Some things to ask when interviewing an SEO copywriter:
How did you acquire your SEO knowledge?
How long have you been writing? What kind of content?
Does he do the keyword research himself or are they dbtodata provided by the client? If he says he does the keyword research himself, what is the process he follows?
Does he ask you any questions about your company or the content you need? If he doesn't ask any, that's a red flag. He needs to understand your brand and industry to do a good job.
Can they give you 10 examples of high ranking content that they have worked on and detail how optimizing the content helped them get that ranking? H1, H2, H3 tags? Keyword research? Alt tags? Resources? Links? Schema.org usage? (How much do they really know about SEO?)
Wait and see if he mentions competitor analysis or asks what yours are. If not, ask him how he does competitor analysis .
Train SEO copywriters within the company
Some things to consider:
Have your internal resources written before? Can they show you work? Does their writing sound engaging? Does the content flow, engage, and convert?
Do they have SEO experience? How much?
What did they write that got a good ranking? Can they show you? Can they explain in detail what their SEO strategy was?
Are they creative? Are they able to learn?
If the people you want to entrust with writing your web pages have never dealt with search engine optimization , they may not be the best choice for you if your goal is to immediately climb the search engine rankings.
It might be helpful to test these people by having them write a few pages of content and see how they perform, and then have them trained by an experienced SEO copywriter: if you have someone who has creativity and some experience in writing, you can save time and money by teaching them how to optimize their texts.