In today’s article I’m going to show you exactly how to become an seo expert. Infact the strategies and approaches that i’m about to share with you. Today i’ll reveal how you can become an seo expert in record time. I’ll also show you real life examples of how some of my readers learned seo. And how they ultimately became seo experts.
I launched my first website over 10 years ago. And i quickly realized that seo was gonna make or break that site success. So i set out to learn as much as i could and i quickly realized that i had no business becoming an seo expert. I knew nothing about coding html content or marketing. And after years of practice i finally figured out seo on my own.
And thanks to that real world experience i now reckon the top three of google for competitive keywords like seo campaign seo checklist and backlinks.
1. Master the fundamentals of SEO
Okay enough bragging let’s get into the steps starting with step number one master the fundamentals of seo. This is a step that a lot of people skip over and it hurts them and hey i’m not judging when i first started to learn about seo. I pretended that i understood stuff that it really didn’t i mean i kind of knew what backlinks were. And i kind of understood why title tags were important but i didn’t really understand how it all fit together.
I was kind of like a basketball player trying to hit half court shots before i even learn how to dribble in fact a buddy of mine jeff recently fell into the same trap. Jeff is helping the company that he works for with his seo. And he recently emailed me saying dude so i just added a bunch of keywords to this page how long will it take to rank.
So yeah jeff was like me back in the day he kind of gets seo but not really which is why it’s important to drill down in the fundamentals. If you want a good primer on how search engines work i recommend checking out moz’s beginner’s guide to seo and if you want to learn more about seo best practices and how they all fit together check out the seo marketing hub..
2. Put SEO into practice – Become an SEO Expert
Okay so now that you have the fundamentals down let’s move right into step number two. Put seo into practice you can read articles about seo all day long. But if you want to be good at seo you need to do seo and when it comes to practicing your seo skills.
You have three main options your first option is to practice seo on your own website this is how i got started with seo. And it’s the way i recommend that most people learn how to become experts. Here’s why when you run your own website.
You can make changes on that site fast there’s no need to ping your boss on slack to see if it’s okay to change a title tag. there’s no need to email your client’s web designer to add an image to a page see something that needs to be changed change it.
And see the results the cycle of test learn improve moves 10 times faster with your own property than with someone else’s website. Plus when you work on your own website you can see the million other things that go into making a site successful.
Some of which aren’t really directly related to seo i’m talking about things like website design copywriting social media building an email list and more. In other words running your own site helps you become what’s known as a t-shaped marketer.
A t-shaped marketer is someone that’s an expert in one area but you also know about other related subtopics. For example if you’re reading this article you obviously want to become an seo expert. So in that case seo will be your main thing. But it’s also helpful to know a little bit about social media ux and even email marketing.
Example
For example a backlinko reader named gerald norden is a former nasa scientist that recently launched his own real estate website. According to gerald he was able to figure out seo on his own super fast. Because he was testing on his own website as another example. Another backlinker reader micah runs a website that helps kids in the netherlands. Learn math and thanks to her seo expertise.
Micah’s site now gets 200 000 visitors per month which is even more impressive when you take into account. That there are only 17 million people in the netherlands. Again micah reports that practicing seo on her own helped her learn the ropes in record time. that said running your own website isn’t the only way to learn seo you can also become an seo expert by working with clients.
Prepare yourself
This probably sounds a little bit weird i mean if you’re not seo expert yet. Why would someone hire you hi yeah i know nothing about seo wanna hire me. It’s a good question here’s the answer first off even if you’re not a legit seo expert yet the fact that you’re watching this article puts you ahead of 90 of the people that run websites also seo is a lot of work.
And you’ll find that most busy small business owners will be happy to pay you to take seo off their hands. last but not least you’re not going to get paid a lot for your first few gigs. So you can think it more like an apprenticeship or an internship that way there’s no pressure to perform miracles.
For example backlinko reader felix norton got started with seo when he helped clients in his area with their local seo. Another way to practice seo is to work somewhere as an in-house seo or at an agency. The big advantage here is instead of going at it alone you’re surrounded with people that already know seo. And it’s their job to help you get up to speed so you tend to learn things fast.
3. Experiment and learn
Learn if there’s one thing that separates seo experts from seo newbies it’s this seo experts are always testing that said seo can be a tricky thing to test. So if you want to run seo experiments here are a few things to keep in mind. As you go through the process thing number one is to focus on testing the right things.
In theory you can test literally anything but in practices i recommend focusing on these things. And if you want to get more advanced you can test link building strategies content formats and paid social media promotion.
For example a while back i wanted to see if interactive content would help reduce my bounce rate so when i launched this mega list of seo tools. I added an interactive filter to the top of the page as it turned out my bounce rate and time on site on the interactive page was better compared to other pages on my site.
So i decided to use the same interactive element to all of my really long list posts and the results were similar. This is something that i never could have learned from reading blog posts or watching youtube videos. It had to come from an experiment so thing number two to keep in mind as you test is your change isn’t always the cause.
in other words correlation doesn’t always mean causation. For example take a look at this organic traffic report from my google analytics.
Google Updates
Now over the time span you’re looking at here i didn’t make any major changes to my site. But as you can see my traffic went up and down as google made various tweaks to the algorithm. After all google reports that they make over 3 000 changes to their algorithm every year. And when i first started running seo experiments. I would assume that if my rankings went up or down it was because of something i did.
But more often than not it was just google making one of their 3000 changes that they make every year. For example i add a few keywords to a page see my rankings go up from number seven to number five.
And it assumed that my keyword optimization caused the bump it might have been the cause. But it could also just be google’s algorithm doing its thing. Which leads us to thing number three look for big consistent results.
4. Scale your SEO tasks – Become an SEO Expert
Our last step step number four scale your seo tasks. Now it’s one thing to know how to optimize a title tag. But how do you optimize 70000 title tags on an ecommerce site. That’s where scaling comes into play. And I’m going to show you two real-life examples of people that scaled important seo tasks.
The first task that you’ll eventually need to scale up is content production on the surface scaling content. Is really easy all you need to do is just hire a bunch of freelance writers on upwork. But scaling good content that’s a different story for that you need a system. A system for finding blog post topics doing keyword research outlining writing editing and design. Well backlinko reader bob warfield founder of cnc cookbooks has a scalable content system that works great for his business. Bob’s company publishes 12 posts every single month and despite being in a quote boring niche. His content is really good his secret bob and his team follow a repeatable blueprint for creating high quality content.
Here it is find keywords that customers search for using kw finder and ahrefs sort the keywords by search volume. And download that list to excel then toss out any keywords with a keyword difficulty of 30 or more.
Skyscraper Technique
Use the skyscraper technique model to create the content and then optimize that content for seo. And bob uses a google sheet like this to keep everything super organized. As bob put it the method i just shared with you is the foundation for making sure every article comes out great.
The other task that can be tricky to scale is link building especially if you’re doing a hundred percent white hat seo. I mean sending 10 outreach emails is really no big deal. But how do you send a hundred or a thousand without being spammy. The key is personalization when you personalize emails not only do you avoid sending lame emails. But your outreach converts 10 times better in fact backlinko reader kalin yablonsky makes personalization a top priority at his agency. So in addition to having detailed processes for every step of the link building process. He also asks his clients to help him understand the industry.
They’re in that way he can send laser targeted outreach emails that will work in that niche very cool. There you have it my four-step process for becoming an seo expert.
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