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Results of two to four months of inbound SEO marketing work (niche: freelance writing)
Posted by on July 21, 2020 at 4:36 pmHey folks, I’m a freelance writer that counts on inbound marketing and SEO for the majority of my work. Over the last four months I’ve been focussing a lot of effort on building out my website to attract more customers. Here’s a quick breakdown of what I have done, and a brief summary of results.
My marketing mix is around 20% applying for relevant freelance writing roles, and 80% inbound content marketing. I setup a reasonable good portfolio website when I first started, and was able to rank in the top 20 of SERPs for about a dozen relevant keywords. Then, work exploded, and I literally did not look at my website or inbound marketing for about four years. The positions slowly started to drop off.
Then, coronavirus happened, and my client base fell off a cliff (I lost about half of my clients in March / April.) Fortunately, we’ve got savings, and my wife has her own freelance work that still brings in good money, and can ride out a few months of less income, so I decided to spend the time I would have been writing working on my website.
I am doing this (it’s still a work in progress) in two phases – Pre- and post-SEMrush.
Before SEMRush, I focused on two main areas:
* Building out my portfolio samples – I added around 300 links to published content to my website, bringing the total to around 500. The results were that last week’s portfolio page impressions in Google search were 4,430, compared to 3,200 the same week in 2019.
* Creating topic expertise niche pages, writing specialist content for narrowly focused writing needs and keywords (think Supply Chain, Accounting, Business Intelligence, SaaS, etc.) I have almost 50 of those pages, broadly categorized into three main areas: Business, Finance, and Technology. Those expertise pages got me 900 impressions last week.I am still tweaking descriptions and titles to optimize CTR, as that’s still pretty low and not where I want it to be – in fact, the lack of CTR is my biggest focus at present.
After I got SEMRush, I was able to focus on areas that had specific issues. I’ve made most of these changes over the last two weeks, so these results are *extremely* preliminary.
My approach was:
* Audit my website to find out where there were currently problems (e.g. broken links, redirections, titles that were too long, descriptions that didn’t exist, etc.) This was *huge* – I found that one of the main CTAs I used on my website was broken, across pretty much all my pages. *Massive Picard Facepalm*. I was also able to deal with a number of other, less major issues.
* Explore keywords and refocus content around narrower search intent, mainly through a strong focus on B2B, business, finance, and technology writing. This was already the area I was writing within, so it made sense to put that front-and-center on the site.
* Write and update long-form content to pick up those keywords, both focussed by the format of the writing (articles, blog posts, white papers, etc.) And by overall content area: Business, Finance, and Technology. I was able to create 2,000 words+ for each, and it’s starting to work.
* The last step will be to strengthen the other existing pages on my website, like the home page, experience page, expertise page, etc. I am also writing an extensive freelance writing best practice guide that I will publish over the next couple of days.I would say working on both phases has been the equivalent of two months of dedicated work (but spread over around four months).
According to SEMRush, the efforts are starting to pay off, although this is after only two weeks using the tool in earnest:
My website health has increased from 84% to 94%.
Between July 15 to July 21, I increased positioning in Google SERPs as follows:
* Top 3: Added 2 new keywords, for a total of 5.
* Top 10: Added 8 new keywords, for a total of 11.
* Top 20: Added 24 new keywords, for a total of 30.
* Top 100: Added 105 new keywords for a total of 144.My top 20 positioned keywords (together with positioning in SERPs are):
* freelance writer services 2
* professional freelance writing services 2
* professional freelance writer 2
* freelance business writing service 3
* freelance writing services 3
* freelance website content writing services 4
* business content writers 4
* business content writer 4
* freelance content writing services 4
* freelance business writing services 4
* freelance writing service 5
* freelance article writing service 5
* freelance business writers 6
* content writing services pricing 6
* technology writing services 8
* freelance business writer 8
* financial writing services 11
* freelance web content writing 12
* technology freelance writer 13
* professional corporate writer 13And versus my competitors on these keywords, I’m doing OK, although there is still a way to go, as I am in eighth position:
1. upwork.com
2. thewriterfinder.com
3. fiverr.com
4. freelancer.com
5. thewritelife.com
6. elnacain.com
7. verblio.com
8. **paulmaplesden.com**
9. kristihines.com
10. probizwriters.com
11. contentdevelopmentpros.com
12. donsadlerwriter.com
13. jennifergregorywriter.com
14. grammarchic.net
15. freelancewritingservice.com
16. joecanwrite.com
17. ayeletweisz.com
18. lisatannerwriting.com
19. dawnmentzer.com
20. meganhillfreelancewriter.comOverall impressions increased too, with 12,200 last week, compared with 10,400 in the same week in 2019.
But, of course, the real upshot is how many clients have I managed to win doing this over the last few weeks, and the answer is two. One in supply chain and one in payments processing, that together will replace around 30% of the clients / income I lost.
I hope this is helpful – I should point out that I am not a professional in SEO, I would describe myself as a “talented amateur” and I achieved these results mostly through onsite SEO improvement.
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3 Replies
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Good solid work
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Thats awesome work! Sounds like your doing things the right way and excited that you been able to build back your business. I am in the same boat a freelance writer and lost about 25% of my clients due to this crazy world we live in. So this post was very inspiring! Thanks!
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Well done! Onsite SEO is an important aspect of SEO. Glad that you got it right.
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