Being a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) freelancer definitely comes with a variety of challenges. Whether you are a newbie or veteran in this industry, the story might almost similar where every individual encounter certain issues. The ever-changing Google algorithms that demand SEO freelancers to always update their clients' websites are just one among others.
Not to mention, the client expectations that request for a high-ranking position within a short period of time. After all, facing the challenges is inescapable regardless of how much you learn about SEO. Therefore, specifying what is the main problem and defining how to overcome it are the essential way.
In this article, we're going to delve into common challenges and problems faced by SEO freelancers. Not just making a fuss, we never come in empty-handed as we will also offer solutions that might benefit you and your projects.
Challenges Faced by SEO Freelancers
Maintaining a well-performed website can be a resource- and time-consuming. Applying SEO best practices, following Google updates, and the creativity it takes to build the site a great one are just some of the core activities. Not to mention, if you handle more than one or two projects to monitor. It might be quite an overwhelming thing to track all-highly targeted keywords from each project.
Different Timezones
Working as a freelancer allows everyone to work on projects from different countries around the world. By that means, an SEO freelancer also needs to adapt to the different time zones to look for the targeted keyword. Timezone is a vital indication to get the most relevant keyword.
While analyzing the traffic data, it's the customer that we are looking at, right? Therefore, setting the correct timezone will bring insights into what the customers are searching. For example, if you work for a project in the US but you live in Indonesia, changing the timezone to the US time is definitely a must to know how the demand for the targeted keywords is.
It might sound easy and can be done in minutes but handling many projects from different countries would look different. There is a hurdle faced by SEO freelancers to track, monitor, and analyze keywords from one timezone to another.
Choosing the Right Tools
Versatility is what many people would love to simplify their work. If you can do it in one place why bother to move to another tool? In fact, a survey showed that choosing the right tools is one of the top challenges faced by SEO freelancers in their careers.
Choosing the right tool would help to gain valuable insights and stay on top of the competitors. We believe that every business is unique in its branding and persona. Some tools might fit one project but are not suitable enough for the other. As such, it brings to use more than just one tool.
Using multiple tools and looking at one that fulfills all of the features you need is just another time-consuming job. It might be just fine for some time but a cumbersome activity in long term as SEO freelancers need to focus on their core activities.
Get Started with Sequence Stats
The industry of SEO consists of never-ending updates that lead everyone in this field, including SEO freelancers, is being thrown into different situations. Being quick-witted is needed to spot the quick wins on where to find the answer. This is where Sequence Stats can come to the rescue.
Sequence Stats is an analytics tool integrated with a range of features to help SEO freelancers, webmasters, business owners, and other people in the SEO industry track keyword positions, analyze the competitive landscape, and monitor website performance.
Features offered in Sequence Stats would be a good help to go through challenges faced by SEO freelancers as mentioned above. This tool provides a package to explore keywords in one place. Isn't it better to never miss any chance that comes on the path? Let's take a closer look at what Sequence Stats offers.
One User in Multiple Teams
Sequence Stats allows a user to join multiple teams. As SEO freelancer who manages many projects, this will benefit them to work collaboratively on different projects with only one user account in one tool. That way, it can simplify work to be more efficient.
Team management also exists to arrange every member with different access depending on the role, such as owner, admin, member (editor), and member (viewer). The owner is the highest level in a team that can do anything to the lower-level member, such as restricting their activities.
Multiple Domains in One Place
Let's say your team has multiple sites to be managed and it would take quite some work to continuously monitor everything. Not to mention if you have different tools for each domain. While it might work for some cases, being able to work collaboratively in one place would sound like a better option.
For us, collaboration is essential to make every work well-delivered. Therefore, Sequence Stats comes with a feature that allows a user to have more than just one domain in each team to analyze. As such, every member of the team can directly monitor the performance of every targeted keyword for every domain in one place.
Crawl in Different Timezones
Time does matter in a search engine and it would bring us a valuable result if set correctly. There are billions of searches every day on Google. As such, different results would happen in different sets of locations, times, and even languages. As we've mentioned previously that different timezones are a vital consideration when tracking the targeted keywords, locating the correct one would lead to better insights.
In simple words, Google crawls new content every day and every time on new pages or sites while at the same time people also search for something every second globally. With that in mind, it's no wonder that the result of keywords analytics would be different. Therefore, it is important to set the timezone based on the location you are targeting.
Within the team that allows you to work collaboratively managing several domains, Sequence Stats supports timezone settings. That way, a user can change to whichever timezone it wants and analyze the demand for the targeted keywords in the selected timezone.
Figure 1: Change the timezone settings
You can go to Team Management and select the team. Just below the list of team members, you can see the timezone setting box. Once the setting is applied, it will affect the crawl time of every data in the team.
Define the Language and Location for Targeted Keyword
Being specific and accurately targeting the goal are ones of essential things in SEO. If you want to gain traffic for a certain area of geography, it's better to apply geographic and language targeting.
By that means, you choose relevant keywords that are high in demand within the area and language you are targeting. Doing this will allows you to reach potential customers and increase the possibility of higher traffics.
Optimizing those practices, Sequence Stats could come in handy to help you target the keywords within specific areas and languages around the world. Simply add the keyword, select the location, and language, then you can simultaneously monitor and analyze the targeted keywords in Rank Workspace.
Figure 2: Add new targeted keywords set in Germany using the German language for desktop
Final Verdict
We all might ever hear the old saying that a master would never blame his tools but what if he realizes there is another option to help solve his problems?
The search engine will continuously update its algorithm with the aim to provide a better search environment for people. As SEO freelancers, every essential thing it takes to help clients gain better exposure in search engines is a must-do, from following the updates and even finding a better solution for their own problems.