More and more people are entering the SEO industry, but there is still a constant need for new specialists. Above all, there is a shortage of SEO professionals who have more than just a few years of experience and who have actually become skilled at the craft during their first years in the industry.
Here, you get a chance to become one of the few who truly make a rocket career in our field, as some really do just that.
SEO is a complex subject with some fuzzy edges. To begin with, you need to understand how the small details work, such as titles, meta descriptions, navigation, JavaScript issues, and all the hands-on improvements you make on a site. To truly become a specialist, you also need to be able to lift your gaze, see how the site fits into its context, how Google chooses which pages on the site matter, and why the visitor clicks on that particular search result. Here are our five best tips for those who want to become a real pro at SEO.
SEO is not just about technology
Something we often encounter when recruiting is that many people who are relatively good at SEO tend to be strongest in the technical aspects. Sure, it’s great to be able to run Screaming Frog on a site, change 16,000 titles, and handle regex, but in my eyes, that’s not typically a job for a senior. If you want to land a good job as an SEO, it’s more about understanding what currently and in the future will impact a site. Naturally, our specialists also do tasks where they run Screaming Frog, but it’s not that knowledge that makes them who they are. It’s more about the ability to interpret the results that separates someone who is employable from someone who isn’t.
Making the judgment about which pages should belong in which categories of the 16,000 pages is a more common task, and that’s the understanding you need. How do you acquire that knowledge, you might ask? Well, unfortunately, it’s a bit fuzzy. It’s about differentiating between relevance in the eyes of people and in the eyes of a search engine. Particularly in Sweden (and other small countries), Google and other search engines are really bad at understanding what is related to what, even though they claim otherwise. For a long time, Google didn’t even realize that SEO and “sökmotoroptimering” (search engine optimization) were related, so the two search results gave completely different outcomes. It’s still easy to spot the result of that issue, where it’s very difficult to rank for both terms with the same page, even though we, unlike Google, easily understand that they mean the same thing.
What complicates it further is that you also need to be able to deliver relevant landing pages for potential customers. They also want relevance just as much as Google does, but they define it a little differently. Here, you need to be able to find the solution.
Learn filters, it’s essential for survival
What separates someone who truly understands SEO from someone who has just managed to rank something at one point is often the understanding of filters. Many who have ranked for a moderately difficult keyword at some point feel like they’ve found the solution. If you get a ranking in six months and make money from it, that’s great, but it doesn’t automatically mean you can repeat that for 100 other sites, on 100 different keywords, over several years. Many SEO professionals have achieved good rankings, only to get stuck in a filter months, a year, or even years later, disappearing entirely. We can easily remember two sites that at different times ranked first for the prestigious term “sökmotoroptimering” (search engine optimization); I’m talking about sokmotoroptimering.nu and smotop.se. The latter was recently sold for pocket change, and neither is visible in the search results anymore, although sokmotoroptimering.nu sometimes pops up at around position thirty or something similar.
No disrespect to Helena or David, who got their sites to the first place, it was certainly profitable during the period they held that spot, but it’s naturally a hard blow when the Penguin or another similar filter hits like a hammer on a grape over the site (getting the first spot there is quite an achievement—besides Wikipedia and these two, only Sokmotorkonsult.se, while I ran it, has kept that spot over the years). Taking that position, or any other position for that matter, and holding it over time is a completely different thing than achieving it for a short period. To do that, you need to keep track of Google’s filters and manual actions. These often directly contradict the regular algorithm, for example, Penguin penalizes anchor text-rich links, something that the regular algorithm rewards.
Unlike the previous point, filters are somewhat easier in one sense. There is plenty of material online about them, but seeing their effect in practice requires a lot of experimentation. Also, remember to sift through the information; if you’re rambling about Hummingbird or Caffeine, we’ll stop listening.
Understand the technology
Now, I did say in the first point that SEO is not about technology, and I stand by that. However, there are a number of things you simply must know. Take the PageRank algorithm, for example, which is the very foundation of how Google values pages. The algorithm is well-known; it’s published on Stanford.edu. There are no excuses for an aspiring SEO specialist not understanding PageRank. A lack of this knowledge leads to absurdities in the profession. For instance, this is where the recommendation to have the “flattest” sites possible comes from, something that is directly harmful to your SEO.
A search engine is a crawler, a series of algorithms, and a way to present data. It’s a machine. Granted, it’s a complex machine, often so complex that those who work with it can’t predict how the results of a change will look. However, it’s also a machine that is incredibly easy to overestimate. Statements like “Google should understand” or “Real facts will rank better” will quickly end the interview, and we’ll say, “We’ll get back to you if something comes up.”
What you need to do is be thorough when learning the basics, don’t skip Google’s fundamentals while dreaming that social signals will be important. If someone needed a Facebook expert, there are thousands to hire just in Sweden. What everyone needs is someone who actually understands where a search engine stands today.
Half of the job is understanding people
A huge part of SEO is understanding people. If it’s important to understand the mythical algorithm, it’s almost just as important to understand how we behave online. If you don’t understand what I’m looking for when I type a keyword into Google’s search box, you can never offer a solution to my problem. Furthermore, people act differently online than they do on the street. Learn to understand people on the internet. A great example of this is why everyone separates words in their search phrases. Why on earth would someone search for “matjes sill” (pickled herring) or “cykel reparatör” (bicycle repairman) when they fully understand how to write in their everyday life? It’s because they don’t type real questions into their search engine; they start with a word and refine it. First, they searched for just “matjes,” and when that didn’t work, they added “sill” at the end.
Learn for yourself
One of the most important pieces of advice I would give is to listen less and do more. The internet is full of nonsense, and there’s no difference in the SEO industry. In fact, it seems to be the opposite here—once someone has heard of SEO, they start a blog to explain how it works. You need to learn for yourself, and you can’t just follow someone else. You need to go through several dozen projects to get a basic understanding of search engine optimization. It’s you who needs to learn, and no matter how much we, the bloggers, share, it’s the execution that makes the difference. It’s doing SEO in practice that sets a top-tier SEO professional apart from everyone else, even though, ironically, you actually end up working less on the execution as you get better.
But there are so many SEO experts who don’t live up to these points?
Yes.
Magnus Bråth
CEO
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.