What is an SEO Specialist?
A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist checks, analyzes, and adjusts a website to make it load faster and more user-friendly, as they incorporate keywords throughout the website pages to help search engines categorize it properly. This process leads to a better ranking on the SERP (search engine results page.)
An SEO professional optimizes a website to ensure a great user experience while working with your company on brand awareness, increasing website traffic. Simply put, an SEO Specialist is not much different than any other traditional marketing professional in that their objective is to increase sales for the clients they work for.
An SEO Specialist can greatly improve a website’s exposure across the internet by conducting keyword research and using SEO tools such as Google Analytics. Search Engine Optimization has significant benefits for any business because it helps potential customers across the internet find the services and products that they’re looking for. Some SEO specialists collaborate with other members of a team to develop new strategies or improve the management of social media platforms in order to increase user engagement and website traffic.
What Kind of Things Does an SEO Specialist Do?
Whether working for a digital marketing firm, a company’s digital marketing department, or as a freelancer for a client, SEO Specialist job responsibilities vary; however, the vast majority of SEO Specialists will cover all or most of the following:
- Develop optimization tactics to help the company’s website rank better in search engine results.
- In order to obtain optimum ROI from sponsored search ads, the SEO Specialist will run experiments, collect and evaluate data and results, and uncover trends and insights.
- Manage SEO campaign costs while staying within budget, predicting monthly costs, and settling discrepancies.
- Work closely with the web development team to ensure that SEO best practices are followed across the website’s content. Work with the editorial and marketing departments to promote SEO in content creation and marketing.
- Assume accountability for search engine marketing page optimization.
- Continuously study, find, and optimize new SEO keywords for inclusion on the company’s website and marketing materials.
- Investigate and apply suggestions for search engine optimization.
- Create a link-building strategy and put it into action.
- Increases SEO placements for desired keywords, change the website architecture, content, linking, and other aspects.
- Establish quantifiable objectives to show that your marketing efforts are improving.
- To better evaluate the efficacy of your SEO strategy, uses SEO tools like Google Analytics to track daily performance indicators.
- Manages SEO strategy, collaborates with colleagues in the marketing department.
- To boost website search results, provides intriguing and high-quality website content, such as blog articles and page descriptions.
Where Do SEO Experts Come From?
The majority of SEO Specialists and other search engine optimization professionals start out in other sectors before honing their technical talents to go into this field of expertise.
Unfortunately, there’s not a college degree specifically related to SEO, and there’s not a marketing program that will give you the specific skills you’ll need to succeed in this area; most SEO Specialist positions do require a Bachelor’s degree in a related field such as business, marketing, or communications.
Most SEO experts in the field seek extra certification to show potential employers that they have the required abilities to execute their digital marketing strategy, increase search engine traffic, and ensure that their website ranks towards the top of search engine results pages. There are courses like BrainStation’s Search Engine Optimization Certificate Course that will also allow you to produce actual work that showcases that specialist’s ability, and it will be done under the supervision of an SEO industry expert who understands what employers are looking for.
Even with a Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field, you will almost certainly need to also have attained some sort of additional certification to demonstrate that you are up to date on the ever-changing field of SEO.
What Are the Things a Successful SEO Expert Needs to Succeed?
To be successful in the field of digital marketing and search engine optimization, a competent SEO specialist must possess the following important characteristics:
- A Basic Understanding of SEO’s Three Levels
Search engine optimization has three tiers, and any professional SEO Specialist should include all three when designing a marketing strategy:
- The non-content parts of your website are referred to as technical.
- This section contains opportunities for improving a website’s backend structure and basis. A large part of this task will be conducting a complete website analysis, which will reveal technical SEO chances to improve website speed, indexing, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, and architecture.
- Technical SEO will help increase a website’s readability, which will improve the user experience and show search engines that the site is good.
- On-page SEO refers to improving the content on your website to assist search engines grasp the topic of your material and recognize it as a useful resource.
- On-page SEO utilizes features such as keywords, meta tags, internal links, and HTML title tags in order to enhance search engine traffic and ensure that your website appears near the top of Google results.
- Off-page optimization uses a range of link-building techniques to strengthen the association between your website and other websites. Off-page SEO also involves measures to improve a website’s reputation, which shows search engines that a website is a reliable source and, as a result, should be towards the top of search engine results.
All the tiers of search engine optimization contribute to how well your website is ranked within Google search results, according to SEO professionals.
Marketing Intelligence
The technical components of SEO are undoubtedly important, and recognizing the issues that may be causing Google to bury your page in the search results is essential. However, after you’ve gotten over that, SEO jobs are a lot like other digital marketing or even traditional marketing positions in that you’ll need to generate and position content that describes the consumer’s benefit while moving them closer to a sale.
The tough aspect is coming up with material that will appeal to both individuals who are searching online and Google’s algorithm. That is an art that comes with time and practice.
But, in order to truly connect as an SEO Specialist and a digital marketing professional in general, you’ll need more than that. To be truly successful in an SEO role, you must think about content marketing on a deeper level, looking at consumer psychology and the target audience you’re marketing to, the social media landscape, web design and development, marketing strategies, and overall business goals that help drive brand awareness and conversions.
The Ability to See the Big Picture
As we’ve seen, SEO affects every aspect of your business. Because company websites are so vital, SEO is inextricably linked to the rest of these factors.
Having precise goals for SEO marketing is beneficial. Is it your objective as an SEO Specialist to focus on search engine rankings, driving traffic, increasing brand awareness, or conversions (converting a visitor to a customer)?
An SEO Specialist will be successful if they can define those goals and then execute an SEO plan while keeping the organization’s wider goals in mind.
Excellent Communication Skills & a Willingness to Work Together
Sales, customer service, web development, analytics, IT, marketing, and other divisions of a company will all work with an SEO Specialist. It’s also not always clear why making modifications to a website can improve SEO and, as a result, increase traffic and conversions. That’s when your ability to communicate comes in handy.
SEO experts must be able to explain why certain modifications are important and how they will help the website and the company’s bottom line in a persuasive and understandable manner. Furthermore, part of your job entails working on the website with teams from various experiences and perspectives.
Not only that but you may be involved in the development of specialized content for the site, so make sure your writing abilities are up to par for SEO tasks.
Adaptability & Curiosity
Google’s algorithms for ranking search engine results are continually changing. Depending on your perspective, this could be either annoying or fun for you, but a competent SEO Specialist embraces the task with enthusiasm.
To succeed in the SEO industry, you’ll need to be adaptable. Continuous learning is beneficial to many professionals, but an SEO Specialist requires it to thrive. Furthermore, if you’re in charge of a single company’s website, you can’t afford to be complacent; it’s your responsibility as an SEO expert to continually analyze its content to check if it adheres to ever-changing SEO best practices.
In Closing
Thank you for stopping by today! If you are in need of an SEO Specialist then we’d love to connect with you! Please reach out to us through the link below and we’ll set up a time to talk. We offer free consultations and an SEO audit of your website.
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