You’ve decided to hire a search engine optimization company to increase your online traffic. You’re happy to let them take over the technical stuff. But what about your blogs? Can they really speak with authority about your industry? Will they get the technical jargon right? What if they fail to capture your unique voice?
While all of these are understandable concerns, they’re easier to resolve than most people think.
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Setting Up Your SEO Copywriter for Success
A kickoff meeting can get your writer off to a good start. Come prepared to tell them about:
- Your origin story.
- Your ideal customer.
- Your competition.
- What sets your product apart.
- Your podcast, YouTube channel or other media.
- Any blog topics you would like covered.
- Any topics to avoid.
- Preferred “voice” (casual, formal, humorous, sarcastic, etc.).
Expect to give feedback on the first few blogs to help your writer align with your voice. Investing a little time now can save a lot later, and you’ll likely need to give less feedback over time with future blogs. You can also expect to enjoy extra traffic from letting your SEO company help you with content.
Benefits Of Outsourcing Blog Content
Consistency
Consistency is key with search engines. If you want to rank high, you need a constant stream of content on your website to showcase that you’re the authority in your industry. But few companies have the time to make that happen. Hiring an SEO company ensures that new content is popping up on your website without you having to babysit the process.
Reach Your Target Audience
A good writing team will research your target audience. What is that audience already searching online? What problems do they need you to solve? What aspects of your product or service are most appealing to them?
Then, they should outline topics into a content calendar. If you don’t take time to research your target audience and are spitballing topics, you’ll be wasting your time on content that will not rank and won’t attract the right audience.
Establish Your Authority
Long gone are the days of ranking high on search engines with low-quality content stuffed on your website. Google algorithms have changed that. Google now rewards authority. This means they reward high-quality content for industry-related topics.
A good blogging team can consistently generate value-added blogs that set you apart as a trustworthy thought leader in your industry that search engines will notice.
Optimize For Traffic
You may know everything about the widgets you sell, but that’s only part of the battle. You also need to understand how to write about those widgets without boring your audience. You’re an expert, but that doesn’t mean you know how to write compelling content.
Experienced blog writers know best practices to attract ideal buyers: improving readability with direct paragraphs, writing attractive titles and incorporating keywords strategically but not excessively.
Save Money
Business owners may write blogs but struggle to be consistent. After all, they have a business to run. While an owner could be growing their company, they’re stuck at the computer doing something that someone else could do, hurting the bottom line.
You could always hire someone internally to help with copywriting, but do you really want another person on payroll? By the time you bring in HR and deal with insurance, taxes, benefits, etc., it’s often cheaper to contract out. You’ll likely find that outsourcing brings a higher ROI.
If they’re a good SEO company, they’ll send you regular reports showing you progress and increases in visibility. Poor quality blogs can hurt that visibility, so the SEO agency will have plenty of incentive to write effective blogs to boost your search engine traffic.
A Few Tips For Outsourcing
- Don’t micromanage. Winston Churchill knew that “perfection is the enemy of progress,” and so do SEO experts. If you’re holding back blogs to scrutinize every last comma, you’re going to bog down progress and hurt your online performance. Expect quality but don’t get so buried in the details that you sabotage momentum. To paraphrase, 90% and done drives traffic; perfect but incomplete kills it.
- Remember the ‘why.’ Why do you write blogs? To build trust with your target audience by giving them something of value. Blogs answer readers’ questions and help them solve problems. A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of wanting blogs to be strictly promotional. That’s great for Facebook ads and landing pages, but it will scare away blog readers and tank your website traffic.
Let’s say you search Google for “reliable luxury watches” and click on a blog that pops up in the search results. If it’s a thinly veiled sales pitch for a specific watch, you’ll be annoyed. You don’t want an ad! You want hard facts to help you make the best purchase across various watches.
On the other hand, if it’s filled with helpful research showing the pros and cons of different watches, you’re probably going to stay on that page. You might even make the site your “go-to” source for watch-related questions. Because you now trust this website, you’re more likely to buy from them.
A good content writer will create blogs that are educational—not promotional—and they’ll cover a range of pertinent, popular topics from a vulnerable and transparent perspective. This means that not every topic will be tied to something that you sell. You’re educating and earning trust, not overpowering and establishing dominance.
People outsource lawn care, housekeeping, taxes and oil changes all the time. It’s not because they can’t figure out how to do these things; it’s because they know that others have the tools and resources to do them well—and usually in less time.
Blog writing is no exception. If you take the time to lock in a good SEO company with killer copywriters, you can free up your schedule and headspace to focus on your superpowers to scale your business.