11 Tasks a Freelance Blog Writer Can Master

Aside from writing blog posts, there are several tasks that a freelance blog writer can do for you. Not every freelance blog writer that you come across will have experience doing all of these tasks. If you give them time, however, they can learn to master each task.

If you have a bigger budget to work with, then you can hire a freelance blog writer who already knows this stuff. They can then take over without additional learning and start improving your blog’s impact immediately.

1.  Keyword Research

The main reason why a business would want to have a blog is to support their search engine rankings. Every business wants to get greater visibility so that more potential customers can see them. Every business also wants to be able to show off great scores so that people will trust them more.

A lot of people say they can do keyword research, but good keyword research requires high-level analytical skills as well as a creative mind. Your keywords need to be both relevant to your business and flow smoothly in your content.

A freelance blog writer is in a great position to do keyword research because they have content creation experience. They know what works from the reader’s side, which is a main factor that search engines look for. The technical side can be learned, especially with the help of tools like the Google Keyword Planner or Moz.

2.  Topic Research

With a set of highly relevant keywords to use as a guide, a freelance blog writer can start researching great topics. A simple internet search can generate a ton of matching results. These results will serve as wonderful inspiration for interesting topics that will support your brand.

To begin, a freelance blog writer will take one of these keywords and plug it into Google, then take lots of notes. From those notes, they will then brainstorm topics that will grab the attention of your target audience.

3.  Title Creation

Post titles are a major factor in most ranking algorithms. Your post titles need to be optimized if you want to beat out the competition and show up higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Post titles also need to be catchy. Visibility isn’t enough if people see your link but aren’t interested in clicking through to read your post.

An experienced freelance blog writer will know how to creatively combine the following vital elements of a winning title:

• a relevant keyword with high searches and relatively low competition
• an idea that appeals to your audience targets
• add-on words that grab readers’ attention

A writer can also use a tool like Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator, Portent’s Content Idea Generator, or Build Your Own Blog’s Blog Post Ideas Generator. These tools will help them more easily create catchier titles using the science behind reader interest.

4.  Blog Calendaring

Creating topic after topic with awesome titles may be enough to capture your target audience’s interest. You need to keep that attention, however. If you can only succeed in bringing visitors to your blog a few times, you’ll end up with a high bounce rate. That’s not good for your site score.

Hire a freelance blog writer to arrange topics into a blog calendar. This way, you can visualize week to week and month to month the topics that you will be covering. Then you can arrange these topics based on:

• a series – hooking readers into steps so they come back for the next installment
• seasonality – e.g. holiday tips for eCommerce sale days, hacks that apply to summertime
• segmented audiences – e.g. position in the sales funnel, beginner and advanced knowledge

Having a blog calendar is also, therefore, a vital safety measure. With titles panned out ahead of time, you can also get content scheduled for publication early. If for any reason content production stops for a time, you will have a good buffer to rely on. You won’t get stressed out trying to cover the gaps. More importantly, you won’t end up posting low-quality content because you’re in a hurry. Rushed content will only hurt your site’s and your business’s reputation.

5.  Heading Creation

Your optimized post title will get readers to click through to your post page. You need optimized, catchy headings to:

• support your rankings – headings are the second biggest optimization factor for text content
• get readers to stay to the end of your post – keep them engaged

The longer people stay on the page, the better. On the ranking side, it improves your bounce rate. This tells search engines that people like your content, and this moves your page up on the SERPs. On the readers’ side, it gives you the chance to give them the value that they came for. They will then be more likely to:

• come back for more – increasing traffic and further improving ranking potential
• trust you as an authority – moving them closer to your paid offering
• refer you to friends and colleagues – increasing your reach and potential sales

Get a freelance blog writer to create headings that take readers logically and smoothly from one section of the post to the next. Readers need to be made comfortable. They need to absorb the information quickly and easily. Headings that achieve this make readers feel that your content is a good use of their time.

6.  CTA Formulation

Getting readers to visit your post and read through it brings them one step closer to your products or services. If you have achieved the above to produce quality content, they need just one more push to look into what you have to offer. If they’re really impressed, they may go straight to signing up or making a purchase.

This last push past the blog to the paid stuff is your call to action. An effective CTA needs to be clear and concise as well as compelling and conducive. A skilled blog writer with marketing experience can formulate CTAs with these elements and add them to posts where they make the most sense. This will lead your readers smoothly down the sales funnel.

7.  Post Optimization

Other than your post titles and headings, you need to optimize the rest of your text and meta tags.

A blog writer can creatively and logically weave your main keyword evenly throughout the text as they write. This shows search engines that the post is truly relevant, and you’re not just randomly stuffing keywords on the page. They can also use a tool like the Yoast plugin or SEOBook’s Keyword Density Analyzer to quickly check that they have the right keyword density.

Next, the metadata needs to be properly configured on the post. We’ve already gone through the title and heading, so this leaves the:

• description – the second most important meta tag, the content snippet that appears under titles on the SERPs
• keywords – tying together the relevance of all the elements of the post
• alt text – more on this under Image Optimization below

A good freelance blog writer will take time to create clear, accurate and compelling descriptions. Because they serve as summaries of the content, they are a major factor in attracting people to click through to the post. Titles give an overview, but the description gives more context that many readers want to know before choosing to invest their time in reading the post.

Adding the main keyword phrase is easy if you have a plugin like Yoast – just enter it into the Focus keyphrase field. Adding more keywords may improve SEO, but this requires the paid version of the plugin. Since these additional keywords don’t really have a huge impact, however, I don’t recommend paying for the Pro version just to get this one feature.

There are other meta tags, but these should be pre-set during blog setup so they render on each post by default (e.g. meta content type, viewport, canonical). A developer can take care of this for you if you don’t have it set up yet. Then you don’t need to worry about entering them as HTML for every single post.

8.  Post Formatting

Your posts need to be visually appealing as well as provide substance. You have all the text in there with your main headings. Now you need to arrange these blocks visually so it looks easier to read and is easier to understand.

Most people are visual, so a long post (because Google prefers around 2000 words) should never look intimidating. A freelance writer can fluently insert sub-level headings to nicely separate larger content blocks into more digestible chunks. Doing this also improves your SEO because Google knows that readability improves when sections are no longer than 300 words.

9.  Image Selection

Speaking of visual appeal, images are an essential part of any post. They support text formatting and help readers better grasp the meaning of the words. Images must be relevant and properly placed to achieve this, however.

The blog writer who created the content has intimate knowledge of it and can therefore select the perfect images to complement the text. These images will:

• show what’s explained in the paragraphs that follow
• help break up the text even more with interesting pictures and color
• help set the mood of the post to get readers in the right frame of mind

10.  Image Optimization

Images are for the search engines, too. They are indexed and can help rankings a great deal. Since search engines can read only text, you need image alt tags to tell them what the images are about.

A writer can add the proper alternative text to each image as they are added to the text. These alt tags will describe the images, telling search engines what they represent. If the images have been chosen correctly, they will add relevance to the content as a whole and further boost rankings. The writer can also include the main keyword in the alt text where it makes sense to add more ranking juice.

11.  Linking

Links help search engines judge the relevance of your content. They also show how you provide additional value to readers with these extra sources of information. Linked content, whether within your website or from another website, must, therefore, be complementary and useful.

A writer with link building experience will not just link out to any page. They will carefully select content that has direct bearing on what you’re talking about. It can be used to further explain something you’ve mentioned or act as a supporting source for your claims. Moreover, they will always choose top content from other websites. Each piece will be from an authoritative domain and have lots of traffic going to it. A browser plugin like SEO Pagerank makes it super easy to check how popular a page is to search engines and readers.

In addition to spotting quality sources, a blog writer will know how to link them to a post. They won’t just paste them willy-nilly but choose the right anchor text in the most relevant place within the post, and not cram too many links in one area.

It’s good to note as well that as time goes by, links get outdated. You can call upon a good freelance blog writer to update your old posts to get them up to par with the latest standards and to fix broken links on your site. This tells the search engines and your readers that you care about providing only the best resources.

Hire a Freelance Blog Writer

Maintaining a blog is not a simple task. You need to please the search engines, and this is not easy to do. Search engine algorithms are changing all the time, and you need to keep up. You need to attract the right readers, and please them, too. There are so many parts involved in building out quality content that can do this.

Hiring a freelance blog writer to handle the above tasks gives you a great head start. It will take a lot of responsibility off your plate, for starters. An experienced freelance blog writer will also help you produce quality content faster so you can start getting better results from your efforts. Post maintenance will also be handled so your blog posts can continue to climb the SERPs over time.