6 SEO Tips for Freelance Designers

Table of Contents 

• The Importance of SEO
• 6 SEO Tips for Freelance Designers 
• Key Takeaways
• Conclusion
• FAQs

Are you tired of writing personalized cold emails that never get a response? Has your cold-calling strategy hit rock bottom? Freelance designers are always in search of clients. Their struggle to find clients never stops, even if their current month’s calendar is occupied. There are numerous ways to approach clients and get the best contracts.

No one gets their hopes up too high with cold calling/emailing. But what if your prospects are the ones reaching out to you? You can land your ideal clients with a neat website design, consistent, relevant content, and the right SEO tactics. 

Let’s dive straight into the tips for freelance designers to benefit from SEO and earn a dream income figure in 2022. 

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The Importance of SEO

Your website can become your best lead generation tool with the right SEO tactics. Gone are the days when businesses relied entirely upon cold-calling for generating leads. Instead, you can let your leads find you without spending any money on paid ads. Freelance graphic designers often choose freelance sites to approach clients. But these sites usually take a considerable amount of your earnings, leaving you with minimal benefit. 

The main motive is to focus on creating content that targets the pain points of your ideal customers and offers value. With these tactics, you will end up generating highly relevant leads instead of approaching clients nowhere near your area of specialization. 

Remember that search engines focus on context and intent rather than keyword stuffing. Good keyword research is essential, but creating topic clusters will help you achieve your targets. 

Being a designer, which are the areas you specialize in? Let’s say your target audience is restaurants and cafes. Start by posting different types of content in these areas. For example, how to design flyers for a food business? Or eight menu design hacks to make your customers order more. 

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6 SEO Tips for Freelance Designers 

Let’s look at six simple tips for freelance designers to attract more clients through search engine optimization or SEO.  

1. Have a website

Your freelance designer website will help you develop credibility in front of your target audience. With a crisp and clear about me section, you can describe your journey, a services page wherein you detail how you can help your target audience with your services. Next comes creating packages and offering special discounts to first-time purchasers. Let’s take a quick look at all the crucial parts your website must have: 

Positive reviews testimonials from satisfied clients 

You might have positive reviews regarding your services or testimonials from your satisfied clients. Your website is where you can show your potential clients how excellent your services are. The point is to make them realize that your services are worth investing in. 

A blog section for sharing your knowledge and expertise

Don’t miss out on a blog page where you post information regarding your industry, case studies about your recent clients, and everything that shows you as an expert in your industry. 

Make sure your website is linking back to all your social channels that are regularly updated. Keep your posting consistent and make sure you build your personal brand on all your social channels. These are the places that help prospects get insights on how knowledgeable you are in the area that you claim to be. 

A portfolio page with your best samples 

If you have been working for years, you have many samples to show your prospective clients. But do all of them have to appear on your website? 

No. Your website should consist of your most remarkable work. Remember that you aim to show prospects you can deliver the best. It’s time to give them a peek into the very best. Working with different clients leads to solving significant challenges on your own. 

Did you recently help a client get through a significant issue with your skills? Your portfolio is the place to show that off. Instead of showing your prospects your great designs, work on showing them what a mess it was before and how exactly did you make it intriguing enough. Your portfolio should aim at telling a compelling story and describing the details of how you reached the end. 

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2. Use targeted keywords

Using the right keywords ensures you drive relevant traffic to your website. Instead of using broad terms like graphic designing, go for specific terms and target long-tail keywords—for example, creating engaging menu designs for restaurants. 

When you are just starting your website, targeting highly competitive keywords wouldn’t give you a good ranking in search engines. Instead, all the pages on your website should use highly focused keywords. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and make the most of Google’s voice search feature. 

Remember that stuffing keywords in your web copy isn’t the solution. Use them wherever necessary and let them flow naturally. Being specific will help google in proper categorization. 

3. Write blogs

A blog section helps rank every website, irrespective of the industry or niche. But remember that your blog section speaks about your knowledge, expertise, and understanding of your area. Posting irrelevant content to increase the number of blog posts won’t help you. Similarly, stuffing your blog content with keywords won’t work either. 

Posting high-quality, relevant content consistently will give you results. Remember that you don’t have to post daily to improve your ranking. Two long-form articles a week on trending topics would do the work. Your content should be engaging enough for visitors to drop comments or queries. This will help you generate leads and boost your visibility amongst your target audience. Create exciting content like trends in your industry, experts’ opinions on specific areas, a case study of your recent client, etc. 

Let’s say you specialize in designing corporate brochures. Your portfolio is filled with highly-engaging samples. But what’s the point if your target clientele doesn’t go through it? 

You can convert your ideas into engaging blog posts. For example, how to create stunning corporate brochures along with examples. Mentioning your best work in blog posts will help you improve conversions. 

4. Mobile-first

Did you know that 52.2% of all website traffic is generated through mobile devices? 

A significant amount of traffic generation occurs through mobiles. Your best clients are probably searching for a freelance designer right now on their mobile phones. 

All your tactics might work well to improve your ranking on Google. But if you lack a responsive website, you are likely to lose possible conversions. Remember that Google considers mobile SEO. With poor mobile SEO, your overall website ranking will be affected. 

Consider the following points while optimizing your freelance graphic designing website for mobile devices: 

Quick and easy navigation for all screens 

People are likely to engage with your website with easy and quick navigation. This will provide them with an excellent mobile user experience, thereby increasing the average time spent on your website. 

Improve your average page load speed

You can have an excellent freelance graphic designing website, but your prospects will still leave if it takes too much time to load. 

Create your website using a responsive WordPress theme 

The easiest way is to choose a responsive WordPress theme for excellent performance on all devices. This theme ensures the website design is neat and navigation is easy, irrespective of a desktop or mobile screen. 

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5. Add ALT text

Another crucial SEO tip is to use ALT text. Most people focus on making the website copy and blog SEO-friendly. But remember that for every freelance designer, visuals play the most crucial role. Optimizing these visuals to ensure your target clientele finds you on Google images is important. 

Search engines aren’t capable of interpreting images. ALT text is a small sentence defining your visual to help search engines index the images. Don’t confuse it with your picture captions. Google merely uses these for interpreting and indexing. Use the most specific keywords in your ALT text to ensure your graphics come across your target audience. 

6. Add Google Analytics to each page.

What’s the point of consistently working on your website if you don’t measure your results? Let’s say you researched some keywords in your graphic designing niche and used the perfect blend of short-tail and long-tail keywords. These keywords work incredibly well for your competitors. But analyzing the performance of your website pages is crucial to modify your strategies. 

Google Analytics is a free tool that will help you keep track of all crucial data to measure your website performance. Blindly creating content will take you nowhere in the long run. Keep experimenting and eliminating the methods or ideas that reap negligible results. 

Key Takeaways

• Ditch cold calling and land your ideal clients by prioritizing SEO. 
• Start by creating a freelance graphic designer website to show your expertise in your field. This website will show your best work, skills, awards/recognitions, etc. 
• Go through the most common queries and research keywords that ensure your ideal clients find their way to you. 
• Having a blog section on your website will help you develop credibility. You can showcase your best samples in various blog formats. But remember that the aim is to provide value instead of promoting your services. 
• Optimize your website for mobile devices to ensure you don’t lose the majority of your target audience scrolling through the same.
• Search engines can’t recognize images or visuals. They are of crucial importance when it comes to graphic or web designing. Add relevant ALT text to ensure Google indexes your images. 
• Keep working on your website consistently, but measure progress through Google Analytics. Modify your strategy accordingly. 

Conclusion

Finding relevant high-paying clients is one of the biggest hurdles for freelance designers. But you can ditch all your low-paying clients by shifting your focus to inbound lead generation with the right SEO strategies. With these graphic design freelance tips, your ideal clients will come searching for you. Get started and consistently work on your website to get your desired results. 

FAQs