Are you struggling to get your blog to deliver the results you want? Are you seeing your posts failing to grab readers and drive traffic to your site? You may be considering hiring an SEO content writer––but when is the right time to do that?
Why Some Businesses Need to Outsource
Some blogs can be successfully maintained by the company itself. Usually, these efforts are most successful for a large company, which has the ability to pay a staff of dedicated writers or content creators. In this case, the companies are usually dealing with very high traffic numbers, and have room in the payroll for multiple writers.
For many smaller businesses, this is not a realistic option. Often someone on staff has to manage the blog along with their other responsibilities. In some cases, the task might even fall to a business owner or a CEO, who usually already has an overloaded schedule. The problem can be compounded if the blog simply “isn’t working.”
The Two Areas Where Most Blogs Run Into Trouble
Sometimes it can be difficult to know when to stick with a blog project or outsource it, but there are some tell-tale signs. These are signals that a business should consider looking outside its own organization, and stop trying to produce the blog in-house. Usually, these reasons fall into one of two broad categories: planning and execution.
Planning
The first reason is that the blog isn’t performing the way you want, in spite of your best efforts. This is usually due to a lack of expertise required during the planning phase. The company may not have someone on staff who is familiar with SEO writing, and isn’t in a position to plan an effective approach.
Execution
The second reason exists with the execution rather than planning. You may have a good SEO strategy, but no time or resources to implement your ideas. Creating a successful blog takes time—a lot of it. If your staff has other obligations that keep taking priority, it can be nearly impossible to produce quality content at a regular pace.
The 7 Big Signs You Need an SEO Content Writer
Whether you’re running into trouble in planning or execution, you are probably going to have a good idea of what your problems are. So what are the specific signs that you might need to get a third-party SEO content writer?
#1 – Your Posts Aren’t Attracting Enough Traffic
By a wide margin, “increasing traffic” is the most important priority for business owners who are seeking SEO content writers. The need to generate more traffic, drive brand awareness, and connect to a bigger audience––this is nearly universal. There are 236.5 million search engine users in the US, and everyone wants a larger part of that pie.
The trouble is that simply “writing a blog” is not enough. Every blog post needs to be written in such a way that it is properly indexed by Google and other search engines. This is where SEO (search engine optimization) becomes important. When done properly, this approach will get more readers to your page when they do a Google search.
The key is making sure that your pages are ranking for relevant keywords, preferably in the top ten results. This requires a careful analysis of what topics give you the best chance to do this. A regular blog writer may just write about any topic, but an SEO content writer will select topics that have a chance of helping you rank high in those categories. 75% of searchers never click past the first page of results, so it can often be better to rank high for a “rare” search than to rank low for a “common” search.
#2 – Your Posts Aren’t Attracting the Right Traffic
Another issue that comes into play is the question of making sure the right visitors are coming to your site. 236.5 million searchers is a lot of people, so you want to make sure your content is really specifically targeting your ideal customer––the person who is most likely to want your product or service.
There are a few ways to do this. You can answer specific questions that customers may have, or you can focus on geographic location. This is especially helpful with the increase we’ve seen in mobile shoppers. 82% of smartphone shoppers use “near me” searches when looking for options in their vicinity, and if your website is designed to work well on mobile devices, this can be an extremely successful strategy.
#3 – Your Posts Aren’t Engaging Your Visitors
The first two challenges were centered on the “SEO” part of hiring an SEO content writer. This part is about the writing itself. Even if you get the right customers to your site, you still want to make sure you’re providing sufficient value to the people who come your way.
One of the best approaches here is to ask what your ideal customer would want to know. What problems are they trying to solve? What areas are they confused about? Why do they need your service?
8% of search queries are entered in the form of a question, and this trend has been growing in recent years. A good writer will employ a smart SEO strategy and think about these sorts of customer questions (even if the keyword isn’t a question itself). This is how you keep customers on your site for long enough that they will want to learn about your business.
#4 – Your Posts Aren’t Getting Good Conversion Rates
When it’s done properly, inbound marketing can be incredibly effective. Leads from SEO are eight times more likely to become paying customers than those that come from traditional marketing campaigns like ads and mailers.
There’s some logic to this. Many of the people who come to your website as the result of organic SEO are already looking for your product. Still, you need to use a content writer who can make the case for why a visitor should consider becoming a customer. This is another point where the “SEO” part becomes less emphasized, and the “content writer” part becomes more important. A good content writer will be able to improve your conversion rates, and help your bottom line in the process.
#5 – Your Posts Aren’t Current
One of the ways Google determines a website’s ranking is by looking at the age of your posts. As a general rule, the older the post is, the worse it’s likely to rank.
There are times when an older post may be especially popular, and it continues to rank high even though it was written months or years ago. This usually only happens when the rest of the website is kept current, or the post itself is frequently updated.
In order to stay current, a blog needs several new posts every month. For many small businesses, this can become a major time sink, and if there is a time of the year that gets especially busy, the blog falls behind, and the ranking will suffer as a result.
#6 – You Don’t Have Time to Post
This is the top challenge for the clients who seek content writing. There isn’t enough time to get a good post written and published on a weekly basis. If it does happen, it’s often at the expense of something else that needs to get done.
If you don’t have time to post to your blog regularly, your blog will suffer. Prioritize the blog, and something else suffers instead. When you constantly have to make this decision, a good question might be: which of these things is impossible to outsource? The tasks that can only be done by your staff, or the blog? In most cases, the blog is the easier one to move to a third party.
#7 – You Don’t Have Time to Learn SEO Yourself
The world of internet marketing has become much more sophisticated over the past couple of years. We’re now in an era of fierce competition, where most of the common keywords and topics are staked out by large companies with significant financial resources to maximize their online presence. This means that a small or mid-size business needs to be more creative, and delve into the details when it comes to driving traffic.
SEO is the key factor in being successful here. But SEO is a skill, and it is something that requires some time to learn. Does it really make sense to put more hours into researching and developing that skill set, when there are other matters that are more directly connected to your business? For many businesses, it simply doesn’t make sense to spend weeks on a blog when there are affordable content companies full of writers who will already have that skill in place.
SteadyContent: Your Complete SEO Solution
Sometimes, you need more than just a single content writer. At SteadyContent, we have been utilizing our pool of over 550 content writers to create engaging and SEO-driven posts since 2010. We have generated thousands of blog posts for hundreds of companies in a wide range of locations and industries.
We are able to deliver quality results because we listen to our clients, and personalize all of the content we create. We look carefully at all of the factors a specific business will have: what is the ideal customer? What is the best SEO for their site? How can we bridge the gap between the business and their customer base, with valuable content? Every post we make is unique, and every post goes through a rigorous testing process to ensure its quality and originality.
Would you like to find out more? We are currently offering a trial package for new customers, where you can see how our process works. Get your first blog post in a risk-free arrangement, and see what SteadyContent can do for you!
