SEO Content Writer vs Creative Writer: How to Find Right Experts for Marketing

When you run a business of your own, you know you’ll need to work with a slew of professionals in order to focus on growth, while you delegate tasks for which you’re no expert. For most businesses, that includes content writing and the creation of their brand’s voice.

What some business owners, managers and leaders often don’t realize is that selecting the right writers for the job can mean the difference between success and failure, both in the eyes of your target audience and search engines that will rank your content and determine your online visibility.

Creative writers might be an appealing choice, since you want to imbue your brand and your business with unique flair and personality. Alas, building a brand and strong online presence requires a careful interplay of creativity and technical knowledge.

While every single piece of content you use does need to be appealing and in line with storytelling essentials, it also needs to appeal to every search engine’s algorithm preferences and include various ranking factors in the creation process.

That is why you need to have access to writers who can give you the best of both worlds, the creative spirit of storytelling with the technical relevance of SEO.

Creative Spirit of Storytelling vs Technical Relevance of SEO

When searching for writing experts to tend to your digital content needs, you need to find writers who not only possess great writing skills, but also demonstrate the following key competences:

1. Keeping track of SEO trends

Google and other search engines regularly update their focus and the core algorithm to include new ranking factors and refine their ability to filter out irrelevant content. They strive to deliver only the finest brands, products, services, and content to their users, which means that they need to change how they approach the ranking process.

Writers in this branch need to be aware of the latest algorithm updates, how these affect the process of content creation, and the most appropriate ways to use these changes in their work.

Just like in any other industry, trends change how brands operate on a daily basis, and it’s no different for marketing and SEO experts. In fact, these trends often define how SEO writers will collaborate with the entire marketing and web design team, as well.

2. Writing for readers/search engines

A creative writer needs to understand the reader and the target audience, but an SEO writer needs to know several other layers of the marketing puzzle that makes their services necessary.

The SEO writer needs to know the search engines, the technical language of different topics, the marketing parameters they need to follow, and the specific algorithm’s rules for better ranking.

Sometimes, in-house resources of various companies cannot cover such expertise, which is why using whitelabel SEO services has become a go-to solution to ensure better rankings, improved link-building efforts, and overall SEO-friendly content creation.

What that means is the writers in question will research and implement relevant keywords that might bear little relevance for a reader, but that are essential for search engines to recognize a brand’s place in the digital universe and an industry.

Add to that, it means citing relevant studies and resources that further solidify your expertise in the industry, and help users find more information on a certain topic online. It can also mean building blogging relationships to post guest blogs on other authority websites and thus reinforce your presence online, both in the eyes of search engines and readers.

All of that is an intricate, albeit creative process that few creative writers can tackle, while SEO writers consider it second nature.

3. Writing “invisible” content

Creative writers often focus on projects such as writing e-books, stories, ghostwriting on different topics, interviews, social media posts, you name it. What they often don’t have any experience with or any knowledge of are those bits and pieces of content that only search engines appreciate to their full extent. Think: metadata, Google snippets, image descriptions, alt tags, and the like.

The criteria for writing effective, optimized web content in such formats that’s not really meant for users directly are different from your standard rules of creative writing.

SEO-focused writers have the ability, knowledge, and experience with these bits of content that most creative writers never come into contact with. They’ll often work with a wide range of SEO tools as well, to continuously research the finest ways for optimizing content for different clients in various industries.

4. Understand the definition of “relevant”

Creative writers don’t necessarily keep an eye on topics that are trending in terms of different industries. While they might be able to spin a nice tale on artificial intelligence, they might not be able to grasp AI’s impact on a particular business sector that could help a brand rank better with their expertise and service offers.

Relevance is a very fluid notion for SEO writers, and they'll focus on the specific factors that are shaping a certain industry in ways that help your brand stand out as a leader and an authority.

Creative writers, on the other hand, might provide an immersive story, which will, unfortunately, not rank that well or ensure that your brand is presented as a relevant player in the market.

Conclusion

Although your SEO writers do need to be creative by nature if you want them to write appealing content pieces that will help your readers connect with your brand, they do have various advantages when working in the marketing industry over writers with no SEO training.

Depending on what your business needs might be, you should definitely alter your criteria when you’re selecting the marketing team for your brand, so that you can make sure your presence online and offline is in the right hands.