What is Freelance SEO and How Much Can be Earned from it?
If you know what freelancing is, then you will have little problem understanding what Freelance SEO is. In brief, a freelancer is someone who is self-employed, and the person offers services to one business or multiple businesses at the same time. A freelancer has the luxury of choosing his working hours and can have a workstation anywhere he likes, but the only disadvantage is that working hours are very high compared to being employed by someone.
So, the definition of who an SEO freelancer is is quite simple – Anyone who offers SEO services but does not work for any company. A successful SEO freelancer has the quality of both an SEO specialist and an SEO analyst. The person must know about SEO better than most SEO specialists to gain good reputation and credibility. To do this, a few things must be done –
Constantly be on the update
An SEO freelancer must be up to date with the latest trends and techniques in SEO if he/she wants to be successful since clients would more likely hire a company for SEO services rather than go to freelancers, at last, the heavyweight clients. This means that your reputation as an SEO freelancer must be on par with SEO service companies out there in the world.
To be up to date with the latest techniques of SEO, many freelancers log in to Search engine land, SE Roundtable, Quora, Moz, Search Engine Journal at the end of the day, seven days a week. Do this, and you will always know of any noteworthy event that happened that day. You will know of these latest marketing strategies and social media contests that are news and most of all; you will gain even more experience. It also helps that you will be on a constant update with what keyword or website is seeing a spike in traffic.
Related: How To Start A Career In SEO?
Take competition seriously
An SEO freelancer must understand that there are competitors beyond the usual ones in the first page of SERP, remember you are not the only freelancer out there, and there are hundreds of freelancer as skilled as you looking to rank websites.
What an SEO freelancer has to do is look well beyond the apparent competition in the market. It is important to realize that competitors can come in different forms. A right thing to do is, as an SEO freelancer, pick 2 or 3 competitors per month and thoroughly research their tricks and techniques, what they apply in their website and use paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMRUSH to analyze their profiles.
Build connections and be on top
As an SEO freelancer, it is mandatory that you have excellent and lasting relationships in the business world. This way more people will know of your worth, and you will gradually gain international standing.
An SEO freelancer must also be on top of things, if possible, be the first person to master a new technique since SEO has constant updates every single day of the year, there are always new things to learn about SEO. As an SEO freelancer, focus on creating ongoing and long-lasting for current clients and future clients as well.
Related: 3 Common Reasons Why You’re Afraid To Start A Freelance SEO Career
How much can you earn as an SEO freelancer?
There is no definite answer to this question since this mostly depends on how long you work per day and what type of work you are doing. SEO is not limited to keyword analysis and building links; there is more to it than that.
Just for the sake of finding out what SEO freelancers make, let’s look at a freelancer who works 5 – 6 hours a day. Any freelancer who works this much can have an average client base of around 14 – 16 per month. This is a massive number since even you earn approximately 400 to 500 USD from one client, you are receiving a total of 5k USD on average.
This is based on the fact that you are entirely new to the business. In the world of freelancing, reputation means quite a lot. So, the more you work, the higher the chances of finding clients who will pay you much higher than these rates.
If you take all the freelancers in the world into consideration, the average pay of a freelancer is around 40,000 USD per year. This might seem low but understand that not all of these freelancers are full-time freelancers and may are students who freelance to have a side income. It is a well-known fact that established freelancers easily cross the sweet $100,000 mark. If you manage to become one of them, then your life is set! This is not an impossible task if freelancing is indeed your passion.
How much money do freelancer writers make?
The world of freelance writing is one of the most profitable ones in the domain of freelancing since the number of good writers is quite limited compared to other segments of freelancing. But the harsh reality is that no matter how good you are at the beginning, the world of freelance writing is divided into two factions – Native and foreign writers.
You can already guess that the rate of native writers is higher than non-native writers. First, let’s look at what non-native writers make. Usually, non-native writers start at a price of $3/$5 per 1,000 words, and it keeps on the rise the more you write, and the higher your reputation gets. Most writers in Bangladesh peaks at 30 USD per 1000 word but cannot get beyond that no matter how much they try, but a 30 USD cap is no a limit nor is it a peak for everyone. There are a few writers who can go well beyond even that.
Now Native writers can make even more significant than that, for example, prominent writers like Linda Formichelli earns around 250 USD per hour. Yes, 250 USD! Can you imagine how much that is? You make easily cross the 100,000 USD mark per year.
These writers were not this famous from the start; they were just like anyone of us, the difference is that unlike us, they dared to dream. Like us, they too started at a measly $3/$5 per 1000 words, and through years of hard work and never giving up, they finally reached a position we can only dream of.
The Job of an SEO Specialist
“Modern SEO specialists know that search engines are placing increasing value on quality content – which will invariably increase traffic to a site.” – freshgigs.ca
In short, the primary job of an SEO specialist is to optimize your website in such a way that it generates the maximum amount of traffic possible. The way to do this is to know how search engines work and then analyze the website and review and implement correct procedures that would later be called search engine optimized.
The job of an SEO specialist is a difficult one since you need to learn new things continuously. This means that the skills that you knew 5 or 10 years ago are no longer applicable for the recent search engine algorithm. A modern-day SEO specialist must know the correct way to find and implement keywords while also be able to introduce quality contents and good backlinks correctly. Because in the current world of SEO, content is King and backlink is Queen.
An SEO specialist must also know the use of various SEO tools and must know how to use WordPress.
The Role of an SEO Analyst
The primary job of an SEO Analyst if to maintain the health of a website and ensure that it never falls in rank in SERP. To do this, an SEO Analyst must have in-depth knowledge of keyword analysis and implementation.
Content analysis is also a part of the job; an SEO analyst must work in such a way that keeps the website both informative and user-friendly. In short, an SEO analyst must work so that the site is in order, has relevant information and can maintain a reputation in the online world.
Keyword Research
It is exceptionally mandatory that an SEO analyst know how to implement keywords correctly. He/she needs to know how to use SEO tools properly and MUST have knowledge of paid tools like SEMrush Ahrefs, Longtailpro and a lot.
Besides having in-depth knowledge of keyword analysis, an SEO analyst must also know how to analyze competition for specific keywords and must have in-depth knowledge of all the technical issues that the website has. Link building and developing campaigns for backlinks is also a part of what an SEO analyst does.
SEO tasks to do
If you want to build a website, but you do not want to spend much money on it, then finding the right kind of affordable SEO services is the way to do. It is evident that hiring an SEO expert will seriously cost you a buck, so instead, here are a few ways you can have affordable SEO services –
Focus Content
Remember, content is king. The best way to rank your website these days is through having quality contents that are long and informative while being relevant to your site or topic in question.
If you can write your articles and blogs, then you are fortunate since you do not even need to spend money on content writing, but remember that you need to have error-free grammar and quality contents. If you cannot write articles on your own, then you can always use websites like write and freelancer to hire writers at a minimum of 3 dollars. This is way cheaper than hiring SEO specialists, and the right thing is these contents will land you on the first page.
Also, if you must remember to use long-form contents, that means that all your articles and blogs must be longer than 500 words, or even 1000 words if you can manage it. If you look at the top websites in any search results, you will find that almost all of them have articles that are around 2000 words or more. Focusing on informative and quality content that can answer your consumer’ s most pressing concerns will help you get a higher rank in SERP.
Increase On-Page SEO
Your home page is not everything there is to your entire website; you need to optimize your pages to increase traffic individually. This is where On-Page SEO comes in, the sole purpose of the process is to do just that.
Some ways to do so is –
- Use appropriate titles – Your title should exactly tell your readers what the page is about. To do this, use the targeted keyword in your title so that users can directly access your website from a search engine.
- Relevant description – Do not overdo story, keep it exciting and straightforward so that readers do not see an over-optimized website. Instead, they see something that is built to help them genuinely.
- Short URLs – Keep your URLs short so that users can easily understand them, if possible, include keywords in them.
- Appropriate use of keywords – Use keywords moderately, as said before, do not spam them as Google does not like it. If possible, use 1 or 2 keywords per 1000 words.
As far as affordable SEO services go, these are some of the best ways to optimize your website. Although it is advisable that you spend at least a little bit on your site since entirely free methods are never going to rank against paid methods. Also, avoid buying cheap services since they are sometimes a complete waste of money. If you are in it for the long haul, then try learning all the nooks and crooks of SEO yourself on the internet. This brings us to the next point.