An SEO expert is someone responsible for increasing the traffic from search engines and helps your website to get higher rankings on the SERP. An SEO expert or SEO specialist usually excels in different areas of search engine optimization along with other digital marketing skills including web design and writing content. By hiring an SEO specialist, businesses can increase their website ranking and traffic, improve brand awareness, and decrease extra costs and many more. For these reasons being an SEO expert is in high demand and is one of the most sought after career options in the digital marketing industry. Here are 6 crucial steps you need to follow to become a successful SEO specialist.
Have a clear notion of how search engines work
The foremost step you need to consider is to get familiar with how search engines work and have a clear idea about the basics of search engine optimization. In short search engines go through three major processes including crawling, indexing and ranking. Crawling is how the web spiders discover the content on the web, indexing is the process they include the content in their index and ranking describes how the search engines determine the position a certain website will get in the search results. To become an SEO specialist you need to learn how to optimize a certain website at every stage to improve its ranking and to make search engines read and index the content without any hassle.
Understand the different aspects of SEO in-depth
SEO consists of mainly three types of aspects including on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO and each of them has different factors to focus on. Technical SEO consists of all the technical part of a website to take care of including XML sitemap optimizations, finding crawl errors, improve page speed and more. On-page SEO elements are mainly optimizing page title, Meta description, content and making internal and external links. Off-page SEO on the other hand is all about the activities are done outside of your website that mainly includes link building to improve your site authority.
Opting for a proper SEO training
SEO contains a lot of things to learn including On-page SEO, Off-page SEO and technical SEO and these might seem a bit overwhelming at first. Learning search engine optimization without a proper mentor or guide may lead you to endless articles to read and an unplanned and disorganized way of learning. This is why it is crucial to opt for a reputable and reliable SEO course if you want to become an SEO expert. This will not only provide you with an organized way of learning but also will give you practical experience to apply SEO strategies as well.
Stay updated about SEO changes
Like the rest of the aspects of digital marketing, SEO is also ever-changing. Rather than being a static discipline, you will face new algorithms and rules to update your SEO strategy. As Google always tends to update and change the algorithms, it is important for an SEO expert to stay updated on these changes. You can follow popular blogs and SEO news website to stay updated and apply the new trends to your strategy.
Opt for the right SEO tools
As much as your knowledge in SEO is important so is using the right tools to aid your SEO strategy. Every aspect of digital marketing requires some advanced tools to deliver the best and expected results and it is no exception in SEO as well. There are so many decisions to take and information to process that if you try to do everything manually it will be time-consuming and restrain you from focusing on other important factors to improve your marketing strategy. There are plenty of free and paid tools available that are preferred by marketers that include Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Google keyword planner, Aherfs and SEMRUSH and more.
Practice SEO rather than relying on theoretical knowledge
Digital marketing is all about practising rather than gaining theoretical knowledge and it is the same with learning SEO as well. You need to apply what you have learnt and experiment constantly to improve your results and understand what approach works better. As each website is unique and contains different content, it is not necessarily that the same strategy will be beneficial for every website. This is why it is essential to practice SEO as soon as you have learnt the theoretical aspects of it. You can also go through various case studies on how other marketers applied different approaches to handle different scenarios.
Conclusion:
As SEO is the base of all digital marketing campaigns, excelling in SEO is highly beneficial for any business to increase traffic, improve brand visibility by getting a higher rank in the search results. SEO is also the only way of growing your online presence in a cost-effective way and for that reason is considered one of the best digital marketing approaches by marketers all over the world.
