by Congratulations, you’ve officially made your own freelance website.
As tempting as it is to celebrate, let’s wait a few minutes before popping the champagne.
While creating a website is the first step to success, don’t expect clients to suddenly line up for your services just because you’ve clicked publish. After all, you’ll need to be visible to your audience for them to even be aware of your presence.
So, what do you need to do?
For starters, craft a solid SEO strategy. Often, freelancers make the mistake of ignoring SEO entirely. If you’re the same, then it’s time for a little reality check.
The bottomline is: without SEO, you are not going to earn any traffic, visitors, or be extension leads.
Don’t worry though! In this post, I’ll cover some of the basics you can attempt yourself, and how you can best leverage SEO services without blowing your budget.
Keyword Research
You’ve probably heard about keyword research before.
It’s sort of the bread and butter of performing any type of SEO. And it makes sense right?
In order to be discovered, you’ll need to make sure Google recognizes your site as relevant to the terms that you think your audience will be using in the Google search box.
Often, freelancers make the mistake of assuming they know the right terms. But, I’d encourage you to let the numbers do the talking. This is where keyword research comes into play.
We’ve written a guide to keyword research already, but here’s the short version…
For starters, focus on search terms that accurately describe your business or service. Common sense, but you’d be surprised how often this is overlooked.
There are a number of tools available to help inspire you if you have trouble coming up with enough valuable terms that aren’t too competitive. As always, I’d recommend you focus on finding long-tail keyword combinations that your potential clients are likely to use.
As trends are introduced and practices are changed, you have to update your keywords in order to match these changes.
Keyword research is the first step to earning higher ranks, and our in-house experts will be more than happy to assist with this critical step. We consult with new clients to determine the most valuable keyword opportunities for each and every business that comes through our metaphorical doors.
Link Building
The name says it all. But we’re not just talking about building any old links. Beginners often make the mistake of prioritizing quantity over quality, with the mindset that every link has the same value. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Earning links from authoritative sites in your industry can be a real game-changer however. Heck, it can even skyrocket your visibility and traffic virtually overnight (provided you picked the right keywords of course)!
Think about it this way.
Link building is just like making friends. Tell Google who your friends are, and it’ll tell you who you are. So, if you’re associating yourself with the wrong company, then Google won’t judge you pretty well.
So, how do you get quality links?
Again, we’ve written at great length about this topic before. You can check out our guide to high-quality link building or do a quick google search to find any number of other useful tutorials on the subject.
In short, you’ll need to be ready to invest a lot of time and energy on this front. If you’re just getting started, it can be quite cumbersome and difficult. I am not going to mince words, because that is just the reality of it.
With our performance-based SEO service, we’ll handle all of your link-building (among other things). You can just sit back and relax, while we take care of the heavy lifting.
On-Page Optimization
For the uninitiated, Moz defines on-page optimization as the process of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more traffic.
Everything starts with a good first impression.
When clients see your page show up in the search results, they don’t get to see all of the fancy graphics and UX you’ve designed. Instead, they’ll only see a title and meta description.
It’s therefore critical that these effectively illustrate what it is that you do, and are appealing enough to earn a click!
Of course, on-page SEO goes a lot deeper than titles and meta descriptions. The guide I just linked to covers the most important bits! We provide a free on-page optimization for all customers when we start a new SEO campaign.
In order to ensure higher rankings, we offer a free on-page optimization for all clients. Think of it like the cement foundation upon which your “SEO house” is built. Without it, you’re not going to be able to build any meaningful or lasting success.
Seek Help
As you can see, there is no shortage of hard and technical work involved in improving SEO results. But despite the heavy effort required, it is undeniably worth it.
The added exposure and popularity amount to substantial increases in sales for the vast majority of businesses that run successful SEO campaigns.
The bottom line is, improving your site’s SEO with keyword research, on-page optimization and link building is absolutely necessary if you want to get discovered on Google.
Otherwise, you risk running a freelance business with no clients!
If you don’t know where to start, then that’s perfectly okay. Here at RankPay, we provide you with quality SEO services to help you earn new and rewarding freelance clients.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.
Guest Author
Monique Danao is a freelance writer, content creator and copywriter with expertise in tech, food and digital marketing. When she’s not creating her next big article, you’ll find her enjoying funky food, listening to music, stalking startups and researching updates on tech. You may contact her through her website or follow her on Twitter.
