Your Brand
In addition to tailoring their copy for your audience, a good SEO writer will be familiar with the voice and tone of your brand. Your brand voice, after all, should be reinforced in all your content assets.
A good candidate will already be familiar with your company’s voice and messaging from reviewing your materials. But even so, you should walk them through your brand and mission, and how your content to reflect them.
If their work is filled with fluff rather than insightful information presented in the way your audience needs to hear it, it’s time to start looking for someone else.
Similarly, if they’re working on a piece of content that supports and links back to a pillar page, but their copy isn’t anchored in a deeper understanding of the topic, they’re not going to be able to help readers progress through their buying journeys.
Understanding how individual pieces fit into the overall content footprint of your website is an important part of on-page SEO. Search engines rank content not only based on the words used, but ingoing and outgoing links, the content of other pages on the website, and more. That’s why it’s essential that the content assets you host support each other and guide your reader to the next step.
And that is, at the end of the day, the most important quality of your next SEO content writer: the ability to communicate your brand value in a way that expands your digital reach with your target audience’s best interest at heart.
WHAT TO ASK THE WRITER:
How do you go about incorporating a client’s voice into your writing?
After reviewing our content, how would you describe our brand voice?
How do you think our target audience perceives our brand?
4. Understanding The Scope Of The Topic
Lastly, one of the most essential qualities in an SEO content creator is the ability to grasp the scope of a topic—the bigger picture—so that they’re able to set parameters for each piece of content and work comprehensively within those boundaries.
Great SEO content doesn’t bounce around haphazardly within a topic, hitting on relevant information as it comes up. Search engines love to deliver comprehensive results that are clear and well-structured.
When a single piece of content includes not only a direct, snippet-friendly answer to the primary search query but covers related questions and includes semantically related terms, search engines can see that it contains the information searchers are looking for.
WHAT TO ASK THE WRITER:
If all you have is a title, how do you research what should be included in a piece of content?
What do you do if a piece you’re writing is getting too long, and you still have more to cover?
What do you do if a piece is too short, but you feel like you’ve included everything you need to say?
Finding new talent can be difficult, but you make the right connection it can be a milestone for your business. Wherever and however you find a content writer to help with your SEO, be sure to thoroughly explore how well they can capture your brand and speak to your audience—not just include the right keywords.