Who to Hire? — A Custom Content Shop or a Freelance SEO Writer
We’ll make it easy for you:
- Hire a content shop if you have a strict budget, want bulk content fast, and are looking to implement a hands-off approach.
- Hire an SEO writer if you want to involve yourself in the content creation process, have budget adaptability and want a hyper-personalized article that can be edited further.
Want to know more? Read on:
Fact: as a business owner, you need to communicate and engage with your customers.
Your content marketing strategy acts as the generator for inbound leads, constantly whirring and turning prospects into customers, even when your mind dwells on other pressing needs.
Needless to say, it’s crucial to set the right entity to do the job for you.
For many businesses there lie two options: finding a freelance SEO content writer to write content for you or buying writing services straight from a content shop to create blog posts for you.
Competition is fierce from both big players (content agencies) and independent freelance writers, so finding a reliable source for custom content can prove to be challenging.
But we’ll try to make it easier for you. Let’s look at what you need to know before hiring either a custom content shop or a freelance content writer to make the right choice the first time.
What Does a Freelance SEO Writer Offer?
A freelance SEO writer offers highly personalized SEO writing services. The expertise, pricing, proficiency, and fluency can swing wildly depending on where you look and what you’re after.
But at its core, they create content custom-made for you and foster a relationship that’s customized and professional.
How it works: you contact them, whether through an intermediary website or through a professional page, and communication is usually excellent and transmits well into the work.
They can integrate your desired keywords seamlessly, and most are capable of posting the content directly to your website too.
Freelancers are excellent writers, but there’s a sizable chunk of them who don’t hold proficiency in the entire end-to-end process. This means that you or your marketing team have to research the keywords yourselves and provide them the briefs.
The research process can take a while to get going, but it’s a necessary requirement for most freelance writers to get an idea of what type of SEO writing you want your blog filled with.
What’s Unique About a Freelance SEO Content Writer?
An SEO writer tends to accept your full creative input, making this connection a hyper-customized one.
A freelancer also has a lot more adaptability in terms of their output deadline and rates—granting you some room to negotiate with a reasonable request.
This also extends to how often you can ask for revisions for your work, although some SEO writers lay out their terms to only maintain a set number of revisions. Some may have an additional fee too.
However, as it’s just one person you’re collaborating with, writing SEO content and putting them on your site would naturally take longer with them.
You can circumvent this by hiring or outsourcing multiple SEO writers to populate your web page.
But, be warned.
Managing a fleet of writers that command different rates, deadlines, and communication styles might prove to take a whole greater effort than hiring a bulk content service en masse.
Speaking of…
What Does a Custom Content Shop Offer?
On the other hand, a content shop or SEO writing agency revolves its business around the end-to-end needs of its clients.
This doesn’t just include original and engaging content, but it also the overlapping parts of the content creation process as well. The major chunks of this process include graphic design, keyword research, title creation, and website publishing.
But for a few agencies, there are more features in the content strategy. Here are some guarantees of a content shop like CopySmiths:
- Quality control by professional native English writers
- Writers trained to write with an SEO Copywriting course
- Focus on Google EAT principles and user search intent
- Plagiarism check key phrases with Copyscape
- Relevant Google keywords, outline, and title
- Authority inbound and outbound link distribution
- Keyword volume tools to optimize for SEO writing
With a custom content shop, you’re guaranteed to receive a batch of great content delivered in bulk. This includes integration of all your desired keywords at a much faster pace compared to services from a sole SEO writing specialist.
What’s more—as there are standard quality control measures in place, articles read well and have high chances to rank in search engines with the right keyword.
Who Would Benefit the Most From Hiring SEO Writing Agencies?
Entrepreneurs, CMOs, and busy marketing department decision-makers in successful startups and eCommerce businesses.
By getting content in bulk from SEO writing agencies, you can sit back, focus on other parts of your business, and take a hands-off approach while letting highly-trained specialists search for the best keyword to inject into your content.
The articles created in a content shop are guaranteed to follow the best ranking practices to show up in search results with your favored keyword.
Know Your Needs Before Hiring
Hiring an SEO copywriter or an SEO writing agency to get you to the first page of Google isn’t a magic bullet.
You need to know when to do it and lay down the goals you wish to achieve beforehand.
Define Goals and KPIs
Goals provide direction. Make them SMART, aka smart, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
Before kicking things off, you should communicate with your chosen writing service provider and ensure that they resonate with and can handle your business’s goals.
Also, get a good idea of what services they offer at the start. Are they available for end-to-end services? Are you paying for just the document file? Knowing this can prevent miscommunication mishaps down the line and additional fees due to scope creep.
Don’t leave it up to your outsourced talent to predict and assume your goals—you might end up failing to resonate with your target audience. You could also miss the mark on ranking on Google search engines with your relevant keywords, wasting money in the process.
Budget
According to Impact Plus, over 68% of marketers are planning to increase the budget of their content marketing strategy in 2021. Content marketing and digital marketing are getting increasingly potent as the digital age comes into full swing.
As a business owner, it’s important to realize your own financial situation as well. Can you afford a few thousand dollars for an agency’s high-quality work? Are you only capable of allocating a tight budget for an outsourced SEO content writer?
In other words, know what to expect with the price range you allocate for your content marketing strategy. While many affordable writers fill the trenches of freelancing websites, you’re expected to get a more premium service with agencies.
Cadence
A simple observation—but agencies have multiple SEO writers ready to churn out relevant content for you, while a single content writer can only put out work worth one person’s efforts.
If you want a consistent flow of blogs made for your site, an agency can usually deliver more SEO writing jobs in a shorter duration. The more eyes that see the brief, the higher your chances of getting fulfilled and served for your site.
SEO Optimization
Good content ranks. For 99% of business owners, writing SEO articles that engage readers and abide by search engine optimization standards is the main reason why they choose to outsource.
You wouldn’t want to hire a content writing specialist who can maybe write a good blog post but doesn’t know the first rule of search engine optimization.
The search engines like Google are a highly competitive space with many businesses and websites looking to increase their click-through rate from your chosen keyword.
That’s why you need to know where you’d like to position your business when people search for it in Google search engines with a keyword or keywords.
Unsure how to get started? If you’re a budding business that wants to gain local SEO traffic, you’d want to use a keyword that’s specifically tailored to your business and won’t be pit against lots of competition. Long-tail keywords are key to rank high in lesser-known niches.
Got all that? Here are some writing tips to tell your service provider: use keywords with a decent search volume to give it a chance to rank high in search engines.
Additionally, ensure your SEO content writing specialist abides with Google terms and includes keywords and keyword phrases naturally in their title, outline, and article
The Bottomline
You want results. You want your business’s content strategy up and running. And you need an SEO writer or SEO writing agency to create content that abides with search engine optimization rules and engages your readers.
Now that you understand the needs of your business, it’s time to compare the two services and make a decision.
Grab a Regular Content Supply At This Content Shop
If your intent is to optimize articles and get your content ranking high in search engines, hire a content shop.
At CopySmiths, we collaborate with you to touch the heart of your readers through copywriting. We do all this while producing articles with keyword phrases that are guaranteed to rank high in any search engine.
Our writers follow our tried and true copywriting technique as they write, creating a recipe for success that’s helped many businesses scale and see results in a search engine.
CopySmiths
I'm Katrina McKinnon, founder of CopySmiths and Small Revolution. In my 20 years of experience, I have helped online businesses create high-performing content specifically on an eCommerce store's blog. Find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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