A Day in the Life of an SEO Writer
A snapshot into one of the best career decisions I ever made.
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My goal here is to help you figure out if this is something you want and if you’d actually be successful doing it.
While I can’t guarantee that your SEO writing career would look exactly like mine, I’m here to show you what’s possible.
Top Reasons to Be an SEO Writer: Great pay, flexibility and scalable, repeatable work.
No matter what career path you get into, don’t you wish you could see into the future to know for sure if it’s something you’d actually enjoy doing?
For example: I thought I would love being a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist because I loved learning about food and using it as fuel. So, I went to college, completed my dietetic internship and got my credentials. I was all about it!
It wasn’t until I got my first real job as an online nutrition coach that I came to an off-putting realization: I could NOT do this job for the rest of my life.
I dreaded it. Plus, I wasn’t good at it. None of my weight loss clients were losing weight, none of my weight gain clients were gaining weight and I hated that I just kept counseling people to adopt healthy habits, and they never did.
Needless to say, I sucked at the job I went to school for. And I hated it.
In this article, I want to give you an idea about what your day could look like as an SEO writer. This is what I pivoted into after quitting my dietitian job.
My goal here is to help you figure out if this is something you want and if you’d actually be successful doing it.
While I can’t guarantee that your SEO writing career would look exactly like mine, I’m here to show you what’s possible.
Good Morning, SEO Writer
I’m a mom, so in between cleaning up a breakfast mess and telling my toddler to grab different toys while I (try to) sip my coffee, I might glance at my emails.
Back in the day, I used to bid for jobs on Upwork and/or pitch my services via email cold pitching. However, since I’ve been working professionally as a writer since 2017, I get most of my work from referrals or people searching on Google for a writer.
My favorite types of SEO writing jobs are the ongoing ones that last for years at a time. It makes things way easier on me, and I don’t have to get on a bunch of discovery calls.
Usually, once I get all the initial information for a monthly contract, I never have to do a phone call or Zoom meeting with that client again. Email correspondence does the trick.
Anyway, if someone reaches out to me for work, the process to get on a discovery call is pretty routine. While I used to get on a call with almost anyone who contacted me, now I tell them my project minimum before booking a call.
After all, I don’t want to waste 30 minutes on a discovery call only to find out that the person can only pay me a couple hundred dollars per blog post. As an expert SEO writer and copywriter, I only take on projects at expert rates.
Nap Time, SEO Writer
Okay, it’s actually not nap time for me... It’s nap time for my son, and that’s when I can focus for 1.5-3 hours (if I’m lucky).
If you don’t have any kids or you have childcare all squared away, that’s great, but not required to be successful in SEO. Luckily SEO work is super flexible and can be completely remote.
When my son was an infant – quieter, taking more naps, babbling nonsense rather than real words – I used to be able to work a bit more. And I would often use voice dictation technology in my work, at least for the initial draft. Voice dictation is great when you have 0-1 arms available to type.
Nowadays, I can really only work during nap time or sleeping time. When I’m working on SEO projects, I follow the same system and use a collection of the same SEO tactics regardless of what topic I’m writing about.
That’s the beauty of SEO! In general, you can use the same set of principles and strategies with every piece of content you create.
It doesn’t matter what topic or what industry (and sometimes, it doesn’t even matter what kind of content you’re creating). If you have a comprehensive SEO foundation and you have learned all the tactics, you can succeed in all future projects that come your way.
Yes, SEO continues to update and change, but the foundational principles and goals always remain the same.
So anyway, once I know exactly how to write content for each of my clients, I can knock out a full 1500-word SEO blog post, edit it and send it to my client in about 2.5-4 hours.
I’ve been writing SEO content for quite a while now, but I wasn’t always that fast. I sometimes use AI SEO tools to expedite my work (only the good ones), but I still often write from scratch too.
And I still do get the occasional SEO work that stumps me and drags on a bit longer, but that’s pretty rare.
My clients may have minor revisions (or none at all) and the content gets published ASAP.
If I can get a whole blog post done or a content review done or 30-50 title tags and metas done over nap time, I’m a little mentally worn out but content.
Good Evening, SEO Writer
To refresh from my intense 2.5-4 hour working window, all I have to do is watch a Pixar movie or go for a walk to the park with my son.
And the great thing about my SEO writing jobs is that I can close my computer and not have to think about work. Even if I don’t end up finishing a project in one sitting, the work isn’t eating away at me during my free time. I’m not nervous about it because I’m well-versed in the tactics. The clients don’t hound me.
Unlike with my copywriting work where my brain continues to work in the background to find groundbreaking ideas, my SEO work lets me have my personal time. My SEO work lets me mentally separate myself when I’m not working.
Now, if I feel like I want to work in the evening, I definitely can. Before I became a mom, there was absolutely no reason for me to work outside of normal office hours. (And I cherished that!) But, since parenthood wreaks havoc on your schedule, I’ve had to revise how and when I work.
For me, certain nights and weekends are reserved for educational purposes, such as learning new SEO tactics and reading about updates.
I will also occasionally use this time to add content to my own site – and it’s a really good investment of my time since I’ve developed ways to earn passive income from my website content (e.g. affiliate marketing, course creation).
Why I Love Being an SEO Writer
We walked through my standard day as an SEO writer. Before I had a child, I definitely was able to work more and work during the day, which is my preferred time to write.
The Top Reasons I Love Being an SEO Writer
Minimal client interactions: SEO writing work involves some initial interaction with clients but then you can go years without having to get on a call. I love that. As I mentioned before, one of the biggest things I hated about being a nutrition coach (and what I don’t necessarily enjoy in my copywriting work) is all the live interactions you have to do with clients. To me, live calls are draining, slow and sometimes nerve-wracking. Luckily with SEO, I spend most of my time writing by myself when it works for me.
Straightforward, repeatable work: Another huge plus is that the strategies and tactics to create high-performing content is pretty much the same across all topics, all industries and even across various types of SEO content (e.g. video SEO scripts, titles and metas, blogs). That’s not to say SEO is cookie cutter work. But rather, it’s malleable, repeatable and scalable if you want to grow a thriving SEO writing career.
Great pay rates: Yes, you will see cheap, high-competition SEO jobs out there, but those make up only a small fraction of the billions of daily SEO writing opportunities available. Plus, what’s amazing is that the higher paying clients are also way easier to work with. And even if you’re a new SEO writer, it luckily doesn’t have to take years and years to earn expert rates. As soon as you have a great SEO education and some samples that prove you know what you’re doing, you can land work at higher rates.
I don’t want to undermine or oversimplify the amount of work it takes to earn a great living and thrive as an SEO writer.
The 6-figure writers out there know that SEO writing is not a “get rich quick” scheme. It takes training, practice and mastery of the skills in order to land great work at the rates you really want. But it’s not impossible.
Here, you are in great company at the Ambitious Writer Society! I encourage you to check out our SEO writing resources – all of which can help you achieve your career goals faster than if you went at it alone.
