4 Things You Have to Know If You Want to Start a Career in SEO

Zoi Kotsou -

If you are dreaming about the start of your professional path in search engine optimization (SEO), you have come to the right place. This article reveals the essential tips you have to be aware of in case you want to start your career in SEO.

While around 10 years ago, it was hardly anything clear about search engine optimization; nowadays, it is hard to imagine any company with implemented digitalization without an SEO team.

Moreover, the number of open vacancies tends to grow in many countries worldwide, so starting your path in SEO could be really a great idea. So let’s have a more detailed look at what skills are needed for an SEO-related job, what SEO specialists usually do, and how to start a career in SEO.

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Who is an SEO specialist?

In brief, an SEO professional is a person who is responsible for the tasks related to the optimization processes for the website. The effective work of an SEO specialist tends to make a website visible within search engines. That way, a website will appear right in front of the users’ eyes on the search results list once they make searches that match the content of the website.

There are no strict requirements characterizing an SEO specialist because this role is currently emerging on the market. And there are no university programs for Bachelor's or Master’s degrees that will make you a professional in the sphere.

However, there are already many proprietary courses created by different private and public companies designed to shape SEO specialists. They will tell you more about the basics each SEO specialist should know, starting from submitting a guest post to analyzing the technical characteristics of a website.

Things to Know to Start a Career in SEO

Before you embark on your professional journey as an SEO specialist, you should get to know more about this profession. This will help you to decide upon the preparation steps to take before sending your CVs to different companies.

There is no universal recipe for becoming an SEO specialist, though we have gathered 4 things for you. Those would be helpful for you to understand the role and the working ambiance of an SEO specialist:

  • Necessary skills each SEO specialist should have.
  • How to start a career in SEO.
  • Tasks of SEO specialists.
  • Tools for SEO specialists.

What are the necessary skills for any SEO specialist?

The SEO specialist’s role appeared not so long ago, and it continues to obtain its tangible form. That is why a good SEO specialist is a dynamic learner, firstly, who never stops exploring the current trends and tendencies in the market. An SEO tends to be always updated on the newest technological solutions, Google algorithms’ alterations, market dynamics, and many other essential things.

Based on the most recent job announcements, we have gathered a set of skills that most companies usually mention in the "Required Skills" section. Those are categorized into 2 groups – technical and non-technical skills.

Technical

Skills in this group could be also considered as the “meat” or the technical basis that each SEO specialist should be aware of. Those would help an SEO master to perform a quality website audit, make an analysis based on it, and submit a suggestion to the directory board on how to promote a website further on search engines.

The most required technical skills are:

  • SEO terminology.
  • HTML basics.
  • SEO components.
  • SEO tools.
  • Understanding how search engines and crawlers work.
  • Understanding how Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
  • Working with XML sitemaps.

Acquiring the necessary technical SEO would answer the question of how SEO works and how to take benefit of that. However, a range of technical skills would never transform into effective results without non-technical or soft skills.

Non-technical

To reinforce the effect of strong technical skills, a decent SEO specialist should also consider developing soft skills. Those would facilitate collaboration both with colleagues and external stakeholders. Below are provided the most frequently non-technical skills desired by companies in search of SEO specialists:

  • Research skills.
  • Communication skills.
  • Writing skills.
  • Market analysis.
  • Time management.

Where to start an SEO career from?

If you are a complete beginner willing to start your professional career path as an SEO specialist, it is highly recommended that you look through any available courses on the web. Those would help you to better understand the technical part of SEO first.

Moreover, online or offline SEO courses would also help you to develop soft skills that would considerably facilitate your work.

Those who already feel that they have enough technical skills and knowledge in possession might also consider courses in dedicated SEO subjects that you are particularly interested in.

Also, you should extensively explore available SEO tools, as those are used by any SEO specialists on a daily basis in their work.

Once you are confident in your readiness to embark on your career path in SEO, compile your CV.

Meanwhile, look through the list of available job positions related to SEO and prepare for your first interviews.

What are the typical tasks of an SEO specialist?

By analyzing dozens of job postings asking to join an SEO specialist to their team, we have outlined a list of typical tasks for this role. Those will help you to get an idea of what your typical working day as an SEO specialist would be like.

1.   Create and optimize an SEO strategy. Owing to your technical skills, you will be able to make a website audit and make market analysis. Based on that, a deliberate enterprise SEO strategy and content plan should be created.

2.   Monitor the website performance. Review the metrics for the website performance on a regular basis to understand whether it is aligned with the predefined SEO goals. This is possible with the help of SEO tools.

3.   Research keywords and create/update content. As keywords make up the core of the content creation strategy, those should be selected properly. Use dedicated SEO tools to see which keywords would help you to rank high on search engines and use them in your texts.

4.   Communicated and collaborate with other colleagues. This is where communication and writing skills come in handy. Collaboration with other colleagues from the marketing department or other departments would help you to perform your tasks effectively.

Essential SEO tools

As you see, almost any SEO task involves an SEO tool for making precise data analysis and further strategies for improvement. Most SEO tools are designed to track the website performance metrics, including page visits or average time spent on the page.

Also, you will make all the keyword research tasks using SEO tools. Such task as backlink profile check is also possible only with SEO tools.

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Summary

Starting your career in SEO is very perspective these days, though you have to consider many things before plunging into this sphere. Firstly, make sure you possess a range of technical and soft skills that will help you to cope with everyday SEO tasks.

It is crucially important that an SEO specialist understands how the search engine work, knows the website components and is confident when analyzing the obtained data. If you feel that some skills are lacking, do not hesitate to explore courses that would help you to become a qualified SEO specialist. Moreover, explore SEO tools that would facilitate your everyday work.