How to become an SEO expert ?

Before starting, it’s important to understand the difference between an SEO expert and an SEO professional. An SEO expert is someone that knows how SEO works and how to apply SEO to increase the rankings of a website in Search Engines.

Whereas, An SEO professional is an SEO Expert that practices SEO as a profession either by doing SEO consulting, offering SEO services, or taking clients on a project-by-project basis.

Organic search is the heart of digital marketing because of its focus on and understanding of user intent, making an SEO expert a highly important marketing role. Search engine optimization experts are responsible for more than half the traffic on an average website, bringing in about 51% of all your site’s visitors. 

What is an SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing organic traffic from non-paid search engine results in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others to your website. To rank well for keywords that matter to you and make your website more prominent in search results, applying SEO tactics is a must.

What is an SEO specialist?

A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist tests, analyzes, and changes a website so it is optimized for search engines, and the website subsequently ranks higher in the search results on major search engines such as Google and Bing.

An SEO expert performs page optimization across a website to ensure search results are relevant and to create a positive user experience, growing website traffic, lead volume and brand awareness. In other words, an SEO Specialist is no different from any other digital marketing or traditional marketing professional: they’re ultimately trying to create more sales for the company they’re working for.

By conducting keyword research and leveraging SEO tools, such as Google Analytics, an SEO Specialist can increase the visibility of a website on Google, which in turn has major benefits for any company. Some might also work closely with other members of a marketing team to develop new initiatives or better manage social media accounts to boost user engagement and traffic.

What are SEO expert responsibilities?

SEO Specialist job responsibilities vary based on whether someone is working for a digital marketing agency, in the digital marketing department of a company, or freelance for a client, but the job description for the vast majority of SEO Specialist postings will include all or most of the following:

• Develop optimization strategies that increase the company’s website search engine results rankings.
• When conducting paid search campaigns, the SEO Specialist will execute tests, collect and analyze data and results, identify trends and insights in order to achieve maximum ROI.
• Manage the expenses of SEO campaigns, staying on budget, estimating monthly costs and reconciling differences.
• Closely collaborate with the web development team to ensure SEO best practices are properly followed throughout website content.
• Work with editorial and marketing teams to drive SEO in content creation and content marketing.
• Take responsibility for page optimization for search engine marketing.
• Perform ongoing keyword research, discovery and optimization for new SEO keywords to use throughout the company website and marketing materials.
• Research and implement search engine optimization recommendations
• Create and execute link building strategy.
• Change website architecture, content, linking and other factors to improve SEO positions for target keywords.
• Determine measurable goals that demonstrate improvement in marketing efforts.
• Monitor daily performance metrics with SEO tools such as Google analytics to understand SEO strategy performance.
• Collaborate with others within the marketing department to manage SEO strategy.
• Write compelling and high-quality website content, including blog posts and page descriptions to improve website search results.

How to become an SEO expert?

Here are some tips to become an SEO expert, let’s dive into the details:

1. Understand the basics of SEO

To become an expert, start with the basics. You need to understand how audiences and search engines interact, and what you can do to optimize content effectively. Learning the basics boils down to three core components:

• The types of content that users want, expect, or need. It’s all about user intent.
• The inner workings of how search engines really work.
• The tools and techniques needed to optimize websites.

Without this background, you may be able to explain the “what,” but not the “why.” As someone who has worked in this industry for 15 years, knowing the why sets you apart. When you get into more advanced aspects of SEO, knowing why things are the way they are can make you more effective.

2. Build your own websites

Once you understand the basics of SEO, it’s time to apply them. Most professionalists will tell you they learned the most by building sites and breaking things. Learn HTML and all the tags. Also, Pick a topic and create content. Spend more time building and optimizing the content, not writing it.

3. Learn WordPress

Most of the websites are built on wordpress. So if you want to be an SEO expert, you need to know it well. WordPress is perfect for functionalities that directly (e.g., metadata) and indirectly (e.g., UX) affect SEO performance.

4. Learn google analytics & google search console

SEO pros use a wide variety of tools to optimize content and analyze their effectiveness.Google Analytics and Google Search Console are essentials for any SEO command center.

Google analytics is all about measurement and reporting. Whereas, Google search console enables you to optimize your site. SEO expertise requires mastery of both.

5. Read about SEO every day

As the learning process never stops, so keep learning about SEO daily. The major search engines make changes every day and you never know the impact that will have on your rankings. Keeping up with SEO content daily keeps your website fresh.

6. Understand how search engines work

Understanding how search engines work is a key piece of knowledge for any SEO professional. The primary goal of SEO is to increase visibility on search engines so that search engine users can find your content. While content should always be created with those potential website visitors in mind, they won’t make it to your content if search engines don’t know what to make of them. 

Search engines have three primary functions: 

• Crawl – Find and understand content.
• Index – Store and organize the content. 
• Rank – Provide the best content for relevant queries.

7. Read google’s quality rater guidelines

For more in depth details read google quality rater guidelines. Google hires people to rate websites, and this guide covers the factors they’re told to look for.

You may be familiar with the simplified version of its contents, known as E-A-T:

• Expertise.
• Authoritativeness.
• Trustworthiness.

The simplified version is useful if you’re just starting out or even at the intermediate level, but to become an expert, you need to read the whole thing. The raters are not SEO professionals, they’re everyday people.Similar to the search engines’ bots, these raters have an effect on your site’s performance.

8. Look at the SERPs

SERPs are the pages where all the actions are performed. Look at the search engine results pages (SERPs).

• How are they composed?
• What content do they display?
• Who is doing it well?

Notice how the results change when you search for different kinds of queries. Look at how this search for “How to make alfredo sauce” differs from “alfredo sauce.” You can see these featured snippets for recipes because I asked a question in the search box.

9. Learn about technical SEO

Technical SEO makes your site easier to crawl and index. Technical SEO involves mobile usability, site speed, structured data, JavaScript, and all the mechanisms that influence how a website works. These factors play a role in how well a site ranks in the SERPs. You may have amazing content, but a slow or site with lots of bugs will affect your performance.

10. Learn about content strategy, creation, optimization & promotion

While technical SEO helps search engines crawl and index your site more effectively, understanding content will help you improve the user experience, time on site, links, and so much more.

Content needs to be optimized to add context to content to help search engines understand how to categorize it. That content also needs to be supported by a promotional strategy. SEO alone isn’t enough, other marketing channels (e.g. social media, email) contribute to the success or failure of your content.

11. Use link building tactics that actually work

When studying about SEO, link building is the first thing you study about. To get benefit from link building, you need quality links, not just quantity. Good links are like votes; they are testimonials to how worthwhile the content is, and Google sees a healthy link profile as a good sign.

Link building is a term for how marketers and SEO professionals acquire links to their content. For links to help your SEO, those links should be:

• Helpful.
• High quality.
• Natural.

Links should be related to the content at hand; with good anchor text, which is useful for search engines to understand the context of the links.

12. Understand the three key ranking factors

Lots of people get bogged down optimizing for ranking factors that aren’t all that important. So before you start obsessing over pagespeed or title tags, make sure you’re on top of the three big ones.

1. Relevance

This is how well your page matches the query. If someone types “how to make lavender oil” into Google, then Google won’t return pages about cars because that’s irrelevant. But relevance goes deeper than that. Your page also needs to match the type of content people want to see.

2. Authority

This largely boils down to backlinks. Google sees links as votes of confidence. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher you’re likely to rank. The best backlinks have two key attributes: authority and relevance.

• Authority relates to the power of the linking website and web page. At Ahrefs, we have two metrics for measuring this: Domain Rating and URL Rating. The most powerful links are those from high-UR pages.
• Relevance relates to the topic of the linking website and web page. For example, if a post about making lavender oil has two backlinks, one from a tech blog and one from a health website, the one from the health site is probably more relevant. However, page-level relevance also matters. If the linking page on the tech website is about a relevant topic like the best smart diffusers, and the one on the health website is about an unrelated topic like bodybuilding, then the link from the tech website may be more relevant.

3. Utility

Google aims to show the best result in pole position. That means it isn’t enough just to match search intent. Your content needs to be the most deserving of the top spot.

But what constitutes quality and utility depends on the search query itself. So the best course of action is to review the current top-ranking pages and see what’s good about them, and where they fall short.

13. Understand the true meaning of SEO

SEO is not just about keywords and links, it’s much more than that. The true mission of SEO is to provide users with a great experience and give them exactly what they want.

Your goal is not just about getting more search engine traffic but it’s about turning that traffic into recurring visitors and customers. SEO has a number of types, the most important are:

• Technical SEO
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO

Here is an outline of what each SEO type does:

Technical SEO – Technical SEO is responsible for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO you can help search engines index all important pages of your website without issues. The most important technical SEO tasks are:

• URL Canonicalization
• XML Sitemap Optimization
• Setting your preferred domain
• Optimizing you page URLs
• Optimizing your website structure
• Improving your website page speed
• Optimizing your website for mobile
• Finding and fixing crawl errors

On-Page SEO – On-page SEO has to do with elements found on a page. Things like content, headings, images, videos need to be optimized so that search engines can understand their context. The most important on-page SEO elements are:

• Page title optimization
• Meta description optimization
• Content optimization
• Making proper use of headings (H1 tag, H2, etc)
• Internal and external links

Off-Page SEO – The last process is called off-page SEO. Unlike technical and on-page SEO, Off-page SEO has to do with activities outside the boundaries of a website. Things like getting backlinks from other related websites and promoting your website on the Internet are factors that help search engines during the ranking process.

14. Take advantage of free courses

Once you start learning SEO, you will realize one thing: There is too much information about SEO on the Internet and so many things to learn, and this in the end creates a mess. If you decide to do this on your own without any help, you will end up with an endless list of articles to read and things to try out.

It took me years to learn SEO this way because back in 2000 when I started, there were no SEO training courses or guides you could read and have all the information in one place.

Nowadays things are different. People wanting to learn SEO fast can do so by following a reputable course without having to spend endless hours searching the Internet and reading article after article.

15. Stay informed about SEO changes

SEO is not a static discipline. SEO rules and algorithms change all the time. Google alone is making more than 250 changes to their ranking algorithms per year. Good SEO experts need to know about these changes and adjust their SEO campaigns accordingly.

The best way to stay informed is to follow a couple of SEO news websites that are proven to provide information about on-going SEO changes when they happen and not after it’s too late to do something about it.

16. Choose the right SEO tools

The truth is you cannot do SEO alone. There is so much information to process and decisions to make and if you try to do everything manually, you will spend your precious time analyzing numbers instead of working on tasks that can get you better results.

It’s also true that good SEO tools cost but in the long term the return is much more than the monthly fee you will pay for a good SEO tool.

17. Be Patient

SEO takes time to work and you shouldn’t rush to conclusions too soon. SEO is not the quickest way to increase your traffic. If you want immediate results then try PPC campaigns. SEO is about creating a long term sustainable business by building a solid foundation that will get you organic traffic 24/7 for years.

Before making any SEO related change to your website you should take note of your rankings and traffic (for a period of time), before the change and compare it with the same period of time (in terms of duration), after the change. Monitor your rankings and traffic and give it enough time before taking further decisions.

Advantages of becoming an expert on SEO

Increase your rankings and traffic – This is the most obvious reason why someone should aim in becoming an expert in search engine optimization. If you know how to optimize your website for search engines then you can take advantage of the increase in rankings and search engine traffic to make money blogging or start an online business.

Less dependency on SEO agencies – I know that this is not what you expect to read in the blog of an SEO agency but that’s the truth. If you have in-house SEO skills then you can grow your business without depending on external support.

Decrease costs – If you are a solo entrepreneur or blogger you can save a lot of money if you can do SEO yourself rather than having to hire an SEO specialist.

Make better decisions like who to hire to work on your SEO – If you know SEO yourself then it’s much easier to decide which consultant or company to hire to work on your SEO. You will be in a position to understand what their SEO packages include and judge if what they are suggesting can actually help your website achieve better rankings.

Highly recommended for Marketing managers – if you work as a marketing manager then having a good understanding of SEO will give you an extra advantage over other marketing managers or colleagues in your organization.

No business can survive online without SEO – SEO is no longer optional. Websites that are not built with SEO in mind, there is no way they can survive in the highly competitive online World. Knowing SEO and how to use it correctly, can make a huge difference in your website’s future.

Summary

SEO requires time, commitment, and experience. Becoming an SEO Expert is not easy but it’s not difficult either. The process includes a lot of reading, practicing, and testing.

If you are starting out now, the best way is to take a good SEO course so that you have all the information in one place, use the right SEO tools, and above all start practicing SEO. Learn from your mistakes and try again. Search engines and SEO are here to stay for years to come and this is the best investment you can make for your business and personal skills.