Web services that connect job seekers with paid employment have become powerful tools in the arsenals of those that know how to leverage them. Unfortunately, the services themselves and the concepts of how to apply them have often been overshadowed by fear, uncertainty and lack of knowledge about how to apply. No more.

In this post, I'm going to walk you through how to use these web services (and the professionals who do the work) to accomplish powerful SEO tasks that might otherwise be out of reach (due to finances, manpower or scale).

Freelance & Contract Project Websites & Services

  • Craigslist - the world's largest classifieds site allows for a massive range of freedom in posting for and finding talent. Unfortunately, the lack of structure can make the process challenging and lengthy compared to the other services. There's no "reputation" system for contractors, it can be time consuming to wade through resumes or emails vs. browsing a list of bids and project definitions and follow-up are entirely your responsibility. It's definitely the most flexible of the services mentioned, but unless you've got a perfect fit project, the ROI may not be stellar. The biggest advantage - the potential for local recruitment. If you need on-site, in person contact for any reason, Craigslist might be the right choice.
  • ELance (Combined with oDesk to create Upwork) - One of the oldest freelance sites on the web, ELance has a wide variety of options but primarily centers around contract, fixed-price work. You submit a project, bidders send back prices and descriptions of their experience and you choose the "best" one for the job. oDesk, the other component of the company Upwork, takes an interesting twist on the classic freelancer-via-the-web model. Their focus is on by-the-hour contracting rather than fixed-project pricing. They also strongly push the visibility aspect of the software, which allows you to "watch your contractors work" via remote screencasting software and tracks hourly progress.
  • Mechanical Turk - For low sophistication, largely menial/repetitive labor, Mechanical Turk is an excellent alternative. Their HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) are essentially machine-like processes that software can't yet do efficiently/effectively, but humans can. The cost is terrificly low and with a bit of quality control, the accuracy can be quite good. There's also far less direct interaction with contractors, which can mean lower "costs" of setup and management.
  • Others - sites like Freelancer, Guru and vWorker (formerly Rentacoder) also fulfill needs in this space, but I won't focus on them as much (though they may be worth investigating depending on your needs)

To graphically represent the sites, I've made this convenient chart:

Scatterplot of Freelance Sites

Once you've identified the SEO project(s) that needs attention, take care to select the service that's going to be the best match for your

How to Leverage Web-Based Labor for SEO

SEO has a number of tasks that requires human effort in a format well-suited to freelance services. These include:

  • Keyword Research - the menial labor of grabbing data from multiple sources can either be oustourced to a low-cost human provider or scraped using custom software. If you need more careful analysis, oDesk may be the way to go and if you're seeking just basic, repetitive queries, Mechanical Turk could be a solid solution. Custom-building tools is great, but if you're only doing research occasionally, it might be a waste of engineering resources.
  • Competitive Analysis - tools like Trifecta and OSE aside, there are times when you need to gather a lot of competitive intelligence about a set of websites or a market you're considering entering. Creating a process and doing a few data gathering pieces yourself is fine, but once the tasks become repetitive, crafting a process and leveraging oDesk, ELance or Mech Turk might be a perfect solution.
  • Content Creation - In the range of content building options between user-generated and editorially written in-house lies the subcontractor/freelance route. You can get a lot of great content for comparatively low prices using services like oDesk & ELance (and even Craigslist). You might even find some diamond-in-the-rough writers or even exceptional quality professionals who simply prefer the contract approach (or have been forced into it by circumstance).
  • Usability + User Experience - When you need menial, repetitive testing, Mech Turk can be a great way to go. If you're seeking more advanced, situational tests, ELance & oDesk both work well. oDesk is particularly well suited since the recording software can show you exactly how the contractor attempted to perform a specific action on your site. Lastly, if you're in need of in-person testers to come by for a usability session, Craigslist can be a great recruiting ground.
  • Graphic / Web Design - ELance, Craigslist and oDesk all have a plethora of designers willing to create anything from a Wordpress blog template to an entire custom site design to a single infographic. Choosing great designers who can crank out top notch material will give you a substantive edge over competitors - we've seen time and again how great design correlates to trustworthiness, perceptions of professionalism, higher conversion rates and more link attraction. If you have a small budget and an aged or unprofessional design, this might be one of the best investments you can make.
  • Engineering / Development - Many small businesses use oDesk and/or ELance to get their entire site built, but you can use the engineering talent on these sites to get a single tool, a custom script, an implementation of mod_rewrite (for those pesky large-scale URL redirects) or even a change to your CMS or the addition of a user-generated content section. As with design, if development is holding you back, an investment here could yield serious results.

You can use these services for any of these operations, and I'm sure the creative minds out there are already plotting. However, for the purposes of this post, I thought we'd explore a handful of interesting examples (5) (some purely concepts, and others taken from the real world and modified slightly to anonymize the innocent).

#1 - Linkbait Development with oDesk/ELance

If you have a blog or articles section on your site and are seeking to create compelling, viral-worthy content to be spread across the web and help bring links and branding to your site, oDesk/ELance can help in a multitude of ways. You can leverage a workforce of researchers to fetch data, statistics, even very challenging to acquire bits of data from across the web and collate it for you. Say you want to write a comprehensive article about all the animal species that have emerged from the brink of extinction thanks to human intervention. That's a lot of hours pouring through sites and pages, searching, browsing and trying to make sure the list is comprehensive. Alternatively, you could write a detailed project description, provide an example and ask oDeskers or Elancers to go to work.

Graphic design is also a frequent issue with linkbait. Great resources need to have a solid, sharp design (think Mint.com's infographics or Oatmeal's linkbait shorts) and the freelance recruiting services can connect you with affordable labor whose work you can examine prior to making a commitment.

#2 - Content Classification with Mechanical Turk

If you have a large quantity of content that needs categorization so you can efficiently and effectively put it into your site architecture and build the right navigation structure, Mech Turk can help. Skimming through thousands of articles or posts to get enough of a sense to apply classification tags or place them in the proper categories may seem like an impossible task, but it's exactly the kind of thing Turkers were born to do.

You can also leverage the classification powers of the Turkers on images, videos or even snippets of data that might accompany graphics or individual resource pages. Turkers can even add small amounts of content in this fashion by providing context that can be used to improve the quality/value it provides to a user (think classifying house types on Zillow - post-modern, victorian, faux-tudor, etc.)

#3 - Unique-ifying Content with oDesk/ELance

Many sites have large numbers of pages with very little unique content. They might feature a short dataset or an image, but have no significant uniqueness in text material, harming their potential to stay in the search engines' indices. Freelance services can be a huge help here.

Simply send in a list of the pages, contract writers to add 2-4 unique sentences describing each (with examples of acceptable vs. unacceptable quality levels) and do some basic reviewing to ensure standards are met. You know have thousands of pages of truly unique content that provide value to engines and users (and have additional keywords to help reach long tail queries). This is particularly ideal for images or videos when you need descriptions authored - I've seen several sites do amazing things to their traffic using precisely this strategy.

#4 - Link Prospect List Development with Mechanical Turk

Many times in a link building or publicity campaign, you'd like to reach out to between a few dozen and a few hundred bloggers, influencers and journalists. In direct link campaigns, you might just need the email addresses associated with a few hundred specific websites or pages. In either case, it's time intensive, thankless work - perfect for Mechanical Turk (or, in more complex cases, oDesk/ELance).

Don't waste your time collecting webmaster emails and sending generic messages. You'll pour dollars in and get nothing out (and it's practically spam, which you don't want associated with your brand). Instead, you want to find creative ways to leverage your unique value and connect with sites/people that are likely to want to share your message. For example, let's say you have widgets that help small businesses show their hours on their websites and plug-in to their existing office calendaring systems. You might have Turkers or ELancers grab you a few hundred websites for small doctors' offices along with email addresses and names so you can write them a personalized email offering your widget for them for free.

Link building in this fashion is limited only by your creativity and ability to produce something useful and easily shareable. I've heard SEOs tell of link conversion rates over 25% from email campaigns like this that were carefully executed and properly tested.

#5 - Competitive Keyword & Link Research with oDesk/ELance

Say you're entering a new market with your website and want to get to know the major players, the big money keywords, the chunky middle phrases and where the links are flowing from. Using carefully authored projects and clear examples, you can use oDesk/ELance to get a few hundred websites reviewed in a matter of days. Extract the meta keywords and terms/phrases targeted in title tags. Have the contractors use OSE's top pages or the Link Intersect tool (with multiple combos) to help ID strong link sources in the field. Get statistics and metrics on all the major sites in the field, figure out who's been benefitting from social media by digging through Delicious, StumbleUpon and Twitter searches. You can even have your contractors use resources like SpyFu, Compete.com or Google Insights to get search volume and trend data.

The beautiful part is that whatever information you need that's hard to obtain not due to difficulty, but because of manpower, the freelance services can help.

Hopefully these examples have opened your eyes to the immense possibilities that these services can provide. There are a handful of very smart SEO operators utilizing this affordable, scalable labor to produce tremendous results in white hat ways (and a few doing gray/black hat stuff, too, though you won't find that material on SEOmoz). Outsourcing in this fashion is still largely untapped, so I'd recommend finding a few test projects and diving in.

Advice about Writing Project Descriptions & Selecting Candidates

I'd venture a guess that more than half of the projects contracted on these services fail, and in most of those instances, improvements in the project guidelines and/or better candidate selection would have saved the day. Below, I've listed some common sense (and a few pieces of more arcane) advice to help guide your requisitioning:

  • Be Wary of Low Prices - In SEO, we all know that you get what you pay for. Contracting freelancers via the web is no different. Paying a few cents more on Mech Turk per HIT or spending an extra $500 on ELance could mean the difference between a successful outcome and a miserable failure.
  • Be Anal About the Details - It pays to put in time and effort upfront in project definition and, wherever possible, solid examples of what you're seeking. This will yield not only better results, but easier times if a dispute ever arises.
  • Define Small Projects First - when you dip your toe in, don't go for a full website redesign along with a bunch of complex code and redirects. Instead, contract out bit by bit until you feel secure that you've found a great contractor. Start with a small, carefully defined project that isn't mission critical and add only once you're secure in the competence of your freelancer.
  • Hold On to the Great Ones - if you've found a phenomenal writer, editor, designer or developer, fill their pipeline with your own projects and don't let go (when possible). Even if it makes creating some extra, unplanned work items or accelerating your product schedule (or doing more linkbait projects than you planned), it's smarter to hold on to a great relationship than to set them free and hope they'll have time for you in 20 days when you need them again.
  • Keep Project Scopes to a Minimum - Don't ask for huge, complex works that require lots of creativity and independent definition. Instead, define big projects in small chunks. Your contractors will perform far better in this fashion.
  • Plan for Back-and-Forth - Unless you're the world's greatest product planner, you'll likely need several iterations. Plan for this by including it in the project scope and being upfront with the contractor that rounds of revisions will be part of the project. On oDesk, this is often easier than ELance, but even in the latter site, you can specify a bid that includes money for revisions upfront and have success.
  • Read Lost of Project Definitions - Before you enter the world of freelance contracting, go through the sites and read the projects others have posted. Imagine yourself as the contractor - what works and what doesn't? What definitions made it easy to understand and perform and which ones frustrate you? Use this as a guide when you start posting your own contracts.

If you're seeking more information, there are a few great articles on the web to help you along in the process:

p.s. If you've had success with projects/services like this (or even if you haven't), we'd love to hear about it in the comments.