SEO
The Freelance SEO’s Journey, How To Get Started In SEO
SEO is a field that’s ripe with opportunities to build fulfilling careers, though there’s no clearly defined path to getting started.
There aren’t necessarily any degrees required to work in SEO. This leaves many aspiring practitioners left to wonder how they can prove they’re qualified for the job.
You’ll probably get ten different answers if you ask ten SEO pros how they got their first job. One or more of those answers is likely to revolve around freelancing.
Working as an independent contractor is how a meaningful percentage of people get their start in SEO. Some use freelancing as a stepping stone to an in-house or agency position, while others build their whole career around it.
According to data in our State of SEO in 2022, practitioners can find significant success doing freelance work. Close to 45% of freelance and contract respondents reported earning $75,000 to $149,000.
In this article, we’ll look deeper at the data surrounding this curious group of SEO professionals.
How do you become an SEO freelancer? What does an SEO freelancer do? Most importantly, how does an SEO freelancer get clients?
This article expands on the data found in our annual State Of SEO Report. Download the full report to see the first-party data.
Many SEO Professionals Get Their Start As Freelancers
Freelancing is a popular choice for SEO professionals early in their careers.
When we asked how long SEO pros have been working in the field, over 45% of freelancer respondents said they have less than five years of experience.
That number isn’t surprising when you understand why many take the freelancing path in the first place.
If you’re not an industry veteran with an established portfolio, finding full-time work in an in-house role or agency position can be challenging.
In a field without formalized education, freelancing is a path toward building the experience employers are looking for.
With that said, freelancing isn’t exclusively an early-stage career type of gig. As our data in the next section shows, freelancers tend to earn a higher-than-average salary, which makes it a viable option to pursue long-term.
Freelancers Are A Smaller Group, But With Higher Average Income
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, 44.5% of freelance and contract respondents report earning salaries above $75,000 per year.
That number is especially notable when you look at how many years of experience freelancers have.
- Out of the total number of respondents with less than two years of experience, 9.4% were freelancers or founders.
- Out of the total number of respondents with two to four years of experience, 10.1% were freelancers or founders.
- Almost half of all freelancers and founders (45.6%) had four or fewer years of experience.
Although freelancers and founders are a relatively small group compared to others, they can often command higher rates than their peers. Only 6.7% of freelancers and founders took salaries of $34,000 or less.
However, it’s important to note that “founders” may account for the higher salary brackets found in this group, meaning that freelancers may need to build a book of business before commanding the highest rates.
How SEO Freelancers Work And Find Business
When we asked SEO freelancers which channels drive the most business, they responded:
- Network referrals (9.5%).
- Search (8.9%).
- Personal networks (8.7%).
- Organic social (7.7%).
- Upwork (7.7%).
As the data suggests, freelancers primarily rely on reputation and word-of-mouth to generate work.
This puts newer SEO practitioners at a disadvantage as they’re less likely to have the experience, portfolios, or client lists necessary to find work.
That’s where organic search and social come in. Newer freelancers can prove themselves by marketing their services using a website and social media profiles.
Freelance job boards like Upwork offer another route for freelancers to take when they don’t have the benefit of word of mouth to carry them to their next gig.
Smaller percentages of freelancers also report using paid channels such as Google Ads (7.5%) and social media advertising (6.1%) to find work.
Being An SEO Freelancer Is Difficult, But Comes With Opportunity
Freelancing isn’t for the faint of heart. In addition to being responsible for finding their own clients, freelancers are expected to provide a broader range of services than other SEO professionals.
For example, an SEO pro working with an in-house team may be solely responsible for auditing new clients’ websites. On the other hand, a freelancer may be expected to audit the site, figure out how to optimize the site to deliver better results, and then execute the plan.
Being a freelancer comes with a substantial amount of responsibility. However, there are unique opportunities in freelancing that make up for the drawbacks.
We’ve mentioned the higher-than-average salaries, and we’d be remiss not to mention the freedom afforded by freelancing.
Working in SEO as an independent contractor allows people to work from home and set their own hours. This level of flexibility can create a healthier work/life balance compared to working in an office, as freelancers can easily make time for other priorities in life.
On the other hand, you may decide to pursue freelance work only to find the benefits aren’t worth the drawbacks.
That’s perfectly fine because the experience you gain makes you more valuable to employers. After a few years of freelancing, you’re better positioned to transition into an in-house or agency role.
SEO Freelancers Can Transition Into Full-Time Employment
Being an SEO freelancer isn’t a lifetime commitment. While some flourish in it, contractor life isn’t for everyone.
The idea of finding your own clients, generating your own salary, and doing the work of multiple people is understandably intimidating. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth putting in the effort.
SEO freelancers with even a year or two of experience are uniquely qualified to transition into full-time employment.
Here’s a list of reasons why:
- Performing a wide range of services gives you experience working in many different roles.
- Building up a base of clients means you have many employment references available when applying for jobs.
- Your connections through freelancing can lead to permanent employment in other companies.
In summary, taking the road less traveled can lead to opportunities that weren’t previously available to you.
You can find all of our first-party data about the careers of freelancers, as well as SEO professionals in in-house and agency positions, in our annual State Of SEO Report.
Featured image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
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SEO
YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features
YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.
- YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
- New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
- YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.
SEO
How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Crawl Budget
Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Michal in Bratislava, who asks:
“I have a client who has a website with filters based on a map locations. When the visitor makes a move on the map, a new URL with filters is created. They are not in the sitemap. However, there are over 700,000 URLs in the Search Console (not indexed) and eating crawl budget.
What would be the best way to get rid of these URLs? My idea is keep the base location ‘index, follow’ and newly created URLs of surrounded area with filters switch to ‘noindex, no follow’. Also mark surrounded areas with canonicals to the base location + disavow the unwanted links.”
Great question, Michal, and good news! The answer is an easy one to implement.
First, let’s look at what you’re trying and apply it to other situations like ecommerce and publishers. This way, more people can benefit. Then, go into your strategies above and end with the solution.
What Crawl Budget Is And How Parameters Are Created That Waste It
If you’re not sure what Michal is referring to with crawl budget, this is a term some SEO pros use to explain that Google and other search engines will only crawl so many pages on your website before it stops.
If your crawl budget is used on low-value, thin, or non-indexable pages, your good pages and new pages may not be found in a crawl.
If they’re not found, they may not get indexed or refreshed. If they’re not indexed, they cannot bring you SEO traffic.
This is why optimizing a crawl budget for efficiency is important.
Michal shared an example of how “thin” URLs from an SEO point of view are created as customers use filters.
The experience for the user is value-adding, but from an SEO standpoint, a location-based page would be better. This applies to ecommerce and publishers, too.
Ecommerce stores will have searches for colors like red or green and products like t-shirts and potato chips.
These create URLs with parameters just like a filter search for locations. They could also be created by using filters for size, gender, color, price, variation, compatibility, etc. in the shopping process.
The filtered results help the end user but compete directly with the collection page, and the collection would be the “non-thin” version.
Publishers have the same. Someone might be on SEJ looking for SEO or PPC in the search box and get a filtered result. The filtered result will have articles, but the category of the publication is likely the best result for a search engine.
These filtered results can be indexed because they get shared on social media or someone adds them as a comment on a blog or forum, creating a crawlable backlink. It might also be an employee in customer service responded to a question on the company blog or any other number of ways.
The goal now is to make sure search engines don’t spend time crawling the “thin” versions so you can get the most from your crawl budget.
The Difference Between Indexing And Crawling
There’s one more thing to learn before we go into the proposed ideas and solutions – the difference between indexing and crawling.
- Crawling is the discovery of new pages within a website.
- Indexing is adding the pages that are worthy of showing to a person using the search engine to the database of pages.
Pages can get crawled but not indexed. Indexed pages have likely been crawled and will likely get crawled again to look for updates and server responses.
But not all indexed pages will bring in traffic or hit the first page because they may not be the best possible answer for queries being searched.
Now, let’s go into making efficient use of crawl budgets for these types of solutions.
Using Meta Robots Or X Robots
The first solution Michal pointed out was an “index,follow” directive. This tells a search engine to index the page and follow the links on it. This is a good idea, but only if the filtered result is the ideal experience.
From what I can see, this would not be the case, so I would recommend making it “noindex,follow.”
Noindex would say, “This is not an official page, but hey, keep crawling my site, you’ll find good pages in here.”
And if you have your main menu and navigational internal links done correctly, the spider will hopefully keep crawling them.
Canonicals To Solve Wasted Crawl Budget
Canonical links are used to help search engines know what the official page to index is.
If a product exists in three categories on three separate URLs, only one should be “the official” version, so the two duplicates should have a canonical pointing to the official version. The official one should have a canonical link that points to itself. This applies to the filtered locations.
If the location search would result in multiple city or neighborhood pages, the result would likely be a duplicate of the official one you have in your sitemap.
Have the filtered results point a canonical back to the main page of filtering instead of being self-referencing if the content on the page stays the same as the original category.
If the content pulls in your localized page with the same locations, point the canonical to that page instead.
In most cases, the filtered version inherits the page you searched or filtered from, so that is where the canonical should point to.
If you do both noindex and have a self-referencing canonical, which is overkill, it becomes a conflicting signal.
The same applies to when someone searches for a product by name on your website. The search result may compete with the actual product or service page.
With this solution, you’re telling the spider not to index this page because it isn’t worth indexing, but it is also the official version. It doesn’t make sense to do this.
Instead, use a canonical link, as I mentioned above, or noindex the result and point the canonical to the official version.
Disavow To Increase Crawl Efficiency
Disavowing doesn’t have anything to do with crawl efficiency unless the search engine spiders are finding your “thin” pages through spammy backlinks.
The disavow tool from Google is a way to say, “Hey, these backlinks are spammy, and we don’t want them to hurt us. Please don’t count them towards our site’s authority.”
In most cases, it doesn’t matter, as Google is good at detecting spammy links and ignoring them.
You do not want to add your own site and your own URLs to the disavow tool. You’re telling Google your own site is spammy and not worth anything.
Plus, submitting backlinks to disavow won’t prevent a spider from seeing what you want and do not want to be crawled, as it is only for saying a link from another site is spammy.
Disavowing won’t help with crawl efficiency or saving crawl budget.
How To Make Crawl Budgets More Efficient
The answer is robots.txt. This is how you tell specific search engines and spiders what to crawl.
You can include the folders you want them to crawl by marketing them as “allow,” and you can say “disallow” on filtered results by disallowing the “?” or “&” symbol or whichever you use.
If some of those parameters should be crawled, add the main word like “?filter=location” or a specific parameter.
Robots.txt is how you define crawl paths and work on crawl efficiency. Once you’ve optimized that, look at your internal links. A link from one page on your site to another.
These help spiders find your most important pages while learning what each is about.
Internal links include:
- Breadcrumbs.
- Menu navigation.
- Links within content to other pages.
- Sub-category menus.
- Footer links.
You can also use a sitemap if you have a large site, and the spiders are not finding the pages you want with priority.
I hope this helps answer your question. It is one I get a lot – you’re not the only one stuck in that situation.
More resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
Ad Copy Tactics Backed By Study Of Over 1 Million Google Ads
Mastering effective ad copy is crucial for achieving success with Google Ads.
Yet, the PPC landscape can make it challenging to discern which optimization techniques truly yield results.
Although various perspectives exist on optimizing ads, few are substantiated by comprehensive data. A recent study from Optmyzr attempted to address this.
The goal isn’t to promote or dissuade any specific method but to provide a clearer understanding of how different creative decisions impact your campaigns.
Use the data to help you identify higher profit probability opportunities.
Methodology And Data Scope
The Optmyzr study analyzed data from over 22,000 Google Ads accounts that have been active for at least 90 days with a minimum monthly spend of $1,500.
Across more than a million ads, we assessed Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), Expanded Text Ads (ETAs), and Demand Gen campaigns. Due to API limitations, we could not retrieve asset-level data for Performance Max campaigns.
Additionally, all monetary figures were converted to USD to standardize comparisons.
Key Questions Explored
To provide actionable insights, we focused on addressing the following questions:
- Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance?
- How do pinning assets impact ad performance?
- Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better?
- How does creative length affect ad performance?
- Can ETA strategies effectively translate to RSAs and Demand Gen ads?
As we evaluated the results, it’s important to note that our data set represents advanced marketers.
This means there may be selection bias, and these insights might differ in a broader advertiser pool with varying levels of experience.
The Relationship Between Ad Strength And Performance
Google explicitly states that Ad Strength is a tool designed to guide ad optimization rather than act as a ranking factor.
Despite this, marketers often hold mixed opinions about its usefulness, as its role in ad performance appears inconsistent.
Our data corroborates this skepticism. Ads labeled with an “average” Ad Strength score outperformed those with “good” or “excellent” scores in key metrics like CPA, conversion rate, and ROAS.
This disparity is particularly evident in RSAs, where the ROAS tends to decrease sharply when moving from “average” to “good,” with only a marginal increase when advancing to “excellent.”
Screenshot from author, September 2024Interestingly, Demand Gen ads also showed a stronger performance with an “average” Ad Strength, except for ROAS.
The metrics for conversion rates in Demand Gen and RSAs were notably similar, which is surprising since Demand Gen ads are typically designed for awareness, while RSAs focus on driving transactions.
Key Takeaways:
- Ad Strength doesn’t reliably correlate with performance, so it shouldn’t be a primary metric for assessing your ads.
- Most ads with “poor” or “average” Ad Strength labels perform well by standard advertising KPIs.
- “Good” or “excellent” Ad Strength labels do not guarantee better performance.
How Does Pinning Affect Ad Performance?
Pinning refers to locking specific assets like headlines or descriptions in fixed positions within the ad. This technique became common with RSAs, but there’s ongoing debate about its efficacy.
Some advertisers advocate for pinning all assets to replicate the control offered by ETAs, while others prefer to let Google optimize placements automatically.
Image from author, September 2024Our data suggests that pinning some, but not all, assets offers the most balanced results in terms of CPA, ROAS, and CPC. However, ads where all assets are pinned achieve the highest relevance in terms of CTR.
Still, this marginally higher CTR doesn’t necessarily translate into better conversion metrics. Ads with unpinned or partially pinned assets generally perform better in terms of conversion rates and cost-based metrics.
Key Takeaways:
- Selective pinning is optimal, offering a good balance between creative control and automation.
- Fully pinned ads may increase CTR but tend to underperform in metrics like CPA and ROAS.
- Advertisers should embrace RSAs, as they consistently outperform ETAs – even with fully pinned assets.
Title Case Vs. Sentence Case: Which Performs Better?
The choice between title case (“This Is a Title Case Sentence”) and sentence case (“This is a sentence case sentence”) is often a point of contention among advertisers.
Our analysis revealed a clear trend: Ads using sentence case generally outperformed those in title case, particularly in RSAs and Demand Gen campaigns.
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen)
ROAS, in particular, showed a marked preference for sentence case across these ad types, suggesting that a more natural, conversational tone may resonate better with users.
Interestingly, many advertisers still use a mix of title and sentence case within the same account, which counters the traditional approach of maintaining consistency throughout the ad copy.
Key Takeaways:
- Sentence case outperforms title case in RSAs and Demand Gen ads on most KPIs.
- Including sentence case ads in your testing can improve performance, as it aligns more closely with organic results, which users perceive as higher quality.
- Although ETAs perform slightly better with title case, sentence case is increasingly the preferred choice in modern ad formats.
The Impact Of Ad Length On Performance
Ad copy, particularly for Google Ads, requires brevity without sacrificing impact.
We analyzed the effects of character count on ad performance, grouping ads by the length of headlines and descriptions.
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(RSA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(ETA Data)
Image from author, September 2024
Image from author, September 2024(Demand Gen Data)
Interestingly, shorter headlines tend to outperform longer ones in CTR and conversion rates, while descriptions benefit from moderate length.
Ads that tried to maximize character counts by using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) or customizers often saw no significant performance improvement.
Moreover, applying ETA strategies to RSAs proved largely ineffective.
In almost all cases, advertisers who carried over ETA tactics to RSAs saw a decline in performance, likely because of how Google dynamically assembles ad components for display.
Key Takeaways:
- Shorter headlines lead to better performance, especially in RSAs.
- Focus on concise, impactful messaging instead of trying to fill every available character.
- ETA tactics do not translate well to RSAs, and attempting to replicate them can hurt performance.
Final Thoughts On Ad Optimizations
In summary, several key insights emerge from this analysis.
First, Ad Strength should not be your primary focus when assessing performance. Instead, concentrate on creating relevant, engaging ad copy tailored to your target audience.
Additionally, pinning assets should be a strategic, creative decision rather than a hard rule, and advertisers should incorporate sentence case into their testing for RSAs and Demand Gen ads.
Finally, focus on quality over quantity in ad copy length, as longer ads do not always equate to better results.
By refining these elements of your ads, you can drive better ROI and adapt to the evolving landscape of Google Ads.
Read the full Ad Strength & Creative Study from Optmyzr.
More resources:
Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock
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