For example, they discuss how “hiring ghostwriters saves you time on writing,” or state steps of the hiring process (“find the ghostwriter,” “interview the ghostwriter,” etc.), but don’t provide many helpful details or examples on how to actually execute the steps. 

Everybody knows (or can figure out) these things. So we wanted to provide a more detailed article about hiring blog ghostwriters that answers important, real life questions, including: 

• Do you really need a ghostwriter? Or are you looking instead for a content marketer? What’s the difference?

• Should you hire a freelancer, an agency, or an in-house writer?

• How do you filter for the best writers?

• Where are you likely to find the highest quality ghostwriters?

• How much should you expect to pay them? 

We’ve filtered through 1000+ writer applications and tested and hired dozens of writers for our agency. We’ve ghostwritten for clients or put our own names on the by-line. And we’ve had many conversations with clients about their experiences working with in-house writers, other agencies, or other freelancers. We’ve seen it all, and in this article, we’ll relay as much of that experience as possible.

(Aside: If you’re actually looking for someone to manage the entire content marketing process — i.e., including picking keywords, tracking results, building links, etc. — rather than just writing, you may actually be looking for a content marketing agency and not just a writer. If so, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.) 

What Is a Blog Ghostwriter?

A ghostwriter is simply a writer who doesn’t put their own name on the byline, they put yours. But the reality is there is no such thing as a “ghostwriter.” A ghostwriter is just a writer. 

At our content agency, sometimes our writers use their own name as the byline for a client article, while other times we use our client’s founder’s name as the byline (or someone else at the company, or the company brand name, etc.). It usually just depends on the preference of our client or the context of the article. 

So, with this said, the dynamics of hiring a ghostwriter are the same as hiring a writer: you just want to find the best, with maybe an added requirement that their style is a natural fit for your voice. 

Are You Really Just Looking for a Writer? Or Are You Actually Looking for a Content Marketer?

Something we see all the time is companies looking to hire a writer but in reality wanting them to take on every role from search engine optimization (SEO) to data analysis: 

Writers and content marketing strategists are not the same! A content strategist (common titles for this role include “Content Marketing Manager” and “SEO manager”) focuses on how to drive long term organic traffic to your business — they think about SEO, keyword research, page rankings, analytics, and more. Writers focus on content creation — the actual article writing.

It’s unrealistic to expect your writer to produce your content strategy, yet many, many businesses do that. Most will not do a good job with both. 

If you do find someone who is skilled in both areas, don’t expect to pay them the same rates as you would someone who is exclusively a writer. Again, if you’re looking for full content marketing and SEO strategy (not just blog writing services), you need more than a professional writer. You can look to hire a content marketing manager or SEO consultant or even see if we may be a fit for what you want.

Additional Consideration: Is the Goal of Your Content to Sell a Product or Service?

Asking a writer to produce blog content that’s intended to sell a product or service requires a different skill set than asking them to ghostwrite opinion or thought leadership content, for example. 

Specifically, whoever creates your content needs to have the know-how to understand and express your competitive advantages, value propositions, benefits, features, and more. We can tell you from experience that this is a unique skill set, akin to product copywriting, that many freelance writers do not possess. 

So, if the type of content you want to create involves selling your product or service, you need to ensure you hire someone that can demonstrate their ability in this area. The hiring process we share below will discuss how you can approach this.

Should You Hire a Freelancer, an Agency, or an In-House Writer?

Typically, these are the three main ways of hiring blog ghostwriters. All have pros and cons, depending on your situation. 

Freelance Writers

Hiring a freelance writer is the cheapest option and gives you the potential to flex and scale as you need. Obviously most companies do this and we suggest starting out with freelance bloggers if you haven’t hired writers before. The downside is that you will need someone on your team who can coordinate their freelance writing work and provide editing feedback, although that can often be done with other freelancers as well. We cover our detailed process on how to find and filter for the best ones below.

In-House Writers

Having a full-time, in-house writer can work well for a larger company, if you have the resources. The advantage is that they can become a subject matter expert and are at your disposal whenever you need them. They also can sometimes start crossing the line into being more of a content marketer or SEO if you want and if they’re capable. (Note: Developing subject matter expertise can also be achieved by contractors that do in-depth interviews with their clients when creating content, as we do at our agency.)

The disadvantage, of course, is the salary + benefits + payroll taxes (and other employee overhead costs), which, depending on where your company is located, can be as much as double the base salary of a freelance writer.

Content Marketing Agencies

As we’ve alluded to above, many companies that say they want to “hire writers” are actually looking for a lot more than just writing. They need content marketing or content-based SEO done. They want to open up content and SEO as a lead generating channel. Almost no “freelance writer” is going to single-handedly unlock content as a channel for you. 

If this is you, you’re not just looking for a writer, you’re looking to build an entire content marketing operation. As we’ve said above, the key role you need in addition to writing for this, is strategy. We call it ‘content strategy’. It could also be called ‘SEO strategy’. The point is someone needs to manage the process of: 

• Picking keywords and topics.

• Coordinating subject matter expert interviews.

• Being a final pass on article quality, proofreading, and on-page SEO.

• Measuring results (leads ascribed to each piece).

Many companies hire an in-house “content marketing manager” or “SEO manager” for this, and that can work. Alternatively, you can hire an agency like ours for this as well. We discuss how we differentiate in this space here. 

The Step by Step Process We Use to Hire Writers for Our Agency

Hiring writers is easy. Hiring good writers is hard. And this is even more true when you’re looking specifically for someone to ghostwrite for you because you really need them to nail your voice exactly. So the filtering process below is really important. 

Most writer hiring processes involve looking at a few portfolio pieces, and, if someone looks good, immediately putting them on a real piece that will be published on your or your client’s site. 

Yes, we look at portfolio pieces too (discussed immediately below) but portfolio pieces aren’t enough. We’ve learned the hard way that you need multiple filters to find the best writers. 

Here’s our process:

Step #1: The Application

In the writer application, we…

Ask for Writing Samples (A Portfolio) 

Portfolio pieces — while only a start — are the first insight you have into whether this writer is a fit. This is where the vast majority (maybe 80%) of writer applicants are filtered out in our hiring process.

The key, though, is what you look for. 

For us, as we’ve mentioned so many times on our blog, we focus on bottom-of-the-funnel, product related content — SEO content that ranks for keywords like, “best accounting software” or “Google Analytics alternatives.” This type of content writing needs to discuss products and features in a detailed and specific way.

So, for us, a good writer needs to be able to contrast value propositions clearly. They need to understand and communicate differentiators between one product and another clearly and persuasively. So that’s what we look for. 

For you, it may be that you’re looking to write more top of funnel pieces or thought leadership pieces (don’t mess those up, though). Or that you have a particular style or voice you want the writer to be able to imitate. That’s fine. You’ll have your own criteria. 

It doesn’t mean an applicant needs to have a piece that is exactly what you, or we, would publish — most writers don’t. Instead we look for signs in the writing that they can write like you. For us, it’s questions like: 

• Have they written about advanced, complex topics? 
• Can they sell a product or feature well?
• Do they use a lot of filler, fluff sentences or words?
• Do they start pieces with needless quotes and stats?
• Etc. 

We note the applicants that answer these questions well with promising portfolio pieces, and then we look at the next filter.

Ask Applicants to Write a “Mini Sample” on the Fly (Portfolio Pieces Can Sometimes Lie)

Years ago, we used to only use the portfolio piece as the gauge of whether to move a candidate to the test project (Filter #2), but we started to get frustrated at how many writers (some with years of experience) had awesome portfolio pieces but did terribly in the test project. We think this is probably due to the uncertainty of knowing how much of a portfolio piece was actually written by the writer versus edited by their client. 

So, to help filter more out at the application stage, we added a final question to the application that acts as a mini test project. We call it the “mini sample”. It asks them to write a few sentences on the fly. Yes, of course they could take the time to study it and carefully write each word. If they do, that’s great — it shows even more dedication. The point is, it’s unlikely anyone will be editing it. So it’s a much more accurate representation of the writer’s ability. They submit it and we see how they think and write. 

This has helped a lot.  

Make this question as similar to the work you want them to do as possible — just a really short version of it (to respect their time). For example, our question asks applicants to look at a client’s SaaS website and write a short paragraph highlighting the software’s key selling points. We look to see if they can write in our style. You’ll do the same. Most writers should be able to do this in ~15 minutes.

For example, here is a short but good submission for this step from a writer who made it all the way to our team:

Video testimonials convert 25% more buyers, but traditional video production requires a lot of time and money. Vocal Video makes it seamless and easy to record video testimonials, all without a pro. Simply share a link and collect audio and video responses with expertly crafted templates. Vocal Video automatically generates a complete video with your brand’s logo and colors that you can easily embed and share. Sign up for Vocal Video today!

In contrast, here is a submission that immediately told us this write isn’t a fit for us: 

Vidyard’s study (https://www.vidyard.com/blog/case-study-videos/) exposed how 89% of marketers experienced video testimonials as the most result-oriented marketing approach.

Have you wondered why people google reviews or alternatives for software? Trust issues! 

Will they trust your offer’s attractive promises? They won’t. Only testimonials solve trust issues better, and VIDEO TESTIMONIALS best endorse your offer. 

Vocal Video is super easy to use – ZERO editing stress. Generate simple links they’ll only tap on to share your sweet wonders! 

So here’s the real question: Are you still letting doubt stop you?

After this step, you can filter applicants by those that have both (a) good portfolio pieces and (b) good mini samples. 

But, as we’ve learned the hard way, these applicants still aren’t ready to be put on a “real” client piece. Next comes a more formal, paid test project.  

Step #2: The Paid Test Project

For writers who make it through the first step, we have them go through a paid test project that is an exact replica of our actual client work, except it’s a shortened version and won’t actually be used for anything.

It’s important that this be as close to exactly what you need as possible. We use a previously written content piece, one we’ve already published for a client, and give them the same inputs we had when writing it. Then, at the end, we can compare their work to what we produced. We try to use the same one for all applicants so we can benchmark their responses against other applicants as well.

For our test projects, we typically share the angle of the article and ask the writer to produce a list of pain points, a full introduction, and an outline. We don’t need them to write the entire piece because we just don’t need that much written to gauge if they’re a fit. These elements give us enough to evaluate:

• How do they position the client’s product? 
• Is it specific?
• Is it in line with our style? 

For example, if we asked for a piece on “best accounting software” (for a specific client), we’re looking for something along the lines of, “Most accounting software has X issues which fail to solve Y pain points. Our software solves those pain points in Z way.” 

We’re not looking for, “Running a business is hard. After you’ve done HR and sold to customers, you sit down after a long day, and now you’ve got to do the books.” 

The first response is specific. The second is general “fluff” content.

But don’t imitate our exact process. You’ll need to provide your writers with the exact same prompt and level of info you give to writers you are currently working with. Again, you want to see exactly how they’d perform “in real life”. 

Next, we see how they respond to feedback. We provide one round of revisions via comments or a recorded video, giving detailed explanations of what we’re looking for. We do this even if the applicant’s attempt is poor because, sometimes, they respond really well to our feedback (which is a key characteristic we’re looking for) and their revised version is solid.

The test project should be paid. If it’s not, most good writers will pass on working with you. Right now, we pay $200 per test project. We talk more about how we pay writers below. 

Step #3: Writing Real Pieces

Finally, if we’re happy with the test project, we’ll ask the writer to work on several real pieces.

At this stage, only writers that are close to what we need are left, so it should go pretty well but the hit rate even at this stage is not 100%. 

Despite all the filters before this, there are still a decent number of writers who don’t work out after working on a real piece. From our experience, that’s just the reality of hiring writers. There is a level of “it’s a numbers game” here. But. if you implement all of these filters, you should be in a lot better shape than the standard, “Portfolio pieces look good, here’s a real piece I need by this date” scenario.

Ongoing Training 

Lastly, we should mention that ongoing training and coaching is critical to helping your writers produce great content consistently. 

It’s possible to find writers who perfectly match your brand voice and content needs from the beginning, but it’s extremely rare. It’s more likely that you’ll find a talented writer who can ace your projects after some coaching. 

At Grow and Convert, our requirements are specific. We’re looking for:

• Clarity of thought in structuring the piece and reasoning through arguments.

• Simple writing style without “fluff”.

• Compelling sales copywriting that’s direct but not over the top.

So, we provide detailed feedback and coaching to all our writers. An experienced content strategist works closely with the writer at every stage, reviewing the questionnaire, giving guidance and providing feedback to the writer. All our content strategists have been writers for Grow and Convert, so they know exactly what they’re looking for. This coaching is obviously heavier in the early stages and tapers down as they get more experience, but almost every writer on our team has been heavily coached by us. We don’t have this false belief that some folks online seem to have: that you can find writers who just happen to write exactly the way you want from day one. 

As you’re going through this process, ask yourself whether the writer can:

• Respond well to feedback.

• Make sensible revisions.

• Write on multiple types of brands/topics (if that’s important to your business).

• Hit deadlines.

If they display these characteristics, they will likely work out long-term. 

Learn more about our journey by watching our video on How to Hire Great Blog Writers.

Where Can You Find Quality Ghostwriters?

Remember ghostwriters are just writers, so where you source them is the same as where you’d source any writer. We’ve tried every popular route to find writers over the years, with varying success. 

Typically, people use one or more of the following:

Writer Marketplace Platforms

Writer platforms such as Upwork, Fiverr, or Crowd Content are popular places for finding writers. While they may include a small number of high quality writers (who will be harder to find), they don’t have a strict filter for freelancers so you have to really implement a strict filter system (like we outlined above) to find quality writers from these pools. 

Job Boards

Posting a job listing on jobs boards such as Remote OK, Craigslist, and Wellfound (previously AngelList Talent), can yield some good freelance blog writers, but these are hit and miss. We’ve had more success from dedicated writing job boards (ProBlogger is one of the more established ones).  

Social Media

Reaching out on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter with a job posting can also work as you can get some useful referrals to good writers. 

These platforms and routes vary considerably. You’ll certainly find writers but it depends on the dynamics of your particular network on these platforms. We are obviously in the content marketing space so those are the people who follow us and vice versa. Many of them are writers, many more work with writers, so it helps. If you don’t have a network of writers, it may not yield as much. But it’s definitely worth trying. 

Writer Job Link on Your Site

Surprisingly, this has been the most effective method of finding good writers for us — more than job boards or marketplace sites. Most of our best team members came from hearing about us through something we wrote or a podcast we were on and saw our “Write for Us” link. Yes, of course, we are a content agency, so we’re more likely to even have writers browsing our site in the first place. But this can still be utilized by product companies or folks not in the marketing space. Writers are people, they check out companies they find interesting. If someone is already on your site for some other reason and happens to be a writer, that’s a pretty qualified candidate — they know, or even may like your company or what you do. Make it easy for those people to see that you’re hiring, in particular hiring writers. 

Employee Referrals

Lots of people are writers so lots of people know writers. Referrals of new writers from existing members of our team have arguably been the #1 source of good writers for us. We offer a referral bonus to our team if they refer a candidate that works out as a long term writer for us and we suggest you do the same. 

Just remember that whichever platform or sourcing method you use to find candidates, the most important thing is that you implement a good process to evaluate them before they write for your blog.

How Much Should You Pay a Blog Ghostwriter?

Over the last six years, we’ve tried different ways of paying writers. This is what we learned:

• Don’t pay writers by the hour or word count — it may incentivize the writer to string out the project or be unnecessarily verbose so you end up paying more.
  
  
• Don’t pay super-expensive rates — we thought writers charging high rates would be really good, but that hasn’t been the case. We’ve paid as much as $1,000 for a piece that we weren’t able to publish. Avoid this costly mistake!
  
  
• Don’t pay a writer less than $200 to produce a top blog post — you won’t get what you need. If you’re also expecting them to do content marketing strategy, keyword research, subject matter research, and interviews, you should pay significantly more. We pay $500 for every article.

Our writers are given:

• The keyword — writers don’t have to do content strategy. Our content strategists (who all started off as writers) do that.
  
  
• An interview, typically with the subject matter expert — writers aren’t asked to research and become experts themselves. We think that’s nonsensical. They base their pieces on what an actual expert tells us about the topic.
  
  
• A kick-off from the content strategist for guidance — writers aren’t left to “get on with it” on their own.
  
  
• Supportive coaching and editing expertise from their content strategist — writers can continue to develop their writing skills.

Learn more about how we pay and motivate writers in this article.

P.S. Are you a writer? We’re hiring! Learn more on our ‘write for us’ page.

Working with Grow and Convert

We have an amazing team of content strategists, in-house writers, and freelance writers who all meet our rigorous standards. We can produce product-focused BOTF content that ranks for buying-intent keywords and is optimized to generate conversions and leads, not just traffic.

If you’re a freelance writer and our process and style of SEO, conversion-focused writing appeals to you, consider joining our content marketing team as a writer or content strategist. We have awesome clients. We’re a remote company. We pay well. And you won’t have to stress about getting your own clients.

If you’re a business looking for writing services, you can hire our agency to do SEO-focused content marketing for you. Learn more about our service and pricing here.

You can also learn more from our course which teaches you about our process in greater detail.

1. Hiring an individual contractor
2. Hiring an in-house SEO manager or building an in-house team
3. Hiring an SEO agency

All three of these options have their pros and cons and what’s best for you depends on your situation. However, we noticed that most discussions stop there, with some cliche about “do what’s best for you”, which is obvious and helps no one. 

This article is meant to be the antidote to that surface level discussion. Below, we share our experience and opinions of when each type of SEO makes sense for a business to hire. This is based on years of working with dozens of clients as an SEO and content marketing agency and, importantly, working with their internal SEO teams and contractors. Our opinions are also informed by what clients have told us has been their experience with past SEOs they’ve hired and our observations of their work. 

Finally, yes, the fact that we’re an SEO agency obviously affects our opinion. We are proud of our process and methodology and the results we’ve achieved for clients, so we feel that we can help tons of businesses achieve real lead growth via SEO, not just hollow traffic. 

But we also freely admit that we aren’t the best fit for every SEO need. For example, if you’re already ranking for a lot of buying intent keywords and need someone to maintain and improve 100+ existing URLs, an in-house SEO or technical SEO contractor would be better than hiring us. 

So, below we’ll cover:

• Key factors when deciding which hire is best for you
• Questions to ask when hiring an SEO
• Scenarios of when each option makes sense for a business

Agencies vs. Freelancers vs. In-house: Key Factors to Consider When Deciding Which to Choose

Factor #1: Execution of SEO Generally Requires More Than One Person 

To have any hope of distinguishing a good SEO hire from a bad one, you need to start with at least a basic understanding of what SEO entails and thus what skills and processes are necessary to “do” SEO. 

SEO requires a wide range of different skill sets to be executed successfully. Specifically, it takes some combination of: 

• Keyword strategy: Keyword research, identifying valuable keywords, prioritizing the order in which to tackle keywords.
• Content writing: Writing high level content that both ranks and converts traffic to leads or sales.
• Technical SEO: Performing SEO audits and monitoring websites for technical issues, fixing issues that arise.
• Analytics: Setting up systems to track key metrics (i.e. organic traffic, conversions, backlinks, etc.) in Google Analytics, Search Console, Semrush, or Ahrefs, among the other tools you’re using.
• Web development: Making website changes when necessary (such as creating new pages, adjusting the site map, etc). 

It’s unrealistic to find a single SEO expert that can do all of these things successfully. For example, when working with our agency, there are often 3 to 5 people with different areas of expertise working together on your account. We have SEO and content strategists, writers, a PPC specialist, a project manager, and a designer ready to deploy for each client. We could not produce the results that we do for our clients without these teams in place. 

So, if you’re planning to hire an individual SEO consultant or in-house SEO manager, it’s worth keeping in mind that that person will need to build a team (either through more in-house hires, contractors, or agencies) to execute the full process. 

In theory, if you hire an agency that has a team in place to handle the entire SEO process from A to Z (as we do at Grow and Convert), this gives agencies an advantage over individual contractors and single in-house hires. But be careful about the writing step — many agencies tend to outsource content writing to freelance writers in their rolodex, which brings us to the next key factor to consider. 

Factor #2: Most SEOs Outsource Content Writing to Freelancers in a Flawed Way

Content writing — specifically, blog content writing — is a crucial aspect of SEO because the core pages of a company’s marketing website (home page, product or service pages, etc.) can only rank for a handful of keywords. To rank for more valuable keywords, you need to produce new, unique content. 

To create this content, most SEOs use freelance writers. This in and of itself is not an issue. But the process that SEOs use when working with freelance writers is flawed. We’ve written an entire article about this topic, which you can read here.

In short, there are two common approaches used by SEOs when working with freelance writers:

The first approach is to simply give the writer a topic or keyword, and have them self-research and produce an article on that topic. We call these “Google Research Papers” — where writers do a Google search on the topic and regurgitate what other people are saying. This leads to generic, low-quality content that is unlikely to rank for valuable keywords, let alone convert any readers into actual customers. 

The second approach is to provide writers with a “content brief” that is slightly more prescriptive (e.g. providing a light outline of subheadings and topics to cover), but still leaves writers largely to figure out the key arguments to make on a topic by themselves. 

In both of these approaches, there are two key issues: 

• Lack of product and domain expertise. Neither of these methods for producing content use a process for gaining and expressing product and domain expertise in your content. They produce Google Research Papers, as we said above, that just sound the same as what everyone else is saying. This is a poor reflection on your brand. In particular, if you’re a B2B business where your customers are professionals in their field (Head of IT, HR managers, CMO, etc.) they’ll often know more on a topic than the writer who wrote your content. That’s embarrassing. It also means that for bottom of funnel topics — which we’ve argued ad nauseam are the most impactful — your writers don’t have the knowledge to discuss the details and differentiators of your product and actually convert readers to customers (more on this below).

• High potential for lacking SEO best-practices required to rank. Many freelance writers are not trained in on-page SEO, and may not have the know-how to take an SEO content brief and turn it into an optimized piece that’s capable of actually ranking for a highly competitive keyword.

If you work with an individual consultant or single in-house SEO manager, they’re almost always going to need to work with freelance writers, and therefore, these issues are likely to be a problem unless the person you hire has a more strategic process. 

Alternatively, if you work with an agency that has in-house writers and a process for solving these issues (as we do at Grow and Convert), then agencies can be a better option than individual hires. 

Factor #3: In-House Teams Take Longer to Get Up and Running

As a final consideration, if you hire an in-house SEO manager, it may take 3-6 months for them to get to know your business, develop a keyword strategy, find and hire freelance writers (a task we’ve found to be very hard), and get content production up and running. Then, there’s the additional time that it takes for your pages and content to rank for keywords in Google; so you might be looking at 12 months before even seeing initial results. 

In contrast, good SEO agencies will have processes (and teams) in place to get up and running immediately, speeding up the time it takes to get results from SEO. For example, as shown in our case study on how long it takes to rank in Google, our agency often has 25-35 articles ranking on the first page for high-value, buying-intent keywords in the first 12 months. 

Consultants with good systems might have a slight time advantage over an in-house hire. But since they’ll likely need to hire and work with contractors to handle parts of execution, they’re also at a disadvantage when it comes to speed. 

For these reasons, agencies will often be the best option from a speed-to-results perspective. 

Now, with these factors in mind, let’s look at the key questions (based on our experience) that businesses should ask candidates when hiring someone for SEO.

Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO

We’ve written at length about factors to consider when choosing an SEO agency, but these factors are relevant when vetting an SEO from any of the categories we’ve been discussing. 

Here we’ll touch briefly on these, but read that post for the full context and explanation behind each one of these questions (discussed as “factors” within that post). 

Do They Use a Traffic-Focused or Conversion-Focused Keyword Strategy?

In our opinion, this is the #1 most important question because it dictates whether or not your SEO budget generates actual ROI. 

Most SEO professionals use traffic-focused keyword strategies with the mindset that with enough traffic, conversions (leads, sales, signups, demos) will follow. But we’ve seen time and time again that more search traffic does not mean more conversions.

Traffic-first SEO strategies might make sense for some businesses (e.g. large incumbents who are already ranking for most of their high-buying-intent keywords), but in our experience, they are a bad fit for companies who want to be efficient with their budget and hit tangible revenue and business goals with their SEO investment (i.e. measurable leads and sales). 

Here are two past articles that provide conversion rate data to back up this assertion:

• Pain-Point SEO: How to Produce SEO Content That Drives Conversions
• Scaling Content: Expanding from Bottom of Funnel Content to Top of Funnel (Geekbot Case Study)

And here’s a good article detailing how we approach this at our agency: SEO Keyword Strategy: How to Prioritize Based on Buying Intent to Drive More Conversions

Regardless of who you hire, be sure to ask them what their SEO or content marketing strategy is optimized to achieve. You will see far better ROI if you hire someone that focuses first and foremost on driving conversions. 

Which Facet of SEO (Technical, Keyword Strategy & Content, or Link Building) Do They Place the Most Emphasis On?

Through conversations with clients about their experiences working with other SEO services, we’ve learned that many focus the majority of their efforts on on-page search engine optimization, technical SEO, and link building. They spend much less time and effort on what we’ve found to be the most important parts of SEO — identifying high-value keywords and creating pages designed to rank for those keywords. 

We think this is backwards. 

In our view, technical SEO and link building should only be done in the service of ranking for your highest value keywords. They can help increase domain authority and improve your chances of ranking in top search engine results pages (SERPs), but they cannot generate any actual revenue for your business on their own. 

Getting top search engine rankings for valuable keywords (our agency’s #1 priority) is where revenue from SEO comes from.

So, without (1) identifying what your highest value keywords are and (2) strategically creating pages on your site to rank for those keywords, having a technically healthy site with several white hat backlinks does very little for your business. 

When hiring an SEO, make sure you get to the bottom of this. 

Ask them questions like:

• What tangible results can we expect after 6-12 months? 
• When they say something about “rankings” ask for specifics: how many keywords can we rank for? How will we rank for those? Which pages on our site or new pages will you use to rank for those? 
• How much weight do they place on technical SEO vs. link building vs. keyword strategy and content? What portion of their time and effort do they spend on each?

If they seem to emphasize technical SEO and link building heavily or as being equally important, this is a red flag and you should think twice about working with them. You’ll be better off hiring someone that uses these to support the main goal of (a) identifying your highest value keywords, and (b) ranking for them with unique, dedicated pages.

Do They Just Do Keyword Research and Provide “Content Briefs”? Or Do They Actually Create New Content to Rank for Your Target Keywords?

Your homepage and existing marketing site can only rank for so much, yet many SEOs and agencies almost exclusively focus on those few site pages to rank for valuable buying keywords. Then they relegate blog content to general top of funnel traffic building. They create a giant keywords list and hand content briefs to writers without worrying too much about those articles. That is a huge waste of SEO resources. 

Most businesses have dozens of high-buying-intent keywords available; you can’t possibly get your homepage or a few landing pages to rank for all of them. You need new content tailor-made to rank for all of these keyword variations, and that content needs to be created carefully and strategically. 

So, if you’re hiring an agency or outside consultant, be sure to ask them about this. In our opinion, you’ll be much better off going with a service that does both the keyword strategy and the content creation so that they can ensure the content is written carefully enough to rank and convert.

Note:If you’re hiring an in-house SEO manager, this question still applies. Ask them whether they’d do both the keyword strategy and the writing themselves. If their plan is to hire freelance writers to create content, ask what their process would be to ensure writers produce pieces that will properly execute on keyword strategy.

Do They Have Expertise in Product and Service Copywriting?

If you take our point that your priority should be to rank for high-buying-intent keywords, then whoever you hire to do SEO will need to understand how to talk about your products or service in-depth, describe your key features, use cases, and what differentiates your product from competitors. 

In order to do this well, they need to have a process for getting this knowledge out of the heads of the experts at your company — your product managers, sales team, customer success team, etc. — and onto the pages they create for you. This is what makes compelling, high-quality content that’s capable of converting readers into customers. 

We can say from experience that this is a unique skill set that isn’t easy to come by. Even great writers often lack these key abilities required for selling products and services through content.

When speaking with prospective hires, try to get a sense of whether or not they have a process for expressing your product features and differentiators through content. Ask them about this. Have them show you examples. If their answers and/or examples aren’t compelling, they probably aren’t the right person (or agency) to work with.

At Grow and Convert, since our focus is on ranking for high buying-intent keywords (e.g. “best accounting software”, “concussion clinic in utah”), we sell our client’s products and services in every piece of content we produce. We get into the details of features, explain how they solve customer pain points, weave in testimonials and case studies, and differentiate our client’s products from those of their competitors. 

We do this by basing our articles on extensive interviews with people at our clients’ companies — product teams, sales teams, customer support teams, etc. We have been doing this for years and have an extensive training process for writers that has helped us build a tight-knit team of product copywriters. 

Read the following past articles to learn more about how we approach this:

• How to Do B2B Content Marketing without Domain Expertise
• SaaS Content Writing: How to Write Content That Gets Leads and Signups

Do They Have Case Studies Demonstrating Their Ability to Drive Actual ROI?

Finally, ask any individual or agency you’re considering hiring to show you proof of their ability to drive business results from SEO. If they have in-depth case studies that show data of the results they’ve achieved for other companies, you can feel much more confident that they’ll be able to achieve results for you, too.

Here are 7 case studies you can read to see how we’ve executed our SEO strategy and met SEO needs for real businesses:

1. B2C Content Marketing Example: 0 – 200,000+ Pageviews/Month
2. How We Scaled Leadfeeder’s Signups to Over 200/Month
3. Scaling Content: Expanding From Bottom of Funnel Content to Top of Funnel (Geekbot Case Study)
4. Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months (Circuit Case Study)
5. How to Do B2B Content Marketing without Domain Expertise (Rainforest QA Case Study)
6. How to Create a Keyword Strategy for a New, Innovative Product (Case Study of a Video Editing Software Client)
7. Case Study: Applying Pain Point SEO to All-In-One SaaS Products

Then, and this is key, ask for as much detail as possible about how they achieved these results. Don’t be satisfied with surface level case studies like “We grew traffic from 0 to 100,000 pageviews”. Ask about: 

• What pages got that traffic? 
• Was it from a couple of pages, or many? 
• Was unique content created? 
• Who created it? 
• What keywords did this traffic come from? 
• Why are those keywords useful for this business? 
• Did you measure leads or conversions? What was the conversion rate? 
• And so on.

Scenarios of When Each Option Makes Sense for a Business

Throughout this post, we’ve argued from many different angles that most businesses would benefit from hiring a good SEO agency, rather than an individual consultant or in-house hire. 

However, there are cases in which any of these options can make sense.

When Hiring an Individual SEO Consultant Makes Sense

Hiring an individual SEO specialist can make sense for companies that already have a ton of content on their site and are looking to get the best performance out of their pages that have already been created.

For example, an eCommerce website with dozens (or hundreds) of product pages can benefit from an individual contractor that provides ongoing technical maintenance and on-page SEO to ensure their site is well-optimized for driving traffic and conversions through organic search.

When Hiring an In-House SEO Manager Makes Sense

Making an in-house SEO hire can be a great fit for larger companies that are well funded and have the intention to build an in-house team. For example, if you’re a product store or a large SaaS company and you can afford to build an SEO team, this can be worthwhile to pursue.

Alternatively, hiring a single in-house SEO manager that works with and manages contracted writers, for example, can work as long as they’re savvy about the factors we discussed above (i.e. they understand how to hire and work with content writers, how to gain product and domain expertise, they’re good at editing and copywriting, etc).

When Working with an SEO Agency Makes Sense

If you want to have a single point of contact (or a single vendor) that can execute the entire SEO process, then considering an agency makes sense. Another reason to choose an agency is if they have a unique or specific process or methodology that would be useful to your business. 

But, as with all options for SEO, vet agencies using the questions above. Just because they are an agency and can do all aspects of SEO, doesn’t mean they do it well, so vetting is important. 

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy built around generating leads, not just traffic, you can learn more about working with us here.
• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here. 

For content marketing to be effective for a company, a content marketer needs to get a lot of things right. They need to be able to produce articles on topics that will attract your target customer, they need to be able to drive the right traffic to the content your produce, and they need to be able to convert that traffic into customers.

On top of that, you need someone who understands SEO and how to drive long term organic traffic, someone who can look inside analytics and make sense of what’s going on, report results to your management team, and manage a team of writers.

So at the end of the day, you’re essentially looking for a unicorn.

There are very few content marketers that have all of these skills AND have past experience growing a blog and generating revenue from it.

In this article, I’m going to share my learnings from growing three content marketing operations (Vistage, ThinkApps and Everwise) as well as growing a content marketing agency from the ground up in terms of who to hire, what skills your content marketer needs to have, I’ll share a sample content marketing job description, I’ll share how much you should budget for your hire, and what to expect in terms of additional investment as your content marketing operation grows.

Where most companies go wrong when hiring their first content marketer

The number one mistake we see companies make in hiring for this role is: hiring a writer to run their content marketing efforts.

They typically do this because it solves the immediate problem with content: they need to start publishing articles.

Second it often stems from an overly simplistic view of what content marketing is: writing. That is the hiring manager’s fault — whether that be a founder, manager, CMO or whomever.

If you think content marketing is just writing, you are setting yourself up for failure. Getting content written is only one of the challenges to solve, and in my opinion, it’s the least challenging.

(Note: Of course hiring good writers is important. If you’re trying to solve the writing challenge we wrote a multipart guide on hiring blog writers.)

The bigger challenges to solve are knowing who you’re writing for (user research), knowing what to write that will actually resonate with your customers (content strategy), figuring out how to drive traffic to those articles (content promotion) and then figuring out how to turn that traffic into customers (conversion strategy).

These are the skills that a marketer has, not that a writer has.

What skills are important for a content marketer to have?

As I mentioned above, it’s going to be tough to find a content marketer that has all of the skills necessary to execute on content marketing – because typically the skills span both the creative and analytical side.

For example, for our agency Grow and Convert, I’m the “grow” and my co-founder Devesh is “convert”.

My skills as it pertains to content marketing are:

• User/customer research – creating survey questions, talking to customers in-person and over the phone to figure out what their pain points are
• Content strategy/ ideation– Turning that research into content ideas that will attract the right customers
• Content promotion – Driving traffic to content that we’ve produced through communities and through reaching out to influencers
• Analytics – Pulling insights from Google Analytics and making informed decisions on how to move forward (however, I know nothing about setting up analytics)

Then Devesh’s skill set is:

• Customer research- he’s done a lot of customer research online through surveys and services like Hotjar
• Operations – He’s great at project management, streamlining our operations, managing the team, etc.
• Editing – He’s great at turning ideas into a compelling narrative, he’s also obsessed with blog intros.
• Conversion optimization – Figuring out the best way to drive leads from content
• Analytics- Figuring out the right software to track conversions, setting up goals, tracking and measuring traffic and conversions from content

If you’re hiring your first content marketer, I’d say the “grow” skills are the most important, not because it’s my skill set, but because those are the core skills you need to start gaining traction with content marketing.

Devesh’s skills come in really handy when you’re trying to scale your content marketing operation, but in the early days of investing in content marketing– you need someone who can get content created and promoted to have a chance at converting anyone.

Note that writing is not on the list. You of course need to have taste, that is, you need to know good content from bad, but you don’t need to be a writer. In fact, it may be better that you’re not a writer so that you obsess and excel at marketing, and not writing. You get around this by simply hiring writers and managing them.

Content Marketing Manager Job Description

If you’re looking to hire your first content marketing manager, I put together this job description that shares the responsibilities, skills and experience that are necessary to land someone great.

Job responsibilities:

• You’ll be responsible for all content marketing initiatives which includes: identifying customers to target, producing content, driving traffic and leads from content marketing.
• Identify and hire freelance writers to produce content that we can publish on our blog.
• Analyze current customer base to figure out who we should target from content marketing and talk to customers to figure out pain points, questions and topics to write content about
• Identify promotion channels that we should use and proactively share content in those places
• Understand which content will target customers at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel
• Optimize blog posts around high impact keywords
• Manage the content calendar
• Measure content performance and report on traffic, conversions, SEO, etc.

Experience:

• 1-3 years experience managing a blog, editorial team, and/or website
• Case studies or data showing proven growth of traffic and business metrics from content
• Need to have working knowledge of WordPress, *or other CMS*
• Need to have working knowledge of Google Analytics and be able to report on a blog
• Ability to make decisions off of data

Content Marketer Hiring Questionnaire/Exercise

When trying to hire for content marketing roles, I’ve found that it can be really helpful to use a questionnaire to filter out candidates.

It’s really hard to tell if someone has the skills and experience you need just from a resume, so what I do for every role is I create a Google Form that has questions that are pertinent to the role and helps me filter out candidates quickly.

Here are some of the questions and exercises that I think are important to ask:

• Have you ever built or managed a team of freelance writers before?
• Please 3 share links to articles that you’ve produced that are most similar to what we ask for above (ideally involve interviewing a(n) expert(s) or subject(s) and turning it into a story). Feel free to say why you like them/are proud of them:
• What 3 companies do you think are the best at content marketing and why?
• What’s the biggest site you’ve grown?
• Here’s an article (link to an article) – please share 5 places you think would be a good fit to promote this piece of content.

Here’s a link to a content marketing hiring questionnaire that you can copy:

How much should you pay a content marketer? Here are some content marketing salaries ranges.

Here are some ranges that you should expect to pay a content marketing manager based on how much experience they have and how much value they can add to your company.

Content Marketing Manager (1-2 years of experience): $50k-$60k per year

Content Marketing Manager (3-5 years of experience): $60-$90k per year

Content Marketing Manager (6+ years of experience): $90-$120k+ per year

Obviously usual caveats apply about location, company, industry, and more but this is what I’ve seen.

If you’re curious if this is worth it for your business, consider reading our article on Content Marketing ROI.

Where to find great content marketing hires

If you’re in tech or have a startup, then I’ve found AngelList to have some of the best talent. The reason is because candidates that are on of their platform tend to be more “in the know” than candidates on Indeed or LinkedIn.

LinkedIn and Indeed are both older platforms with a ton of candidates on them, but AngelList I’ve found to have fewer, quality candidates and the talent skews more towards tech marketers.

Another great way to find candidates is to look to companies that are known for their content marketing, reach out to the people in the role you’re hiring for and ask if the person knows of anyone great. Chances are, if the person is looking to make a move, they’ll respond and let you know, or if they’re not, they likely know a lot of great other people that might be a good fit for your company.

You can also find great content marketers in Slack groups. There are a lot of freelancers who go off to start their own businesses and aren’t able to grow their clientele. They tend to hang out in Slack groups for networking purposes and to try to get more clients. They have the skills and ability to execute on content marketing and do the work, however struggle growing their own business. If they’ve exhausted their marketing efforts, chances are you can get these marketers to come and work for you if you reach out to them at the right time.

Here’s a list of Slack communities to look into for marketers: 11 Slack Communities for SEOs and Digital Marketers

Marketers tend to know other great marketers. If you know of some talented marketers, I’d send your job posting to them and ask them if they know of anyone who’d be a good fit for the role, chances are they’ll know of a few people that are great. You can even sweeten the deal by offering some sort of referral bonus if they refer you to the right candidate (the referral bonus will be a lot cheaper than hiring a recruiter).

How to Manage a Content Marketer? What Metrics Should They Be Held Accountable For?

If it’s your first time managing a content marketer, here’s some things that you should know.

In terms of expectations, the first measure of success will be an increase in qualified traffic to your blog (here’s a way to measure qualified traffic), the second measure of success should be signups or leads driven from the blog.

“What is good traffic growth?”

That’s a subjective question. Don’t compare your traffic growth to other businesses because your business is unique and the amount of traffic that you can drive really depends on the industry you’re in.

Instead what you should do is compete against yourself. If you previously had 5,000 visitors to your blog, can your content marketing hire get 1000 or 2000 visitors within the first couple of months? 5000 within 3 months, etc.

The first 1-3 months should be spent talking to customers and doing customer research, building the writing team (hiring writers and testing them out), starting to produce content and testing out promotion channels. A good goal to set for each article that’s more top or middle of the funnel would be 1000 visitors per post. Bottom of the funnel content might be harder to promote initially but should be able to gain traffic longer term if it starts to rank for keywords.

Content marketing is a long-term play that can have short term wins. Your content marketing hire should be able to start producing signups within the first 3-6 months, however don’t expect there to be a ton of volume. Volume builds overtime as traffic compounds and SEO traffic starts to build.

In terms of reporting, the metrics that they should measure are as follows:

• # of unique visitors to the blog on a monthly basis
• # of unique visitors coming from organic traffic
• Amount of leads/signups coming from the blog
• Which blog posts are producing the leads/signups

At the end of the first year, if your hire isn’t producing measurable signups or leads from your blog, you should really start to question whether they’re the right person for the job.

If that’s the case, you should throw in the towel and hire us, or you can check out our content marketing course and get them up to speed.