SEO
How to Hire Freelance Writers in 5 Steps (Ahrefs’ Process)
If you’ve ever tried to hire freelance writers, you probably ended up with thousands of applications.
This usually leads to you asking yourself two questions:
- How do I choose the best ones?
- How will I even have time to filter through that many applications?
In this post, you’ll learn how we set up a process to answer these questions.
Most job listings tell applicants to email the hiring manager their cover letter and resume. That works well when looking for full-time hires but not for freelance positions because they often attract hundreds or thousands of applicants.
There’s just no way you can review that many resumes without losing it. As a result, suitable applicants often slip through the net and you miss out on great writers.
One way to solve this problem is to have all applicants apply through a Google Form.
Here are two reasons why this makes sense:
- It helps you vet applicants fast and efficiently – Google Forms funnels applicants into a Google Sheet, so you can review all applicants there instead of sifting through emails.
- It allows you to test writers’ skills and knowledge at scale – You can easily ask questions designed to judge applicants’ knowledge, skills, and experience with the topic at hand.
In terms of what you should ask applicants, I recommend a mix of multiple-choice questions and ones with short answers. Multiple-choice questions help gauge knowledge and experience, whereas “short answer” questions allow you to judge writing ability.
Here’s one of our multiple-choice questions:
The answer to this question is something that we expect most experienced SEOs to know. But it may trip up those with less experience.
Sidenote.
There’s still a bit of “it depends” with this question. But generally speaking, there’s a clear and correct answer that I think most knowledgeable SEOs will choose.
Here’s an example of a “short answer” question:
We designed this question to help us judge the applicant’s ability to explain things succinctly and accurately.
If you’re curious about our application form, here it is.
Only a handful of these questions are for vetting purposes; the rest are to get basic details like their names, email addresses, Twitter handles, etc. It’s essential to ask for these details, as it’s the only way to get them when applicants aren’t applying by email.
You now need to attract candidates to your application form, which you can do by creating a job listing and posting everywhere you can.
Here are the four things you need to explain:
- What you’re looking for – Keep it short. Tell applicants what the position entails.
- What skills you require – List everything you expect in applicants.
- Who you are – Give some details about your company. (Keep it short; don’t bore people.)
- How to apply – Send people to your application form.
There are plenty of job boards where you can submit your listing. We posted to ProBlogger, Swipe Files Job Board (prev. Hey Marketers), our careers page, and a few others.
We also posted in a few Slack and Facebook groups.
Given that every applicant goes through the same process, the more places you can post your job listing, the better.
Every aspect of the vetting process takes place in the Google Sheet. This makes life super easy, as everything is in one place. I recommend splitting the process into automated and manual vetting to make things as quick and efficient as possible.
Automated vetting
Here, the idea is to disqualify applicants who don’t fit the bill, give a preliminary score to the remaining ones, and clean up the sheet to make manual vetting as quick as possible. Here’s how to do it in three steps.
A. Disqualify
There’s no point wasting time reviewing applications from folks who can’t follow basic rules or don’t meet basic criteria. So it pays to disqualify them automatically. The beauty of Google Sheets is that you can do this easily with filters and formulas.
You’ll recall that we asked all applicants to define two terms in under 50 words. As we wanted to disqualify those who exceeded the allowed word count, we added two additional columns with formulas to count the number of words in each definition.
Then we filtered to exclude rows where the definitions were above 50 words.
We then filtered for a few more criteria:
- Rate per 1,000 words – We excluded anyone who didn’t put 10–1,000. (This was primarily to exclude applicants who couldn’t follow instructions and gave a price per word.)
- Years of experience in SEO – We excluded anyone with “<1” year of experience.
- Have you ever used Ahrefs before? – We excluded those who answered “no.”
B. Score
Next, you want to give each applicant a preliminary score to get a better sense of their knowledge and experience at a glance.
To do this, we created a formula that checked their answers to our multiple-choice questions, their Ahrefs experience, and whether they still had an active Ahrefs subscription. The result was a score between 0 and 5.
C. Simplify
Even with the filters and scores in place, your sheet will be overwhelming because it contains so much data. So it’s worth hiding columns you don’t need for the vetting process, such as applicants’ names and email addresses. This also helps to eliminate potential biases.
For us, we added conditional formatting to our preliminary score to make eyeballing the quality of each applicant easier.
Here’s what we ended up with:
Manual vetting
We skimmed applicants’ preliminary scores and definitions to decide whether they should progress to the next stage of the process. Each applicant took no more than a few seconds, allowing us to vet over 100 applicants per hour.
For example, it only took a second to decide not to continue with this applicant because they defined SEM rather than SEO.
For the applicant below, on the other hand, we could tell pretty quickly that it’d be worth giving them a shot. Both of their definitions were accurate and well written, and they scored well on our multiple-choice questions:
To track our decision for each applicant, we added one final column:
Most people test writers by having them write a test article from a content brief. We do the same but don’t send unique briefs to each applicant. We send them all the same brief.
Here are three reasons why we recommend this:
- It’s easier to grade their work – You can create a checklist to score writers on the same criteria.
- It’s quicker – You don’t have to create a new content brief for each writer.
- It can be automated – You can set up systems to send the brief to writers when they hit this stage.
Let’s look at how to ensure tests run smoothly and efficiently.
A. Explain the deal and get their details
For applicants who pass our initial vetting process, we need to explain the deal for the test article and get their details. We created a template in Gmail for this.
It explains that we:
- Want to offer them a paid test article.
- Pay a flat fee per test article (and how much).
- Send the same brief to every applicant and that their article won’t be published.
- Own all the work they produce for us.
- Pay invoices at the end of the month.
That may seem like information overload, but it’s best to make sure everyone’s on the same page from the beginning.
Our email ends with a link to a Google Form asking for their invoice email address (this is often different from the one they use daily) and how they want to be paid.
B. Send the content brief for the test
We show a confirmation message when an applicant submits the Google Form in the previous step. It links them to a Google Doc with the content brief for the test article.
Here’s what that looks like:
The document also contains instructions that tell the applicant to:
- Make a copy of the document.
- Write as much or as little as they like (no word count quotas).
- Email us the test article and invoice us when they’re done.
- Read our content guidelines before they start writing.
I recommend everyone create content guidelines when working with freelance writers. We link to ours in the doc. It explains what we expect regarding style and content.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
C. Review their content
Given that you’ll be testing a few writers, you need a fair and consistent way to judge their relative quality. For this, we created a checklist to review and score their efforts quickly.
Here’s an excerpt from our checklist:
You can see that we check the article as a whole for a few basics, then review each section in more depth.
For example, here are a few of our criteria for the definition:
- Is it written in the correct format (according to our guidelines)?
- Is it accurate?
- Is it well written?
In total, there are 30 things on our checklist. Each one equals one point, so we score each applicant out of 30.
Hiring is the easy part. If an applicant scores well on their test article, we assign them an actual one to write. If that goes well, we give them more.
Here are a few things to look out for when working with freelancers:
- Quality deterioration – Freelancers can sometimes get lazy or even begin subcontracting work. Both of these things lead to a reduction in quality.
- Reliability issues – Life occasionally gets in the way for everyone but watch out for consistent unreliability.
- Communication issues – For whatever reason, disappearing off the face of the earth is surprisingly common.
Don’t hesitate to drop writers if you face these issues. Continuing to work with them will suck your time and energy.
By that same token, when you come across reliable freelancers who consistently produce high-quality work, treat them well. Great writers are worth their weight in gold, so keep giving them work and review their rates periodically.
Final thoughts
Hiring freelance writers is easy when you have a system in place. You can even automate many of the steps with tools like Zapier.
For example, we have zaps for outline requests, logging details, and sending payment requests to our office manager.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
Google’s Search Engine Market Share Drops As Competitors’ Grows
According to data from GS Statcounter, Google’s search engine market share has fallen to 86.99%, the lowest point since the firm began tracking search engine share in 2009.
The drop represents a more than 4% decrease from the previous month, marking the largest single-month decline on record.
U.S. Market Impact
The decline is most significant in Google’s key market, the United States, where its share of searches across all devices fell by nearly 10%, reaching 77.52%.
Screenshot from: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/, May 2024.Concurrently, competitors Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search have seen gains. Bing reached a 13% market share in the U.S. and 5.8% globally, its highest since launching in 2009.
Yahoo Search’s worldwide share nearly tripled to 3.06%, a level not seen since July 2015.
Screenshot from: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/, May 2024.Search Quality Concerns
Many industry experts have recently expressed concerns about the declining quality of Google’s search results.
A portion of the SEO community believes that the search giant’s results have worsened following the latest update.
These concerns have begun to extend to average internet users, who are increasingly voicing complaints about the state of their search results.
Alternative Perspectives
Web analytics platform SimilarWeb provided additional context on X (formerly Twitter), stating that its data for the US for March 2024 suggests Google’s decline may not be as severe as initially reported.
From our data (Search Engine website category, US, March 2024) it doesn’t look like we’re there yet: pic.twitter.com/RBUJp4ZLeb
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 1, 2024
SimilarWeb also highlighted Yahoo’s strong performance, categorizing it as a News and Media platform rather than a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category.
Don’t underestimate Yahoo. They’re doing great. On our platform they’re categorized as News and Media, and hence not a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category. But they rank #10 worldwide, #6 in the US, and #1 in their category. Much higher than Bing and OpenAI. pic.twitter.com/O4yJu5QEK6
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024
At the same time, Google is slightly declining 👀 pic.twitter.com/9i7paeU1QG
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024
Why It Matters
The shifting search engine market trends can impact businesses, marketers, and regular users.
Google has been on top for a long time, shaping how we find things online and how users behave.
However, as its market share drops and other search engines gain popularity, publishers may need to rethink their online strategies and optimize for multiple search platforms besides Google.
Users are becoming vocal about Google’s declining search quality over time. As people start trying alternate search engines, the various platforms must prioritize keeping users satisfied if they want to maintain or grow their market position.
It will be interesting to see how they respond to this boost in market share.
What It Means for SEO Pros
As Google’s competitors gain ground, SEO strategies may need to adapt by accounting for how each search engine’s algorithms and ranking factors work.
This could involve diversifying SEO efforts across multiple platforms and staying up-to-date on best practices for each one.
The increased focus on high-quality search results emphasizes the need to create valuable, user-focused content that meets the needs of the target audience.
SEO pros must prioritize informative, engaging, trustworthy content that meets search engine algorithms and user expectations.
Remain flexible, adaptable, and proactive to navigate these shifts. Keeping a pulse on industry trends, user behaviors, and competing search engine strategies will be key for successful SEO campaigns.
Featured Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
SEO
How To Drive Pipeline With A Silo-Free Strategy
When it comes to B2B strategy, a holistic approach is the only approach.
Revenue organizations usually operate with siloed teams, and often expect a one-size-fits-all solution (usually buying clicks with paid media).
However, without cohesive brand, infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts, they’re pretty much doomed to fail.
It’s just like rowing crew, where each member of the team must synchronize their movements to propel the boat forward – successful B2B marketing requires an integrated strategy.
So if you’re ready to ditch your disjointed marketing efforts and try a holistic approach, we’ve got you covered.
Join us on May 15, for an insightful live session with Digital Reach Agency on how to craft a compelling brand and PMF.
We’ll walk through the critical infrastructure you need, and the reliances and dependences of the core digital marketing disciplines.
Key takeaways from this webinar:
- Thinking Beyond Traditional Silos: Learn why traditional marketing silos are no longer viable and how they spell doom for modern revenue organizations.
- How To Identify and Fix Silos: Discover actionable strategies for pinpointing and sealing the gaps in your marketing silos.
- The Power of Integration: Uncover the secrets to successfully integrating brand strategy, digital infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts.
Ben Childs, President and Founder of Digital Reach Agency, and Jordan Gibson, Head of Growth at Digital Reach Agency, will show you how to seamlessly integrate various elements of your marketing strategy for optimal results.
Don’t make the common mistake of using traditional marketing silos – sign up now and learn what it takes to transform your B2B go-to-market.
You’ll also get the opportunity to ask Ben and Jordan your most pressing questions, following the presentation.
And if you can’t make it to the live event, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording shortly after the webinar.
SEO
Why Big Companies Make Bad Content
It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes.
HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing AI, or Zendesk sharing catchy sales slogans.
Judged by content marketing best practice, these articles are bad.
They won’t resonate with decision-makers. Nobody will buy a HubSpot license after Googling “how to buy bitcoin stock.” It’s the very definition of vanity traffic: tons of visits with no obvious impact on the business.
So why does this happen?
There’s an obvious (but flawed) answer to this question: big companies are inefficient.
As companies grow, they become more complicated, and writing good, relevant content becomes harder. I’ve experienced this firsthand:
- extra rounds of legal review and stakeholder approval creeping into processes.
- content watered down to serve an ever-more generic “brand voice”.
- growing misalignment between search and content teams.
- a lack of content leadership within the company as early employees leave.
Similarly, funded companies have to grow, even when they’re already huge. Content has to feed the machine, continually increasing traffic… even if that traffic never contributes to the bottom line.
There’s an element of truth here, but I’ve come to think that both these arguments are naive, and certainly not the whole story.
It is wrong to assume that the same people that grew the company suddenly forgot everything they once knew about content, and wrong to assume that companies willfully target useless keywords just to game their OKRs.
Instead, let’s assume that this strategy is deliberate, and not oversight. I think bad content—and the vanity traffic it generates—is actually good for business.
There are benefits to driving tons of traffic, even if that traffic never directly converts. Or put in meme format:
Programmatic SEO is a good example. Why does Dialpad create landing pages for local phone numbers?
Why does Wise target exchange rate keywords?
Why do we have a list of most popular websites pages?
As this Twitter user points out, these articles will never convert…
…but they don’t need to.
Every published URL and targeted keyword is a new doorway from the backwaters of the internet into your website. It’s a chance to acquire backlinks that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and an opportunity to get your brand in front of thousands of new, otherwise unfamiliar people.
These benefits might not directly translate into revenue, but over time, in aggregate, they can have a huge indirect impact on revenue. They can:
- Strengthen domain authority and the search performance of every other page on the website.
- Boost brand awareness, and encourage serendipitous interactions that land your brand in front of the right person at the right time.
- Deny your competitors traffic and dilute their share of voice.
These small benefits become more worthwhile when multiplied across many hundreds or thousands of pages. If you can minimize the cost of the content, there is relatively little downside.
What about topical authority?
“But what about topical authority?!” I hear you cry. “If you stray too far from your area of expertise, won’t rankings suffer for it?”
I reply simply with this screenshot of Forbes’ “health” subfolder, generating almost 4 million estimated monthly organic pageviews:
And big companies can minimize cost. For large, established brands, the marginal cost of content creation is relatively low.
Many companies scale their output through networks of freelancer writers, avoiding the cost of fully loaded employees. They have established, efficient processes for research, briefing, editorial review, publication and maintenance. The cost of an additional “unit” of content—or ten, or a hundred—is not that great, especially relative to other marketing channels.
There is also relatively little opportunity cost to consider: the fact that energy spent on “vanity” traffic could be better spent elsewhere, on more business-relevant topics.
In reality, many of the companies engaging in this strategy have already plucked the low-hanging fruit and written almost every product-relevant topic. There are a finite number of high traffic, high relevance topics; blog consistently for a decade and you too will reach these limits.
On top of that, the HubSpots and Salesforces of the world have very established, very efficient sales processes. Content gating, lead capture and scoring, and retargeting allow them to put very small conversion rates to relatively good use.
Even HubSpot’s article on Bitcoin stock has its own relevant call-to-action—and for HubSpot, building a database of aspiring investors is more valuable than it sounds, because…
The bigger a company grows, the bigger its audience needs to be to continue sustaining that growth rate.
Companies generally expand their total addressable market (TAM) as they grow, like HubSpot broadening from marketing to sales and customer success, launching new product lines for new—much bigger—audiences. This means the target audience for their content marketing grows alongside.
As Peep Laja put its:
But for the biggest companies, this principle is taken to an extreme. When a company gears up to IPO, its target audience expands to… pretty much everyone.
This was something Janessa Lantz (ex-HubSpot and dbt Labs) helped me understand: the target audience for a post-IPO company is not just end users, but institutional investors, market analysts, journalists, even regular Jane investors.
These are people who can influence the company’s worth in ways beyond simply buying a subscription: they can invest or encourage others to invest and dramatically influence the share price. These people are influenced by billboards, OOH advertising and, you guessed it, seemingly “bad” content showing up whenever they Google something.
You can think of this as a second, additional marketing funnel for post-IPO companies:
These visitors might not purchase a software subscription when they see your article in the SERP, but they will notice your brand, and maybe listen more attentively the next time your stock ticker appears on the news.
They won’t become power users, but they might download your eBook and add an extra unit to the email subscribers reported in your S1.
They might not contribute revenue now, but they will in the future: in the form of stock appreciation, or becoming the target audience for a future product line.
Vanity traffic does create value, but in a form most content marketers are not used to measuring.
If any of these benefits apply, then it makes sense to acquire them for your company—but also to deny them to your competitors.
SEO is an arms race: there are a finite number of keywords and topics, and leaving a rival to claim hundreds, even thousands of SERPs uncontested could very quickly create a headache for your company.
SEO can quickly create a moat of backlinks and brand awareness that can be virtually impossible to challenge; left unchecked, the gap between your company and your rival can accelerate at an accelerating pace.
Pumping out “bad” content and chasing vanity traffic is a chance to deny your rivals unchallenged share of voice, and make sure your brand always has a seat at the table.
Final thoughts
These types of articles are miscategorized—instead of thinking of them as bad content, it’s better to think of them as cheap digital billboards with surprisingly great attribution.
Big companies chasing “vanity traffic” isn’t an accident or oversight—there are good reasons to invest energy into content that will never convert. There is benefit, just not in the format most content marketers are used to.
This is not an argument to suggest that every company should invest in hyper-broad, high-traffic keywords. But if you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re gearing up for an IPO, then “bad content” and the vanity traffic it creates might not be so bad.
9 Best WooCommerce Multi Vendor Plugins (Compared)
Google March 2024 Core Update Officially Completed A Week Ago
Navigating the Video Marketing Maze: Short-Form vs. Long-Form
Google March 2024 Core Update Finished April 19, 2024
Google Declares It The “Gemini Era” As Revenue Grows 15%
The Current State of Google’s Search Generative Experience [What It Means for SEO in 2024]
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 26, 2024
New WordPress.com Themes for April 2024 – WordPress.com News
How to create editorial guidelines that are useful + template
Offline For Last Days Of Passover 5784
-
WORDPRESS6 days ago9 Best WooCommerce Multi Vendor Plugins (Compared)
-
SEO6 days agoGoogle March 2024 Core Update Officially Completed A Week Ago
-
MARKETING5 days agoNavigating the Video Marketing Maze: Short-Form vs. Long-Form
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days agoGoogle March 2024 Core Update Finished April 19, 2024
-
SEO7 days agoGoogle Declares It The “Gemini Era” As Revenue Grows 15%
-
MARKETING6 days agoThe Current State of Google’s Search Generative Experience [What It Means for SEO in 2024]
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 26, 2024
-
WORDPRESS6 days agoNew WordPress.com Themes for April 2024 – WordPress.com News
You must be logged in to post a comment Login