Some Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an SEO Freelancer

I was thinking the other night about how I used to visit this subreddit and many others in my early days as an SEO, scrounging the web for advice and doing anything I could make sure I was on the right path.

Freelancing comes with its own challenges, and SEO has many! I guess putting this together is kind of me creating the post/advice I wish I saw years ago when getting off the ground. Hope it helps anyone that’s just starting out or is newer to the game. There are many other things I could mention in hindsight but these are some of the biggest things that come to mind.

The fastest way to learn is by building and ranking your own website

The early days are pretty exciting as you’re learning what everything is. I did courses, listened to soooo many podcasts (I used to drive a lot in my old job, so a lot of learning was done on the road), watched so many videos and sponged up as much knowledge as possible. I could talk anyones ear off about SEO.

But, the biggest leap in improvement and I think a necessary step for anyone doing this is to build and rank your own website from scratch.

Pick a niche. Doesn’t matter. Make it something you’re at least vaguely interested in. You’ll learn so much. From buying the domain to hosting, coming up with graphics, designing the site, analytics, sitemaps, content, how long things take to rank… you can make it, break it, and fix it again a million times over and it doesn’t matter.

You need a sandbox to play with. Once you figure out how to rank your own stuff, you’ll start to form your own strategy. Learn what works and what doesn’t for yourself.

Spend more time on client education

This is probably the biggest one on the list.

I would attribute almost every client I’ve ever managed to retain over a long period of time down to great communication and client education. It’s really simple.

Explain what you’re going to do for them and how you’re going to do it. That second part is key.

It’s so so so so sooooo important that they understand what is going on and why you’re doing what you’re doing.

You’ll find a lot of clients will have a weird, warped or vague understanding of SEO, or what they think it is. Maybe down to things they’ve heard or what previous SEOs have told them. You need to exercise patience and adapt to their learning style.

You might think that as an SEO, your job isn’t to ‘coach’ your client, it’s to come up with and implement effective SEO strategies.

But doing this builds so much trust and avoids nonsensical questions down the line. Find out how much they know about SEO already and be prepared to continually teach them. Which brings me onto the next one…

Learn how to explain SEO in layman’s terms immediately

Whether this is down to imposter syndrome or just trying too hard to impress, I spent my early days using so much technical jargon and SEO language in front of clients.

It’s stupid and they don’t understand/care.

You’ll be dealing with all types of people from all walks of life. You need to learn how to adapt your language as soon as possible.

For example instead of saying, “your website’s user experience is lacking and signals show that visually upgrading your landing page will increase UI and dwell time… we also need to improve the content to include semantically relevant LSI keywords to improve topic relevance…”

I mean what the fuck. You’re just confusing them and this is why people hate working with SEOs. They can see through it and feel like you’re just overloading them with jargon to confuse them.

Instead you can just say “your website doesn’t look very good compared to your competition and people are leaving the site, so we need to redesign. Also, the words on the page need changing as it’s currently not good enough for what we’re trying to achieve.”

Keep your reporting simple. Keep everything simple, straightforward, and no bullshit. That’s how you succeed.

Clients will appreciate your efficiency and honesty. Never, ever hide behind tech speak or jargon. Certainly don’t do it to try and impress a potential client when onboarding either.

Spend time on creating an effective workspace

So I’d never worked from home before taking on SEO freelancing as a career.

I thought it would be awesome but holy shit, I quickly learned to hate it and felt so unproductive. If I could go back, I’d spend more time figuring out my workspace in order to help me be more productive.

I set up a shitty corner in a room with no natural daylight, no wonder I felt so miserable and slow to begin with.

After moving my set up to a different room with a window (it sounds obvious but this was massive lol) and also taking some days to go work elsewhere for a change of scenery, everything changed for the better.

Self-care in general is important so enjoy the benefits of working for yourself. Take breaks, do fun stuff and recharge. No one really tells you how isolating it can be so stay inspired and motivated, connect with people that aren’t just clients

Pricing yourself gets easier the more you do it

One of my biggest anxieties when starting out was pricing myself.

I spent so much time researching how much I should charge, how much other people charge, asking other SEOs how much I should charge…

The thing is, you will absolutely undercharge for certain projects, and overcharge for others. But it’s important to go through that so you learn.

If you’ve never done it before, you don’t really know how much time things are going to take. How much energy it’s going to take. How much hand holding you’ll have to do with a client.

But the more you take on, the easier pricing becomes. So, don’t sweat it early on.

Ask the right questions before taking on a client

You kind of just take on whatever when you’re starting out but you need to make sure you ask the right questions to ensure a client/project is right for you.

There have been so many times where I’ve been blindsided by something, or wish I’d asked about something early on before agreeing to start.

Ask who is your point of contact, who’s responsible for adding content to the website, do you have a web dev in house, how quickly can website changes be actioned, do you have anyone else working on your SEO at the moment?

I mean, that last one LOL, I got blindsided and didn’t know they had someone in house who was supposed to be doing SEO. I had no idea and neither did they. Not cool. Obviously ended as you’d expect (a mess), but you need to know what you’re getting into before you agree to get going.

Just as they would ask you questions about your services, you need to ask the right questions to make sure it’s the right fit for you too.

This is also where you set your own ground rules. It’s also okay to say no if a client/project doesn’t feel right.

You can generalize and niche down at the same time

One of the things I worried about was whether I should niche down or not.

I knew that niching into a particular sector could be beneficial to getting clients, but didn’t want to cut off anyone else that would be interested in paying me for their services.

Whilst a lot of people talk about the pros of niching down, not enough explain that it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

You can just make 2 separate ‘businesses’. As a freelancer, I’ll take on any SEO project I want. But I also have a completely separate SEO business which specifically targets wedding professionals due to my experience.

It’s advisable after you get your feet wet and can be quite fun.

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Anyway, good luck if you’re reading this. Hope you found it useful. Everything gets easier with time and experience! Go crush it.

Would be interesting to hear what others say in the comments.