SEO experts — that’s the subject of this lesson. Who these Search Engine Optimization professionals are, how you become an SEO expert, whether a course is enough, what a typical SEO consultant job description looks like, which other areas of digital marketing SEO experts tend to focus on, how much these SEO specialists earn — there’s a lot of ground to cover.
As you’ll know, in the SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to SEO and search engine rankings. If you’re new to the SEO world, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you’re weighing up — or have already decided on — a career as a professional in this corner of web marketing. Or because you’re looking for an SEO expert. In that second case, you’ve found us. SEO is our speciality, and this link has everything you need:
If instead you want to understand how to become an SEO expert, let’s not waste time — here we go!
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Who are SEO experts?
SEO experts are web professionals with several years of experience behind them, gathered as an SEO consultant or inside companies, organisations and web agencies. Competence, training, SEO ability and knowledge of the web are what earned them the label.
Becoming an SEO expert is fairly hard. Plenty of people call themselves SEO experts — or experts in any number of other fields — the moment they’ve finished an SEO course, sometimes an introductory one.
Sadly it doesn’t work that way. An SEO expert needs a great deal of experience in the field: they have to have worked on many sites, faced complicated problems, and experimented enough to know what works and what doesn’t.
An SEO course is an excellent starting point, but it isn’t enough on its own. Becoming an SEO expert takes years of practice.
Another quality that drives this digital professional is curiosity. SEO changes constantly, so it calls for continuous skill development and an appetite to test, test and test again.
A genuine SEO expert is a mix of a webmaster working on the HTML and CSS of pages, a capable web marketer and an excellent SEO copywriter.
SEO experts: the job description
A modern SEO expert is a digital professional who is sometimes called on to be a problem solver and a decision maker. Beyond the cross-disciplinary knowledge described above, a degree and a minimum of three years’ experience on the web count in their favour.
How much does an SEO expert earn? Situations and contexts vary, but depending on experience the rate generally runs between €45 and €216 an hour (source: payscale.com).
As for duties and responsibilities, a seasoned, practical SEO specialist handles these main tasks competently and professionally:
- analyses, reviews and implements changes to websites so as to optimize them for search engines;
- researches and analyses trends and the best practices out there, in order to develop and implement strategies that maximise traffic to a site through better rankings for its content;
- develops quality content, which in modern SEO translates into greater engagement and increased traffic, and sets the publishing calendar for it;
- defines, implements and tests various search engine marketing techniques, site architectures and digital advertising;
- has deep knowledge of keyword research and the ability to find the best approach to internal linking and the right placement for those links.
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Why does it pay to hire an SEO expert?
Search marketing helps people find products, brands and information on Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines. For an organisation — particularly a small or medium-sized one — appearing among the top positions on a search engine results page (SERP) is essential, ideally without heavy costs.
So here are some reasons a business or organisation should work with an SEO expert.
Saving time
Doing SEO is time-consuming work that demands an amount of time companies very often don’t have, and that gets taken away from other core activities the business depends on.
Skills and expertise
An SEO expert holds skills and expertise across several areas, which lets them run an initial analysis of the page or website and define the right optimizations to implement.
Those cover checking the use of the keywords users actually search for, analysing content and competitors, and a great many aspects of on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Keeping up with Google’s updates
Beyond “core” updates such as the June 2019 Core Update, the Mountain View search engine updates its algorithm several times a day (source: Moz).
The changes those updates bring can affect where content ranks and what the search results look like, as well as the SEO strategies being implemented. The SEO expert is the one who has to revisit the strategy and make sure it gets carried out.
Lower costs
SEO work is not only time-consuming, it’s a cost to the business — unless the owner happens to have the right skills.
That said, SEO increases sales without a proportional increase in marketing costs. The on-page SEO and off-page SEO work a seasoned SEO puts in makes it possible to take the right actions at each stage of the customer journey your prospects are following.
An inbound strategy, which is what SEO amounts to, generates a far higher ROI than other forms of web marketing such as PPC advertising, social media marketing or buying leads.
Avoiding Google penalties
Badly done Search Engine Optimization can cost a website its visibility in the SERP, in the cases Google’s guidelines set out.
Keyword stuffing, over-optimization and duplicate content are very common mistakes that turn up more often than you’d think. Not only do they take time and money to put right, they hit web traffic, lead generation and sales.
Brand awareness
An effective SEO campaign run by a capable, well-prepared Search Engine Optimization expert can strengthen your brand, improve it and make it more recognisable.
The higher your content climbs the SERP, up to first on Google, the more likely users are to associate the keyword they searched with the products and services your brand offers.
How do you become an SEO expert?
Pages and blog posts suggest any number of routes to becoming an SEO expert; here are the ones they have in common and that deserve the most attention.
Start with the right mindset
Starting with the right mindset gets little attention, yet it matters a great deal in reaching your goals — and not only the ones tied to running a business.
SEO is mostly used to grow organic search traffic, brand awareness and web reputation, but the value it adds is growth in sales and revenue. Don’t forget that SEO is a means to an end — reaching your goals — and that takes skill and competence.
Acquire the right skills
The starting point for anyone with no SEO skills at all is an introductory SEO course, one that lays down the principles and fundamentals.
Studying those fundamentals and putting them into practice continually strengthens what you’ve learned and makes learning more of it easier.
The fundamentals in question are these:
Keyword research
This means identifying and choosing the right keywords, the ones visitors use to search for products and services on search engines, and which you want to rank for.
A cornerstone of any SEO strategy, finding keywords that are relevant to your business, with the right search volumes and low competition, runs through:
- an analysis of your own business and the products and services it offers;
- a SERP analysis to see which keywords the competition ranks for and which strategies they use that you could use as well;
- the use of various SEO tools, starting with free ones such as the Keyword Planner made available by Google Ads (go to site) or Ubersuggest. Among the paid ones there are SEMrush, Ahrefs and SEOZoom. Add to those tools such as Answer the Public and SEO Hero, plus forums such as Quora and Reddit, for finding terms you hadn’t thought of and that keyword research tools don’t surface.
Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is the process of checking which main competitors rank for the keyword you care about. That’s easily obtained through various SEO tools, both free (Ubersuggest) and paid (Moz and SEMrush).
For existing content, we can analyse competitors’ sites to find keyword gaps (keywords they’ve produced content for and we haven’t) or find ideas that let us improve our own content and get ahead of them (for more, read our article on SEO strategy).
Analytics, KPIs & data analysis
The web marketing work being carried out, SEO included, is monitored over time through web analytics tools. Metrics and KPIs give useful information about:
- the number of visitors arriving from organic searches;
- where content ranks for a given keyword;
- the number of clicks and conversions;
- bounce rate;
- average time on page and exit rate;
- other metrics and KPIs.
Gathered into proper reports, this information has to be analysed and interpreted so that the right changes can be made promptly to the strategies in play, in service of the goals that were set.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the set of actions taken while writing or optimizing content for the web.
It’s optimization that on one hand helps Google’s bot (Googlebot) crawl the site, and on the other makes the page more user-friendly to read.
The broad areas on-page SEO work falls into are:
- improving the site’s loading speed;
- optimizing the HTML (including fixing errors usually caused by duplicate or missing title tags, broken links, images with no alt text, pages blocked in robots.txt, and 302 redirects that should be 301s);
- refining the architecture, the information and the content.
For more, read our post: on-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO, also called off-site SEO, affects the site’s indexing but doesn’t involve work inside the site itself.
In current practice, off-site SEO means work carried out away from your site, the main part of which is generating external links pointing back to it. That’s what’s known as “link building” — building a network of external links.
for more, read our post: off-page SEO
SEO audit
An SEO audit is a systematic, documented and independent review of every area of a website that affects where a page or site ranks on search engines.
Done properly, an SEO analysis identifies problems and opportunities and offers solutions for improving performance.
The output of the SEO auditing process is a document summarising all the relevant findings: the SEO audit report.
For more, read our post: SEO audit
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered SEO experts. You now have what you need to understand the skills, responsibilities, duties and requirements involved in becoming an SEO professional.
Sadly that isn’t enough on its own: SEO is in constant transformation, and you have to keep pace and stay informed about recent arrivals and where things are heading.
So stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
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