Search engine optimization is not a one-off job; you’re in it for the long haul. And it is vital to learn a few skills to ensure long-term SEO success. The thing is that SEO experts possess a diverse range of skills, and it is obviously difficult to master all of them at once. Still, certain core competencies should be mastered by anyone interested in choosing SEO as a career path.
With more and more websites being published daily and new businesses trying to access local audiences, the need for engaging SEO experts in marketing campaigns is only going up.
New algorithmic changes, voice search, and AI influx have also made it important to hire SEO specialists who are worth their salt. In the midst of all these changes lies a huge opportunity for those interested in pursuing SEO as a career.
However, you can’t do well unless you are not good with SEO basics. That’s what you will learn today:
Learn to Find and Master the Use of SEO Tools
Various SEO tools and software solutions are available these days. And it is hard to handle various technical SEO aspects without learning to use these tools.
Technical SEO involves evaluating the loading speed of web pages, understanding code, and paying attention to making everything work smoothly on mobile devices. Slow page load speeds can kill a website, as it spoils user experience, which is one of the Google ranking factors.
Similarly, having a working knowledge of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript is vital to making changes to website structures. However, whether or not these aspects need attention requires thorough testing and analysis, which is exactly why SEO professionals require SEO tools.
In order to find SEO software or tools that help with keyword research, data analysis, site audients, and competitor insights, it is important to spend some time researching and comparing various tools. Many websites now offer reviews and comparisons of tools to find what suits your business.
For instance, you can head to https://top10seosoftware.com/comparison/ and get all the necessary details about various tools to pick the best for you. They compare popular software for their features, strengths and weaknesses, and the overall value for money. It still requires time to go through every SEO software comparison, but it helps you find the best software for data analysis, site audits, and keyword research.
Leveraging SEO tools also helps with competitor analysis, which is vital for creating an effective SEO strategy for any business. Manually looking for various details like backlinks profiles and even seed keywords from competitors’ websites is quite cumbersome.
SEO tools simplify it to a great extent. But, even when you have the best tools for technical SEO or use site audit tools that bring loads of data to analyze, it ultimately comes down to how you perceive that data to identify winning keywords, find content gaps, and spot backlinking opportunities.
Learn to Conduct Advanced Keyword Research
Keyword research is vital for the success of any SEO campaign, and you won’t be able to have happy clients as an SEO specialist unless you know how to go down the rabbit hole and come out with high-value keywords.
Keyword research strategies matter a lot and should involve much more than identifying specific keywords or phrases people search for on the internet. Any keyword research tool will help you perform a basic search and leave you with tons of keywords. Will all of them work the same? Of course not!
To perform advanced keyword research, you should always begin by identifying your seed keyword.
Seed keywords are essentially the starting point for any SEO campaign, guiding the keyword research strategy. Remember, the output is only as good as the input is. If you put the right keyword in any SEO tool, the results will be much more impressive and effective.
If a business sells coffee online, the most common seed keywords would be cappuccino, espresso, percolator, French press, or coffee itself. Putting these keywords in any SEO tool will produce tons of potential keywords, but a deeper analysis will help select a few. Once done, it is important to use modifiers to generate more relevant keywords.
Identifying seed keywords is vital for building your topic clusters and uncovering subtopics you may not already focus on. However, it is also important to look at the SERPs, paying good attention to related searches as well as the “People Also Ask” boxes. Similarly, reviewing forums and communities is a good way to identify relevant terms.
As mentioned already, SEO tools work amazingly well in performing competitor analysis. A good tool helps you reverse engineer a competitor’s site. Those features will again help identify high-value competitors’ keywords. To decide if you should go after them, these tools will again help by sharing search volume and keyword difficulty. A keyword with a high difficulty score is less likely to work for new businesses, which brings us to our next point about tapping into the traffic potential of long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords usually have less competition because most people search for short-tail keywords in Google. However, fewer people search for those keywords, so fewer businesses will go for them once they are established. Targeting them makes it more effective for small businesses with a low DA and less visibility in search engines.
Learn On-Page SEO for Content Optimization
While on-page SEO involves so many factors, you must at least master everything related to content optimization.
On-page optimization involves changing the content of web pages in a way that is easy to crawl and becomes more visible on the SERPs. Those changes may look small, but they can make a huge difference in search engine rankings.
To create optimized content, it is important to ensure it is valuable. Gone are the days when creating average content with a few keywords sprinkled around would help it rank. Not anymore! The quality must be excellent, with content divided into bullet points and subheadings for easy readability.
However, it is now more important than ever to place keywords in all the right places. For instance, the page title must contain the primary keyword to tell search engines what the focus is and how to rank it. H1 should contain a keyword, and the same should be done with H2 and H3.
The content must also be made easy to scan with the help of images, infographics, and videos. Images help add a visual appeal to the content, making it more attractive for users. Infographics help share information quickly, which improves user experience, ultimately helping with search engine rankings.
Just ensure that images are compressed and don’t take long to load, slow-loading pages will never help, no matter how optimized your content is. Use alt tags with images to improve accessibility and ensure search bots can understand them well.
Besides title tags, descriptions, and headers, it is important to work on having an optimized site map where URLs use the main keyword. Similarly, taking advantage of internal linking is vital because it helps link one page to other relevant pages on a website and build topical authority.
It also helps keep visitors on any website longer, and a lower bounce rate and higher dwell time tell Google to rank that website high.
Off-Page SEO to Build Quality Backlinks
SEO specialists are among top IT roles in demand, but a true expert shouldn’t just be focusing on on-page SEO because off-page SEO matters a lot. It involves building quality backlinks, which serve as a vote of confidence, confirming Google you have a credible site.
No SEO strategy will work without focusing on building quality links. Optimizing content will help, but it just cannot compete when sites with higher DA are already ranking in SERPs. And guess what? That higher DA is directly linked to the number and quality of backlinks those sites have.
So, the long and short of it is that you must learn how to build a robust backlink profile to boost the DA of a website and help it compete with others in SERPs. After all, less than 1% of searchers go past the first page of search results, and getting more backlinks helps you secure top rankings, resulting in more traffic and leads.
Any SEO specialist will tell you the importance of identifying high-quality link-building opportunities. Creating compelling content is undoubtedly a way to do that, but you need more help identifying sites that would be interested in linking back to your page. How do you do that? Try SEO software!
Use SEO tools to help identify your competitor’s DA and their link profile. This tells you a lot about sites that may be linking back to your competitor’s site. Since you are in the same niche, you can definitely utilize those linking opportunities. Once identified, you can contact those sites and offer guest posting services. Or, many sites would charge you some fee to let you publish your article on their websites with a do-follow link back to your website. This helps transfer some of their link juice to your page and improve DA.
Besides using competitor link building and guest posting, it is also possible to build links using resource page link building, digital PR techniques, and platforms like HARO. Many SEO experts have recently focused on building links and raising awareness by being featured on industry-relevant podcasts. Running social media campaigns may also help spread your content, as people share it with others and increase opportunities for building new backlinks.
Conclusion
There’s nothing wrong in hoping to become an “SEO expert”, but to turn it into a successful career, it is important to learn and master basic skills and strategically integrate various advanced skills into your portfolio. SEO professionals are innovative thinkers and agile learners who know when to leverage technology and SEO tools for the best results. Learn all these skills, and you will be able to drive sustainable results that will help you grow as an SEO expert.
