How To Become An SEO Expert In Some Simple Steps

The digital marketing industry grows with increased opportunities and a better vision of the future that achieves financial goals in tandem style through SEO expertise.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is basically an improving operation for a website to increase its online visibility regarding users’ search queries on search engines such as Google.

Now, keeping the aspect of the user experience is the major building block of your career as an SEO expert in the digital marketing today.

So, if you think, keeping knowledge of a little of everything would be sufficient, well then you are in for a ride.

As Andrew Davis, former NBC producer, who is a best-selling author and keynote speaker for businesses in regard to business growth says,

“Commit to a niche; try to stop being everything to everyone.”

Being a decade old, no college-affiliated degree is needed to take you on a discovering journey of “how”, “what” and “where” of SEO techniques.

You are left with searching the web for materials to teach yourself. But, only a few hundred experts in the field of SEO make it a rather unconventional profession as there are no fixed or definite rules or facts.

You can’t just declare yourself an SEO expert. You must have the knowledge of SEO expectations of your customers which makes it easy to learn how to become an SEO consultant and provide proper assistance.

Don’t worry though!

Here, In this blog, I am going to clear your queries on ‘How To Become An SEO Expert’ just in some simple steps.

So, let’s get started!

What Is An SEO Specialist?

An SEO specialist is an expert who develops approaches and tactics to increase the volume of visitors to a website and get a high-ranking position in search engine results pages.

These experts collect data and analyze its efficiency regularly, generating more leads for a company, while introducing new opportunities to a business so that they drive growth and profit of a digital business.

So, even though you don’t require specific background experience, such that as college marks or a degree to be an SEO specialist, it does require your commitment, time, and an ever-learning mindset to achieve SERPs goals.

Now, SEO is a fast-paced and interesting profession, which may be due to its ‘work from home’ delight or the ‘no need degree’ charisma.

But thinking about learning some terms and knowing how to perform one or two SEO skills makes you an SEO expert, it is a pipe dream with that mindset!

Because it’s like telling everyone that a person is a bike mechanic after reading a few books on ‘how to repair a bike’ when you don’t even have the knowledge or experience of working on an actual bike.

So, let’s understand what does an SEO specialist do?

The answer to this is that SEO expert targets organic traffic and bring authority to the business’ website online which eventually helps them rank these websites on SERPs and get potential customers which require SEO expertise.

So, here are some really helpful points to take into consideration on the journey of you becoming an SEO expert or Guru.

How To Become An SEO Expert

SEO experts are in-demand professionals today. The relative term expertise doesn’t demand from you to become an expert but most preferably you need to have enough consistency to get results and increase their visibility at a local or global level.

With the factor of visibility, the priority of the relationship between the audience and search engine crawlers becomes important as shown in the statistics below.

Therefore, SEO professionals require an SEO strategy that is made up of many different elements.

And in a standard, SEO business, your sessions would majorly be filled with a number of different activities, tasks, and the obligations would most likely consist of a number of SEO techniques.

Though most SEO experts have never intended to become so but become experts by accident. But for those of you who are reading this article in order to get directed on this journey of becoming an SEO expert.

Here are the points and components of an SEO expert that you may have to perform for marketing businesses to help them achieve their targeted audience and the financial end-goals.

Learn Basics Of SEO

Search engine optimization is the first step to becoming an SEO expert which includes on-page and off-page. The basic SEO is a puzzle that needs to be solved and put together in order to gather the interactive behavior of audiences and as a result search engines.

On-page SEO majorly includes optimized content, tags – header, title, metadata, alt images and text, and many other techniques to approach and achieve a better user experience.

Off-page SEO is creating digital goods such as videos, audios, images, infographics; advertising through social media, guest blogging, and link building.

The technical aspect of SEO aka Technical SEO helps crawlers easily crawl your website to provide better usability, speed, structured data, and hyperlinks.

On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO together make what are SEO skills today, and to put these skills into action with the pure intent of gaining organic traffic is an SEO marketing expert.

Learning such SEO techniques and planning on strategizing for similar is the work of SEO experts to recognize the following during their experience online:

1. User intent for the queries online that would help in the creation of an engaging and compelling content strategy that helps you assess the want, need, and expectations of an industry customer.

2. Google and its crawlers work as user-centric intelligence that helps you achieve your above goal altogether, so understanding the workings of Google and its algorithm helps you build and update your own strategy.

Recognizing both the audience role along with Google’s inner working together builds your basic knowledge of SEO. Your basics must be clear enough and practiced to make you a professional SEO expert that directs businesses to achieve goals.

Know Key SEO Tools

Second to learning the basics of SEO is knowing some key elements or SEO tools that would build a business website and optimizing it for both Google crawlers and their targeted audience.

There are too many tools out in the market with most of them giving the best of their expertise. But you have to search for one that works for your clients and businesses.

Here I provide you with some free tools present online along with their function to help you in becoming an SEO professional:

1. PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights helps in checking a website’s speed and provides both lab & field data about a page.

What you have to do is enter any URL and click “Analyze” and it presents you with a result that shows scores of a website’s page speed which is out of 100.

It gives suggestions to make your site load faster through a controlled and uncontrolled environment.

2. Mobile-Friendly Test

Mobile-Friendly Test measures the easiness of users’ access, readability, and navigation of the site on mobile devices, with a pass-fail score.

It also gives suggestions for improving elements and components within a website.

3. Google Search Console

GSC or Google Search Console is basically a URL inspection tool programmed to crawl your website, perform indexing and serve information about a website directly from Google index.

This information helps in optimizing content by data of site’s impressions, clicks, and positions which are based on user queries. This helps you perform SEO according to the data and bring potential customers to your site.

The Google Search Console provides alerts about technical issues that are directly sent to your emails. These faults are analyzed by Google crawlers within your website.

4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool that helps your site audit, keyword research, top-performing content in regards to your niche, and tracks your rank.

Its tools are Site Audit, Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Content Explorer, and Rank Tracker.

To help you in analyzing the website’s link and overall SEO health, you can even do keyword research for Google or YouTube.

These are some of the tools that help you in addressing SEO needed within a website.

Learn Crawlers Language

This is the perspective of none-the-wiser, the Google Algorithm.

The dynamic nature of the Google algorithm gives it the power to make or break the visibility of a website online.

It keeps on changing 2 to 100 times a year making it the most unstable and unpredictable application so far in the virtual line and market.

The thing you need to understand is the fundamental of their changing algorithm, which is providing a better User Experience.

“Google processes around 63,000 search queries per second.”

Making Google bots to be the expert on “what the target audience needs, require, or want” when they search for a solution to their query through the following practices,

1. Measurement by finding, crawling and understanding the structure of content.

2. Reporting with stored data, organized faults, and indexed content.

Now, the Google algorithm boots down to ranking your website on basis of user experience through the traditional SEO, as shown in the graph below

Also, known as the three pillars of SEO, here are the three traditional SEO factors:

A. Relevancy – Relevancy is when the content of your webpage makes the best match among the lakhs of content provided by other websites. The search intent is clear, the content is well-structured, and the webpages are interlinked and provides relevant answers to the users’ query.

B. Authority – Authority is the power of your website through backlinks, citations, reviews, and content engagements (comments, sharing, etc).

This makes the path of Google crawlers pretty easy so the indexing can be performed through this type of authority should always be from the websites and platforms that have high DA themselves.

C. Technology – Technology is a complex metric that utilizes search intent along with the quality of the content and technical data to facilitate Google crawlers.

The important point is that it depends on website structure as well as coding. It includes the safety of your website, your loading speed, and server configuration so that you are provided with data that is needed for observation, knowing the faults, and improving the website.

These ranking factors are more figuratively applied in Google guidelines and rules that decide the ranking of a website and with other 200+ algorithms working together to accomplish them.

You get the gist that the Google crawlers are based on user experience and how it can become better and you become a better professional SEO expert.

Building A Website: Your Portfolio

As discussed before, reading and getting knowledge about a bike mechanic working, repairing, and advancing a bike won’t work if you have never worked on a real bike.

Tell me yourself would it work if every scholar starts performing the knowledge they attained throughout college, institutions and so.

Would it be applicable, when you don’t even have real-life experience?

No, applicability is only when you have the experience to prove it.

So, the question is how can you establish your expertise in this competitive digital arena?

I would say, simple and direct. Make your own website

The best way to accomplish the EAT guideline by Google that requires Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

And what better proof of your expertise: your own website, which has applied, experimented and practiced all the SEO expert tactics, tools, products, and services.

In short, your website can be your portfolio.

Because nothing would teach you more about SEO best practices than applying them yourself to your own website.

Even in an interview by SearchEngineJournal with Ryan Jones (of Razorfish) told that,

“Don’t just start out trying to do SEO for big brands; start doing SEO for yourself. Make something. Whether it’s a blog, affiliate site, or an app…start doing it for yourself and hone your skills that way.”

This provided an insight into the SEO expertise at its fundamental level that is through one’s own website, blog, app, or youtube content.

Here, it is a case of putting your SEO skill into practice by optimizing your content, link building, and other aspects that prove your portfolio to be prospecting from an SEO perspective.

If you get it, you can bet on it.

Read More: 16 Points New Website Launch Checklist (Never Miss a Step‎)

Keep Yourself Updated With SEO Changes

The Internet is a 24/7 service with no sleep as the algorithms work themselves by using data and analyses and learn to provide better results.

According to Danny Sullivan in a report “How Google keep Search relevant and useful”, 2019 stated that,

“Our search algorithms are complex maths equations that rely on hundreds of variables, and last year alone, we made more than 3,200 changes to our search systems.”

So, keeping up with the SEO changes and Google’s new updates, newly introduced algorithms or guidelines provides you with the strategic changes which could impact the ranking immensely.

For example, The CTR or click-through rate, according to a 2018 report, was stated to have a 30% effect on the ranking that drastically dropped, making it almost irrelevant when factoring for rank on SERPs.

Mobile optimization and voice search optimization took a hike over the years they have been used as a ranking factor with updates such as Features Snippets working for bringing them as an indexing factor.

The best way to keep up with the SEO changes is to follow trusted and established SEO news websites.

Also, Never stop learning. Because the nature of SEO expertise is pretty dynamic, that is it keeps on changing and requires you to be on top of your game that comes with knowledge and Knowledge Is Power.

Master The 4 Elements

The art of optimizing a website for an SEO expert aspirant is to understand the fundamentals of optimizing your website to its basic body of coding.

Take for example, if you want to become an on-page SEO expert,

You would want to know what a business executive or HR needs from the services you provide and to make it unique from those 100s of experts who are your competitors.

So, though the information is the key to validating your authority to form the foundation of belief in your services, your content needs to be user-centric.

It can be a step-by-step tutorial on “how you did it” and can also include valid facts, charts, statistics, and personal experience that shows your expertise. And, if you have your own website, you can apply there.

Some of the elements whose importance you need to be aware of, are provided below, the four elements you need to master:

1. You have to keep checks on your website’s growth through the tools provided by various marketing businesses.

Most of which are freely provided by Google itself such as Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Mobile-Friendly Test (Free), etc.

Updating long-tailed keywords are relevant words and phrases for user queries and are also a major part of your website’s growth.

2. Keep performing tests and experiments such as A/B testing and collecting data such as heatmaps, CTR, and bounce rate.

These experiments and collected data help you build user-centric changes in your website and gives users the experience of their preference regarding their relevant query that directed them to your website.

3. Apply new Google updates such as featured snippets.

The Featured Snippets need content to have the following characteristics of question-answer format, listings, and other such to-the-point features which are also, following voice search optimization and the recent addition to Google algorithm, Semantic search.

These updates are user-centric, that is answers your users’ queries in the simplest and the most relevant form that users prefer.

4. SEO is an underway industry and link building is the biggest support you could get.

In this ever-changing and experimenting industry, you need to have real-life, latest, and researched materials rather than even month-old stuff, and this content, when advertised on various query platforms such as Quora.

Now, to make your own website the most solution-savvy site, you check events like conferences, and workshops; your competitors’ comments section, and tools that could help you do backlinking.

This lets you stay tuned with the industry online as well as builds your authority in the digital arena too.

Follow The Experts In The SEO Field

SEO success requires a lot of time and expertise which needs to form a base through expert knowledge along with patience to apply them for SEO success.

Expert knowledge is knowledge regarding an industry, topic, or approach of an experienced personality that has gained knowledge of customers’ wants (through experiments, observations, and customer feedback and reviews).

The SEO expertise helps you with the current information of the industry which is constantly changing and keeps you updated while giving you better and more experienced opinions about a situation in your industry.

Here is a quote by Denis Waitley stating the importance of experience with a must-to-have learning attitude.

Now, the thing is, Weintraub in regards to the query “How long does mastery of a new skill take?” stated that,

“It usually takes six months or more to develop a new skill.”

So, if you are taking more than 4000 hours of learning to develop a skill, the best way you can learn it is by the potent personalities of the field who have years of experience to help you get a better understanding of the concept.

Practicing expertise in any skill is a completely another scenario according to a famous theory by K Anders Ericsson, a psychologist states,

“It takes 10,000 hours (20 hours for 50 weeks a year for ten years = 10,000) of deliberate practice to become an expert in almost anything.”

So, when you are approaching an SEO skill, you are tackling it with following:

• Updates of search tools
• The constantly changing algorithm
• The ever-changing trends

That is no proper words answers the question of how long does it take to become an SEO expert but instead these ever-evolving algorithms, challenge your SEO specialist skills and you understand the need for regular polishing of your skills.

And what better way than, to keep up with SEO experts in the field and build your business through it.

Now, remaining updated is only half part done, the other half is a combination of regular practice and patiently applying these skills for better results.

So, keep working hard, and keep updated by following experts, and going to such industry- related conferences and workshops. All these accordingly find ranking among your peers, with an increase in organic traffic of your future and present prospects.

Bonus Tips

In this bonus tip, I would really like to address the trending nature of your industry and the importance of using current trends while addressing the global market.

Note that according to a “Search Engine Market Share Worldwide” report by Statcounter,

“Google, with 91.56% percent market share, continues to dominate the Search Engine Market Share Worldwide”

So, learning about the most recent Google search engine algorithm updates makes you a savvy business. Your efforts in applying these changes are to perform SEO which is appreciated with the ranking of your website.

Google algorithm updates are essential as well as the major aspect of your website’s SEO. Therefore, I have listed some such Google updates below:

• Featured Snippet Optimization
• Voice Search
• Google Lens
• Mobile-Friendliness
• EAT In Content
• Long-Form Content
• Video For Effective SEO
• Image Optimization
• The Semantic Search
• Local SEO

The fact that the digital market is a rapidly growing industry, SEO, being its major part, would grow more complex fastly too. This can be observed through prioritizing “Semantic Search” over “Keywords Research” by Google search engine recently.

Therefore, you need to keep up-to-date with recent changes in trends and algorithms which affect your searcher’s user experience as it is the top priority of Google and should be yours too.

On this account, understand that the User Experience is prime to all SEO techniques as it affects the incoming traffic and helps your website rank in the SERPs and increase its visibility which is precisely your business motive.

Conclusion

SEO expert, who is an SEO specialist too, works together with a team of employees in an organization of global or local arena performs optimization of websites in order to achieve higher search engine rankings.

The fundamentally required responsibilities of an SEO expert include knowledge of basic SEO and knowing what search engines require to achieve the traffic, visibility, and guidelines goals.

While also keeping themselves updated through a will regarding digital marketing where keep learning, practicing, and applying on a consistent level is the primary requirement which requires patience, regular check on growth, and building a network.

The points in the articles when applied on a regular and systematic basis help in becoming SEO specialists and a professional SEO expert must know them.

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.