Search engine optimization is a grueling, consistent task that many brands know all too well. Unlike the flashy and fleeting aspects of paid digital marketing, SEO often requires persistent effort that does not immediately result in observable improvement. For this reason, many brands choose to embrace paid strategies to immediately expose themselves to their target audiences.

Despite the frustration, SEO doesn’t have to be a painful in-house task that requires constant dedication. Many freelancers and firms alike have experience in cultivating SEO results for brands who know what they want and where they wish to prosper.

Today, let’s take a quick look at how you can intelligently utilize the services of freelancers to advance your broader SEO goals.

Carefully Outline Your Procedures

It is vital that you understand exactly what you wish to gain from any SEO effort or project. Even more so, existing SEO efforts need to be documented in such a way that freelancers can resume your efforts without confusion or inefficiency. While it might seem appealing, there is a considerable amount of prep work that goes into outsourcing SEO to freelancers that many do not first consider.

Before you start pinging servers and inboxes with requests for freelance assistance, it is crucial that you first outline all procedures for your project in a detailed fashion. It helps to think about this process as if you were explaining things to somebody not at all familiar with SEO.

By outlining exactly how you conduct procedures – or wish to have them conducted – there will be minimal confusion between brand and freelancer. This can also ensure that viable and demonstrable progress for any freelance project can be tracked and verified.

Begin Interviewing Freelancers

With your procedures and expectations thoroughly outlined, the process then shifts to interviewing prospective freelancers. While it can be tempting to find a single individual capable of performing every task, it hardly ever benefits brands to approach outsourcing from this angle. If you only wish to outsource a handful of tasks, however, then it may be possible.

Most professionals with experience in SEO outsourcing will tell you that breaking up tasks into key categories and hiring freelancers for each is ideal. This may mean one freelancer for content creation, one freelancer for link building, and so forth.

Additionally and depending on your desired level of personal management, you may need to consider hiring a freelancer manager to coordinate all of your other freelancers’ tasks.

Tweak Actions As Time Progresses

Those hoping to make a series of hires and let everything run on autopilot afterward will be disappointed. After making your first round of freelance hires, the task then becomes one of monitoring progress and seeing which actions deliver results (and which do not).

For instance, SEO efforts that help expand the number of earned links may merit an expansion, while slippage in key SERPs may dictate a change of strategy. Through a combination of project management tools and web analytics, managers can easily monitor these data-points by pinging servers for instant, up-to-date results.

If you want to intelligently outsource your SEO efforts to others, then understand it is not as simple as merely hiring a few freelancers. There are key considerations to be made. When done properly, outsourcing of SEO can gradually free up your time and produce significant returns on investment – but don’t assume it will be a walk in the park!