Does Your Professional Website Rank? | Marketing | Writing Forum

One way you can keep an ongoing flow of work as a freelancer is to make it easy for clients to find you on their own. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a professional website that ranks well in search engines for keyword phrases your prospects use when they're looking to hire a writer. 

You definitely want to be on the first page of results for your target keywords. Ideally, you'll want to be #1, but anywhere in the top 5 is great. 

This is a tactic that's worked very well for me over the years. For example, when I first started writing Web content and blog posts for clients I ran a service site that ranked in the top 5 for "web content writer" consistently. My current website has ranked #2 for "business writer" for quite a long time. That means clients searching for business writers often see my site, visit it, and contact me for quotes. I either take on the work or refer them to colleagues (I referred out 6 or 7 new prospects this week alone because I didn't have time for the projects for example). 

If you'd like an overflow of prospects knocking at your door, choosing the right keyword phrases and making your website rank well can help you get them. Tomorrow we'll talk more about choosing keyword phrases. But for now, take a look at your website. What keywords are you already focusing on? 

Now search for those phrases in Google (turn off personal search results to get true organic results and no bias because it's your site). Does your site rank on the first page? The top result? If you can't see your site there, neither can clients. 

So tell us….

Does your professional site rank? If not, what do you plan to do about it?

Jenn

I know from experience that "business writing" is much tougher to rank for than "business writer." That's because you get tutorials for the DIY types that rank well, whereas "business writer" is more the service providers. There aren't quite as many people searching for that phrase, but there are plenty to keep the prospects coming and the searches are more relevant since they're actually looking for a person rather than tips. I want to get the blog on that site back up and running so I can focus on "business writing" keywords a bit more through that. One of those many things I'd like to do if I ever find the time.

Ranking has to do with a lot of factors, and search engines don't tell you exactly what all of them are. Relevancy (as far as frequent updates and a social presence) is a new focus for google. But one of the biggest has generally been incoming links. Not only do you want a lot of them, but you want them to be well-targeted. Keywords on-site are more important than meta descriptions. But meta titles are still pretty important, unless something's changed recently.

Jenn

Yes. And the best ones are usually ones you have no control over. While SEO firms will "build links" for you, a lot of the common tactics are spammy at best -- directory submissions, mass blog commenting by them or automated tools, auto-tweets, etc. Ideally you'll get great links because you'll create content that people actually want to link to.You can rank well without stressing about SEO. Just focus on creating the best site you can and being active in your network.

I use the Adwords keyword tool and haven't had problems with it. But you have to understand that it's technically a tool for advertisers -- not publishers. So you have to look at it from their perspective.

For example, that means "competition" doesn't refer to how many people are writing about that keyword. It refers to how many advertisers are bidding on that keyword. You want to write about keywords where there are a lot of advertisers bidding, so therefore you'd want to go with keyword phrases in the medium – high competition range.

The only way you can find out if there's low competition among publishers is to do a search for your keyword phrase (right in Google). See how many results come up. If hundreds of thousands to millions of results appear for the exact keyword phrase in quotes, there's probably too much competition. That's the number you want to have on the lower side.

Here's a link for some more info on the columns you see in the keyword tool.

http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472679?hl=en

Hope that helps!

Jenn