SEO has become so embedded in modern business that companies cannot afford to ignore it. They either need to bring in outside agencies to handle SEO for them or hire team members capable of doing the work. That is where you come in. If you are looking for a solid career with plenty of opportunity, consider SEO.
A career in SEO could mean working for someone else or starting your own agency. Either way, there is a lot to learn. SEO is a complicated discipline even in its most basic form. It is made more complicated by the fact that the internet continues to grow and evolve. As it does, SEO grows and evolves with it.
If you are an SEO beginner looking to break into the industry, concentrate on these five things:
1. Mastering Keyword Research
Everything in SEO rides on keywords. Everything. The most time-consuming task you will have as an SEO expert is keyword research. If you don’t know how to do it correctly, you aren’t going to be able to serve your clients properly.
Keyword research is the process of identifying the most relevant keywords people use to search for information online. Once you know the keywords web users rely on to find your client’s websites, you will know how to tailor content to take advantage of those keywords.
2. Learning Link Building Strategies
Keywords are the main tools by which search engines understand and rank pages. A close second are links – at least in the sense of determining relevance. Search engines look at internal and inbound links as a way of determining how much value to put on a website or page for ranking purposes.
All of this is to say that you would do well to learn link-building strategies. If you can find the right keywords and build a sufficient number of internal and inbound links, your sites should do very well in organic searches.
3. Local SEO
Local SEO services are a big deal to many agencies, including Webtek Digital Marketing in Salt Lake City. Local SEO is a subset of the broader SEO discipline, utilizing some of the same principles that are tweaked for local exposure.
Webtek suggests that as an SEO beginner, the chances are pretty good that most of your early clients will be local companies with a customer base made up of mostly local residents. An employer might expect you to master local SEO before allowing you to move on to clients with a regional, national, or global reach.
4. On-Site SEO
On-site SEO is the practice of optimizing a website so that it performs well for the chosen keywords an SEO expert is working with. On-site optimization concentrates on those things that are under the hood, so to speak. It involves things like meta tags, optimizing images, and developing high quality content.
5. Technical SEO
Hand-in-hand with on-site SEO is technical SEO. Technical SEO deals with things like page load times, mobile friendliness, website security, etc. Rest assured that Google and the other search engines take the technical stuff seriously. You are going to have to learn it if you expect to be an SEO expert.
SEO can be a rewarding career for people who like that sort of thing. There are plenty of employment opportunities out there. In addition, SEO experts can always start their own agencies. But to do it well as either an employee or business owner, there are certain SEO skills you need to master. Concentrating on the five discussed in this post will put you in a good position moving forward.