Are you searching for the best approach to become an SEO expert?
This guide will help you know everything about it. You can become an SEO expert easily if you follow the framework I am sharing in this post.
Let’s get started.
Tips to Become an SEO Expert:
1. Begin with the Correct Mindset:
Don’t consider this as another theory, but it is actually important to have the perfect mindset to achieve your goals. Have a look at this important fact.
SEO is an important tool
SEO is valuable as it can help grow your business revenue. It has multiple purposes to serve, like reputation management, branding, and deception. But most people consider it as a tool to bring organic traffic and grow revenue.
Don’t forget, SEO is a tool.
You can mess with algorithms, but the eventual goal is to gain more money. For this, you need to gain at least basic SEO knowledge.
2. Gain Basic Knowledge:
For beginners, it is essential to gain basic SEO knowledge first and then move to the advanced scenario. Even if you have the experience, you must be clear about the basic SEO fundamentals. Just like other skills, even there are important fundamentals to SEO.
- Data Analytics, Analytics, and KPIs
You must be able to use SEO to analyze KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. For this, you need to know everything about KPI or data that matter, how you can use the data to enhance your business marketing campaign.
Having complete knowledge of Google Analytics can help you in this context. You can get through some online guides showcasing rich content about Google Analytics.
After this, you need to learn the way to use Google Search Consoles. It has numerous functions, which Google Analytics cannot perform.
Lastly, you must have basic knowledge about the correct way to use backlink management and analysis.
- Keyword Research
Another critical factor is to identify the right keywords. There are different ways to find keywords. You can find them online to know the best keywords.
- Competitor Analysis
It is not enough to find appropriate keywords. Equally vital is to validate the keywords. This can be done by analyzing your competitors.
- Gaining Technical Knowledge
If your website experiences technical issues, it will kill the overall performance of your website on Google. Hence, it is essential to gain mastery in this field. You must be technically sound enough to find and fix issues with your site’s performance.
- Page-Level Optimization
It is essential to optimize organic landing pages. Such pages are keyword targeted that you wish to rank in Google. It is an important SEO fundamental, that you need to learn.
- Understand the Architecture of Site
Another vital fundamental SEO skill is to understand the structure of your website. A website structure is deemed well-developed only if:
- It can help search engine spiders to crawl your website more efficiently.
- It can enhance the overall user experience.
- It can diminish the number of backlinks you need to rank the site efficiently.
- Relationship Building
You can boost your SEO performance by building relationships. You can gain success in SEO by communicating with real people. You cannot get far in this world by being a recluse.
It is essential to build relationships online to exchange value. You can add value in distinct forms including money, content, physical products, and more.
- Develop Content Assets
Content is undoubtedly the king. It is one of the biggest and important elements of a successful SEO campaign. It is essential to learn how you can create keyword target contents.
- Link Acquisition
The next big ranking factor in SEO campaign after the content is backlinks. Even your most impressive piece of content would not be able to deliver results without proper backlinks. Know what a quality backlink is and then understand how it can be used to plan a successful SEO campaign.
- CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization
An important and valuable skill to drive organic traffic to your website is conversion rate optimization. Even more important than this is to know how you can convert organic traffic into revenue and generate more value.
SEO is a tool, and with CRO you can use this tool effectively to generate new email subscribers, sales, or leads.
- Audits
You can be an SEO expert only when you are able to perform SEO audits. With SEO audits you can identify issues that can hurt your website’s performance.
You must run an audit at least every quarterly. This would ensure that you are able to resolve all issues timely and stay on top of the things.
These are important fundamental skills that you need to know to become an SEO expert. But besides learning these skills, it is equally important to take action.
3. Take Action:
You are now aware of what all you are required to learn to become an SEO expert. This means you need to dedicate some time actually to learn the concept.
But this does not mean you have to get into the knowledge acquisition trap. I mean, you don’t have to spend all your time to read and learn the concepts. It is equally vital to take actions on time.
Being a beginner it would be viable to spend 80% of your time reading and learning the concepts and remaining 20% on taking action, once you have understood the formula.
- Know How to Take Action
If you are new to this field, then I would suggest you develop a niche website. It is very easy to begin a niche website, and the good thing is that it involves the very least volume of risk.
- Analyze the Results
Once you have your niche website, you have to analyze the results properly. But before you begin to analyze the results, make sure you don’t end to conclusions too fast.
There are more than 200 distinct ranking signals used by Google’s algorithm. It is possible to make sweeping conclusions without considering the big picture.
Whenever there are fluctuations in organic search results, you need to follow these simple steps:
1. The question ‘why’?
It is essential to have a valid reason for the increase or decrease in your organic search traffic. Did you acquire new backlinks?
Did you modified SEO on-page, change the architecture, subtract or add internal links, holding crawl issues, updates of algorithms, and finally is your rank tracking software correct.
2. Create a Hypothesis
Once you have determined some culprits, you are required to develop a hypothesis. You don’t have to be rigid. Even something simple will work in this context.
3. Have Patience
This is right. You must not take action on the hypothesis right away. It is because the algorithm of Google can change it. Sometimes it is wise to wait rather than practicing a false solution.
You need to wait for a week for a month to see if there are issues or not. If you continue to face issues, then you need to take action.
4. Test Your Actions
You must take action based on your hypothesis only when you are 90% certain about it. The best way to practice this is to take one action at a time. This way, you can test its validity.
If you take more actions at a time, then it would be difficult for you to test and analyze their performance.
5. Using Annotations within Google Analytics
This one is mandatory. You must always annotate your actions in Google Analytics. It is an important check against your hypothesis. This way would help you to see how the action was performed. Whether it has brought in benefits of hurt the results
- Conduct Quarterly Audits
Auditing your SEO campaign on a quarterly basis is another vital thing to do. This way will ensure that stay on top of the things and are able to resolve issues before they become complex. Quarterly audits will also help you to improve your campaign on a regular basis.
- Pivot
In most of the cases, your SEO campaign would require some micro changes. However, there can be situations when you need to revamp the entire SEO strategy.
Every site has its own unique SEO requirement and experience. No matter how much you read or how many case studies you have practiced, you will never end up in a similar situation.
Make sure 20% of your efforts are able to drive 80% of results. Only then it is worth investing your effort and time into taking those actions.
4. Taking It to the ‘Next Level’
There will be points when you have to stop practicing time-intensive SEO tasks. Only this way you can amplify your scale and efforts.
Practicing everything yourself is a good way on the initial basis when you don’t have much capital to invest. But once you start making money, it would be wise to delegate time-consuming tasks to others.
Right from the very beginning, analyze the task that you do. Over time you will see that you are performing the same tasks all the time. However, such tasks need to delegate. This is possible only when you have the right systems in place. This is the way to move ahead with an SEO expert to a business owner.
Here are some practices you can follow to scale your efforts:
- Create
You need to create procedures, policies, and processes for every step or practice you follow in your business. You cannot scale your business without following this step.
- Test
The next step is to have little knowledge of the industrial processes, policies, and procedures. You can even hire someone with little knowledge of the industry. It is because this would help you develop processes that are much easier to understand.
Intricate procedures lead to confusion, and this can be a big-time loss for your business. You would be spending time clarifying those processes. The best way to improve your system is to bring outside perspective. Might be what makes sense to you, may not make sense to others.
- Outsource Resources to Fulfill Systemize Tasks
You can hire employees, hire an intern, or can use freelancers through reputed online sites to see if this is the route you want to go. Assign individuals to respective assignments and procedures to complete the tasks. If they ask too many questions, then this shows your process is intricate. Hence, you need to improve it.
- Support your Campaign with Backup
By this point in time, you must have delegated time-consuming tasks to others. However, you must be potent enough to meet the worst scenario.
For example, the person you hired to fulfill the task disappears without any information. It is important to have strong backup support to handle such situations. You must have some freelancers on – call. These must be people who you can trust and can help you finish the work efficiently.
Another method to backup support your business is to avoid depending on a single person. You can hire 3 or 4 people in order to complete a bundle of tasks.
This way, even if you experience any sudden or unexpected problem, then you would have others to hire and get your work back on track.
- Focus on Big Impact Actions
Building relationships with clients, creating content assets, and promoting content are core impact actions. You need to figure out what are your best actions.
Might be you are excellent at building relationships, or you are great at creating rich content and more.
You need to identify actions that can have the biggest impact on your overall SEO performance. Just focus on those and outsource the rest.
Some SEO tasks that you can outsource are:
- Blogger Outreach
- Infographic Creation
- Content Writing
- Keyword Research
- Competitor Analysis
- Page-Level Optimization
- Technical Optimization
- Citation Building
Conclusion:
You can become an SEO expert only if you are ready to put in all those efforts and time. There will be times when you would fail. But don’t consider this as an end.
Learn from your mistakes and embrace volatility. Everything explained above might sound complex. But once you would start following it step by step, you would be able to stand out as an SEO expert!