SEO analysts are experts at getting your website indexed in major search engines to drive more organic traffic. An SEO Analyst would prepare your website while keeping into consideration various factors that search engines prescribe for indexing your website and improve its rankings over time.
They use a lot of analytical tools to draw conclusions, brainstorm ideas for improvement, and implement those ideas to make your website better and get the attention it deserves.
Doesn’t this look very simple? Actually, it is not that simple.
Once you begin to break-down the smaller individual tasks that an SEO Analyst performs on a daily basis, you’ll start to imagine how big, complex, time-taking and analytical work is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Skills Required to Become An SEO Analyst
Technically, SEO comprises a lot of small activities which we would discuss in this article.
Each task that an SEO Analyst performs is to make the SEO work in order to better rank the website, page, or product they work on.
An SEO Analyst’s tasks require various skills, such as:
- HTML and CSS
- Content Creation & Curation
- Data Analysis
- Google Search Console & Webmaster Tools
- Excel Sheets or Similar Applications for Reporting
Though, these are not the only things that an SEO Analyst must know. There are several other important things which he should know to do his job.
Let’s now take a closer look at what technical, non-technical, and analytical skills the SEO Analysts have and they use these skills almost every day to do their jobs.
HTML & CSS
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) & Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) are the most basic elements on which the modern websites are built. It is because of these two elements you see beautiful and well-balanced websites.
To become an SEO Analyst you need to have knowledge of these two programming languages. Why these are important?
Because users visiting your website and google bots crawling your website if they don’t understand these on your website they might not be able to give the value it seeks.
So, it is the necessary skill to have for becoming an SEO Analyst. With this, you can figure out if there is an issue with the HTML and CSS of the websites.
Though, there are a lot of tools that you can use to figure out if there is something wrong with the website you are analyzing for SEO.
But, having the knowledge of HTML and CSS would always help you. And it would lessen your dependency on third-party and unreliable tools.
Content Creation & Curation
Content is the mother of everything happening on the web. It’s content because of which the internet is there.
And content is one of the first things search engine bots would look for on your website to decide where to rank your website.
Needless to say that the best content always ranks better on the Search Engine Result Pages. Search Engine Optimization of any website relies heavily on the creation and curation of quality content.
Having knowledge of Content Creation and curation is vital for the SEO analyst.
They analyze your content and data based on which they suggest what type of content is required to fill up the gaps, whether it is should be a bunch of new articles, new images, videos, graphics, infographics, service pages, or product pages which would get the required attention of your visitors to get engaged with your website and take the desired action.
Having meaningful and engaging content is the very first requirement for a website to make their visitors love it.
Keyword Research
SEO Analysts spend a lot of their time researching keywords that are trending and which would drive organic traffic to your website.
Based on their research of the keywords they make their suggestions about which keywords should you use in your content and what kind of content you should create to drive visitors to your website.
Implementation
Based on the suggestions of the SEO Analyst the content is created and published on the website.
After that, they analyze to make sure that the minimum possible scripts and codes are used on the website so that the search engine bots can crawl the content and index them without any problem.
Also, it makes sure that the page load time is minimum on the desktop and mobile devices so that the visitors don’t have to impatiently wait for the pages to load.
Technically, they help you optimize your website codes which don’t interfere with the look and feel of your website and also enhances the user experience and search engine ranks.
Data Analysis
SEO Analysts use data analytics tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Rank Checker, Google Search Console, etc., almost on a daily basis.
These tools help them to understand your data and churn out valuable information to help make your website better in terms of usability, engagement, and search engine friendliness. They mostly study data on:
- Unique visitors to your website
- Repeated visitors on your website
- Time spent by visitors on specific pages
- Rises and falls in organic traffic
- Bounce rate and exit pages
- Demographics of website visitors
- Traffic acquisition types and sources
- Marketing campaign successes and failures
- Goal completions
- Error pages to fix them and resubmit for crawling and indexing in the search engines.
Based on the data they analyze they make suggestions on:
- What type of users is visiting your website?
- What type of content or products would be relevant, meaningful, and engaging for them?
- How can you bring in more organic traffic to your website?
- What should you do to make your website more interactive and intuitive for your visitors?
- What would lead you to your business goals and enhance your brand’s visibility and business growth?
Google Search Console & Webmaster Tools
SEO Analysts help you integrate all your data points like the Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Adsense, Ad Exchange, Big Query, Display & Video 360, Campaign Manager, Search Ads 360 and Postbacks.
This integration of all the properties every data source in one place and make it easy to analyze the data in the way they want to make better decisions.
SEO Analysts are well versed with all the important tools like Google Search Console, Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, etc., which they need to use almost on daily basis to analyze the website performance and other important factors.
These tools and data therein help them to take the required steps for improvisations, alterations, experimentation, and implementation to reach the business goals.
Sitemaps & .txt Files
Sitemaps make it easy for the search engine bots to understand your website’s structure, hierarchy, navigation, pagination, content, images, links, etc.
This helps them extract the required information from your website and index your website as per their algorithm and your website’s compliance with that algorithm.
The SEO Analyst helps you structure your website in a way that would make it easy for the users and web crawlers to interact, engage, crawl and index your website so that the visitors on the website can enjoy simple navigation in a logical hierarchy.
For businesses who are just getting started and want to have the perfect website in place when they launch, an SEO analyst can be of immense help.
The SEO analyst would gather information about your most important products and services, and then make a plan of website structure based on his research on the possible keywords, content type, target audience, geography, etc., which would make the website user-friendly and search engine friendly both.
Recovery from Penalties
SEO Analysts also helps you get out of the penalties which the search engines would have imposed on your website because of any reason whatsoever.
Google and other search engines sometimes ban a website which results in the rank drop and non-visibility of the website in search engine result pages.
Most of the time reason is negative link building and negative domains referring to your website. Of course, Google won’t award your website top ranks if you have negative links referring to your website.
In such cases, an SEO Analyst is of great help. He would thoroughly analyze your website and find out what needs to be taken off the website and which links to be disavowed.
Where build the link from to get your site back in the top of the search engine result pages.
They make changes on your website and inform the search engines to blacklist the websites that have been disavowed by your website.
Disavowing is a denial of responsibility or support for entities that interact with your website, such as other websites that link externally to your website.
Search engines then cut off the links or simply ignore the negative websites linking to your website. This helps your website again get the ranks better than earlier in the search engine result pages.
Reporting
Reporting is what makes you understand the progress of the work being done on your website by your SEO Analyst.
The SEO analysts prepare reports periodically for the client and companies regarding the website’s performance. In their reports, they answer almost every possible question you may have.
Mostly, their reports are based on the number of visitors, page visits and interactions, engagements, goal completions, site usability, traffic sources, etc., which explains how elements fit together to draw the results you want.
I hope till now you would have got a fair idea of what the SEO Analysts do and how they can help businesses get their websites rank better.
12 Steps to Become an SEO Analyst
Now let’s quickly see the steps to become an SEO Analyst, which are as follows:
Step 1: Learn Basic HTML & CSS
You need to learn the basic HTML & CSS so that you can quickly figure out if there are HTML or CSS issues on the website you analyze and get that fixed quickly.
Learning both the languages may take up to 40-45 days, if you seriously want to learn and dedicate your time to it, you can learn these in even 15-20 days.
Step 2: Read about the SEO Best Practices
To become an SEO Analyst you first need to understand the SEO completely. You would need to learn the on-page SEO and Off-page SEO.
However, you probably would not use the Off-page SEO techniques if you work as an SEO Analyst. But, it is good to have knowledge in both forms of SEO.
Step 3: Learn about Keyword Research
Keywords are an important part of the entire SEO work. You would need to learn to research the keyword trends, create keyword themes to write or create content in which search engines could crawl and rank, and your visitors like and engage with your content.
Step 4: Learn Content Creation and Curation
Content is the reason search happens on the internet. To become an SEO Analyst you need to learn how to create quality content and curate it to get the advantage of both the search engine ranks, and better user experience, which gets translated into business growth in terms of sales, customers, etc.
Step 5: Learn about the Search Engine Algorithms
It is very important for the SEO Analysts to have knowledge of the search engine algorithms. They also need to track the updates on those algorithm changes periodically.
Hence, read everything about the search engine algorithm and keep yourself updated on the latest algorithm changes. This would help you prepare your strategy for SEO work.
Step 6: Learn the Analytics Tools
Having expertise in analytical tools is necessary for SEO analysts. Because that’s where they get the data for everything they want to find out. Especially, having knowledge about Google Analytics is very useful in this regard.
So, read about Google Analytics, and also take up the Google Analytics exams to earn the certifications. There are five exams which can be done in less than 2 weeks times.
Exams are Google analytics for Beginners, Advanced Google Analytics, Google Analytics for Power Users, Getting Started with Google Analytics 360, and Google Tag Manager Fundamentals.
Step 7: Learn How to Extract and Use Data
You need to learn how to extract data from Analytics tools and compile them in reports and charts. Simplifying the data would help you make your decisions for SEO changes and to show them to your clients.
Step 8: Learn to Do Technical SEO Audit
You need to have knowledge of doing the technical SEO audits to become an SEO Analyst. Because you will have to do complete SEO analysis for the website to draw conclusions for the changes to make the website rank better and achieve the business goals.
Step 9: Learn to Prepare Charts, Graphs, and Reports in Excel or Google Sheets
Your client or employer would like to see the results of your work, and the performance of their website.
So you need to learn to prepare charts, graphs, and reports in excel sheets or Google Sheets. You can share these with your customers for their understanding and record.
Step 10: Test Your Skills
Once you have done all the above activities you would need to test your skills. The best way is to start by is doing it yourself.
Start a website or blog and implement your knowledge and learnings. Over time you will get better at it. And gradually you will become an expert to offer your services to others.
Step 11: Offer Your Service to Someone
Go online and find people whom you can help by offering your service as an SEO analyst. If you don’t get paid at first, it is OK.
You will get knowledge and expertise working in different types of websites and industries.
That will make you an expert in every type of business domain and industry.
Step 12: Take Your Client’s Feedback and Improvise
You want to get feedback from your clients on your work.
Ask them if they are happy with your services and if there is anything else you can do for them.
Based on your client’s feedback you can improvise and enhance your skills.
How Much SEO Analysts Earn?
SEO is the future and the role of the SEO analysts is crucial. They are in fact in high demand these days. Going forward more SEO analysts would be required to make the business websites drive more organic traffic.
On average an SEO analyst earns around 2-3 lakh rupees a year.
But, again it depends on the skill level, industry of work, nature of the business, geography, and many other factors.
Top SEO Analysts earn up to 30-40 lakhs a year.
Summary
Search Engine Optimization directs the future of a website and the role of the SEO analyst is crucial in getting the visibility and exposure it deserves.
It is the efforts of search engine optimization analysts that are shaping a better future for the internet, consumers by offering them meaningful and valuable content.
You guessed it – we’re experts in SEO Analysis. Get in touch if you need help with SEO for your website to grow your business.
