Before jumping to the question of How to Become an SEO Expert, first, you need to understand what is SEO and what is its importance.
What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is used in digital marketing for long-term results. The objective is to drive organic traffic to a website.
Unlike paid marketing techniques like Google Ads, Affiliate Marketing, etc., which are expensive and short-term, SEO requires time, effort, dedication, and most importantly thorough knowledge of the SEO.
It is no secret that the entire web world revolves around the content. Content comprises keywords that make the content discoverable in the search engine result pages.
You should read The Definite Guide to Keyword Selection. It will give you a good idea of selecting your keywords.
So, if you want to increase organic traffic on your website, which you obviously want because you want to achieve a higher ranking for your keywords which would generate more sales on your website.
In that case, you should learn and know everything about SEO, and if you know everything about SEO you would become SEO Expert.
Becoming an SEO expert is not very difficult, it’s a skill that you can learn and practice. It helps you to achieve better search results for your keywords and website.
You can also offer your services to others if you have the skills of an SEO expert.
As I explained earlier, SEO is one of the best digital marketing techniques to drive organic traffic to your website.
I’ve been working on SEO for the last 10 years and in this post, I will run you through my journey and give you insights that will help you learn the steps you need to follow to become an SEO expert.
Why You Should Become an SEO Expert?
The question “Why You Should Become SEO Expert?” is important to discuss before we learn about the steps of becoming an SEO expert.
Since you know that SEO is significant to get your website noticed in the search engine result pages. And every business website requires the proper attention of the visitors to get them converted as customers.
Hence, having expertise in SEO implementation on your website would help you keep more visitors coming on your website.
Benefits of Becoming an SEO Expert
There are many advantages of becoming an SEO Expert, a few of them are as follows:
Learn a New Skill
It’s always good to learn a new skill which would help you in your career and life.
And learning about the SEO would always help you with your website and finding freelance or full-time work if you are looking to make your career in the SEO field.
Increase Your Website’s Rankings and Traffic
There is a saying that if you want to get your work done perfectly, then do it yourself.
Hence, this is the most obvious reason why you should learn and practice SEO to become an SEO expert.
No Dependency on SEO Consultants or SEO Agencies
Obviously, if you know SEO very well you won’t want to hire an SEO consultant or SEO agency for doing SEO work on your website.
Rather you would want to use that money to grow your business by serving your customers in a better way.
Maybe you want to use that money to reward your employees to keep them motivated.
Helps in Hiring a Better Workforce
Employees in an organization are its best asset. Best and skilled employees make an organization grow faster.
If you want to hire people for your online business, and if you would have knowledge about SEO you would gaze the skills of your new hirings you’re hiring for the SEO work and hire a better workforce which would help you grow your organization faster.
Save Money on Paid Ads
If you do your SEO yourself in a better way that would drive you good quality traffic which results in better sales and revenue.
And you don’t spend your money on paid ads to get that same quality of traffic on your website, which is often very expensive.
Reduce Marketing Cost
Hiring SEO agencies or SEO consultants adds up your marketing costs. But you can save a lot of money if you can do SEO yourself than having to hire an SEO consultant.
Offer Your Services to Others
If you know about SEO you can offer your services to others and get paid for your services.
Opportunities to Teach Others
People want to learn from the experiences of experts. If you become an SEO expert you can teach others about SEO and get paid for doing so.
Keep in mind that in online business SEO is not optional, rather it is mandatory. You cannot keep burning money on advertisements for a longer time.
But, having the right SEO practices implemented on your website can make a huge difference.
14 Simple Steps to Become SEO Expert
Now that you have seen the advantages of becoming an SEO expert and you’re convinced to become an SEO expert yourself, let’s talk about what are the steps in becoming an SEO expert.
Step1: Learn How the Search Engines Work
The very first step into the learning of becoming an SEO expert is to learn about search engines. Understanding how search engines work is very important.
Because the whole concept of SEO or Search Engine Optimization revolves around the search engines.
Though Google’s completely dedicated a page on the working of search engines.
This page is quite explanatory, and you should go through it to get a thorough knowledge of SEO. Here is the link to Google’s Page on How Search Engines Work.
There are a lot of machine learning, algorithms, and data signals which are considered by the search engines while ranking a page in the search engines.
So, it is advisable to spend some time learning and understanding how the search engines work, which will help you understand the basic concepts, and later on it will help you understand the complexity of the search engines and how you can make your SEO strategy to get best results from SEO.
Step 2: Learn About SEO Content Writing
Content is at the very core of the SEO, it is the king of the entire online world.
The only reason a search happens on the internet is because of the content.
So, you need to learn content writing, and how you can write LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) content.
Old black hat techniques like keyword stuffing, link farming, etc., are now redundant. And using those techniques may result in penalization of your website.
What works now is relevant content, which the users can consume.
Hence, spending your time writing good quality content would help you in your SEO task and get better results in the search engines.
Google prefers content written with LSI.
Step 3: Learn About HTML & CSS
For becoming an SEO expert it is important to have knowledge of HTML and CSS because these are the coding languages that are the most preferred languages search engine bots crawl.
Though it is not necessary, it is advisable to learn the basics of these languages.
Probably at some point in time, you might find that the website you are working for is experiencing HTML and CSS issues, which is hampering your expected SEO results, and if you know the languages you can get that fixed quickly.
Step 4: Learn About Keyword Research
Keywords are the main ingredient in the content which makes them appear in the searches.
Hence, keywords should be researched very well and you should make sure that the keywords are included in the content, meta tags, title, alt image tags, etc. so that the search engine bots can thoroughly read and index your content.
Though keyword research is the most complex part of SEO.
You should spend your time researching the keywords because the better your research better would be the results.
Here is a quick guide you can refer to for the keyword research.
Step 5: Understand the Basic Concepts of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEO is one part of the entire digital marketing and hence, an SEO expert should also look at the other aspects of digital marketing.
SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the complete package of the equation.
It comprises paid marketing, Google Ads, Affiliate Marketing, Link Building, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization, Content Marketing, Online Reputation Management, and many more.
Have a clear understanding of the other aspects of search engine marketing so that you can actually expect what kind of results you would drive from your SEO activities.
Step 6: Understand What is SEO
Simply put SEO is not just about content, keywords, and link-building, it’s much more than that.
The real objective of SEO is to provide users a great experience, and informative content, and give them exactly what they are looking for.
As an SEO expert, your goal should not be just about getting more search engine traffic (organic traffic) but it should be about converting that traffic into recurring visitors and customers.
SEO is comprised of many subcomponents, the most important are:
- Technical SEO: This part of SEO is about crawling and indexing, wherein the search engine bots crawl your website and index it based on the content and keywords you have used. This part also comprises making your website’s speed faster, mobile-friendly pages, readable fonts, etc.
- On-Page SEO: This part of SEO is about optimizing your page, content, keywords, meta tags, URL, image alt tags, sitemaps, etc. Technically everything you do on your website to make it more user-friendly is part of the On-Page SEO.
- Off-Page SEO: This part of the SEO comprises directory submissions, link-building, social media promotions, and any other activity you do to drive traffic from other websites on your website.
- Content SEO: This part of SEO is about optimizing the content on your website. Here you write your content based on your keyword research and write appropriate titles, headings, and sub-headings, which make your content better for both search engines and website visitors. Remember when your visitors love your content then Google loves your content. Hence, make sure that your content is really informative, engaging, and useful.
Step 7: Get the Right SEO Training to Become SEO Expert
The Internet is an ocean of the information and finding the right information from the Internet is very tough.
When you want to search for information on the internet about SEO you will find thousands of websites, but obviously, you won’t have that much time to go through each and everything.
So, you need to consume the right content which enhances your knowledge and doesn’t waste your valuable time.
It’s better to learn from the best in the industry, either it is one-on-one training or whether it is from the writings of the SEO experts and industry reports.
There are a few good SEO training institutes that can help you learn SEO faster and save you time and money too. Your chances of making mistakes go down in that case.
But, if you choose to learn the SEO on your own you can do that as well. Below we will be discussing a few very important and useful resources you can use to learn SEO:
Google Digital Garage
Even though this course designed by Google covers everything you need to know about Digital marketing.
Since SEO is a part of digital marketing, I would recommend this course so that you understand where SEO fits into the entire digital marketing landscape.
This course is not designed for SEO professionals or people who want to learn SEO in order to become an SEO Expert, but this course is a great resource if you want to familiarize yourself with online marketing.
SEO Guide from Google
This is the most authentic resource you should refer to when you want to learn SEO. It covers SEO from Google’s perspective. This course will help you learn what Google wants you to learn about SEO. It is time-taking but trust me it is worth spending your time reading the guidelines of Google in terms of SEO. And not only SEO but everything and every component of SEO.
Moz SEO Course
Moz is the most famous company when it comes to SEO tools, but it has created an SEO course that covers the basics of SEO.
Step 8: Keep Yourself Updated on Search Engine Algorithm Changes
SEO is very dynamic and the rules and algorithms of SEO keep changing all the time.
Google and other search engines keep changing their algorithm very frequently in order to give users a better experience.
An SEO expert needs to know about these changes and adjust their SEO campaigns accordingly so that they don’t lose their search ranks in search engines.
The best way to stay informed is to follow a couple of SEO news websites that provide information about ongoing SEO changes when they happen.
One should make the required changes as soon as the algorithms change and not wait too long, because if you wait for long you might lose your search engine rankings for your website and keywords.
Below are a few resources you can use to keep yourself updated on SEO and changes in the SEO industry:
Search Engine Roundtable
This website publishes daily news about the SEO industry, hence it would keep you updated on everything happening in the SEO space.
Search Engine Land
This is one of the oldest websites in the SEO industry.
The owner of the website was hired by Google.
You can imagine the amount of information and quality of the information it has.
Google Blog
Google publishes news related to Google products on its blog.
They also share news about Google search as well.
Keeping this on your watch list would keep you updated with Google product and algorithm updates.
Google Search Blog
A blog by Google dedicated to Search.
This blog has a lot of information that would help you learn SEO best practices.
Google Webmasters Blog
The official Google webmasters blog.
You should keep an eye on it as you get to know the latest changes in the search algorithm of Google.
Step 9: Choose the Right SEO Tools
Accept that you cannot do everything manually in SEO.
Because if you want to do that you will end up wasting a lot of your time analyzing numbers, data, keywords, and other things, and chances are that you would make some mistakes in the calculation.
But, if you use the right SEO tools you save your time and expect better results.
Most of the good SEO tools are paid but in the long run, they return better results which are worth the cost.
There are a lot of tools for different purposes but for your convenience, I am listing down a few of the best and widely used SEO tools you can use:
Google Webmaster Tools (Free)
Google webmaster tools are one of the best, authentic, widely used, and most useful tools for SEO.
Interestingly Google offers it for free and it can give you a lot of insightful information about your website or app.
For the record, Google Webmaster, Tools is now called Google Search Console and Google is migrating the data from Google Webmaster Tools to Google Search Console.
Google Analytics (Free)
The majority of the websites in the world use Google Analytics for measuring the performance of their website. Google Analytics is again a free tool offered by Google.
It is very useful and gives you very intelligent data and insights that can help you in improvisations and get better results from your website. Google also offers free Google Analytics Certification and to earn that Certificate you would learn Google Analytics completely.
I would recommend you spend some time doing this Certification because it would immensely help you in SEO.
SEMRush (Paid)
SEMRush offers a lot of tools that help you in SEO, PPC campaigns, competitor analysis, keyword research, link building, social media monitoring, and many more. It is however paid but it’s worth the cost.
You get a complete SEO package in one place. They keep updating their tools to make it even better so you get the best of everything.
Ahrefs (Paid)
Another tool that SEO Experts use is Ahrefs. It is also a very good SEO tool like SEMRUSH. You can use Ahrefs on a free trial for 7 days.
Yoast (Freemium)
Yoast is one of the best SEO tools which many million people use on their websites. You get many insights about your content, keywords, paragraph length, etc., through this tool.
Step 10: Keep Practicing to Become an SEO Expert
SEO like driving a vehicle, more you practice more you drive perfection in it.
You can’t be sure about the SEO until you use it practically. It is best to keep applying your learnings in practice to see the results and measure your understanding.
Each website is different and has a different SEO requirement for it, hence more you work on a different type of website more you learn about the SEO.
Step 11: Read Case Studies Written by SEO Experts
Case studies offer great insight into the SEO and reading them would always help you learn something new.
By reading the SEO case studies you would get new ideas that you can use in your SEO work.
Step 12: Share Your Knowledge
It is always good to share your knowledge as it makes you more perfect because when you share your knowledge you would research it very well so that you don’t pass the wrong information to someone.
This is also true with SEO as well, the more your research, the more you practice, more you share your experiences more you would become perfect in your art.
Start a blog and start implementing your knowledge of SEO and also share your experiences which would help others as well.
Step 13: Keep Patience to See the Results
SEO is a time taking process and results cannot be expected soon. If you are expecting quick traffic or sale on your website then SEO is not the fastest way.
Though, you can use Google Ads to drive quick traffic on your website.
SEO is the key to the foundation for building sustainable organic traffic on your website.
Source: Age of pages ranking in Google Top 10 Results
Before making any SEO-related change to your website you should take note of your rankings and traffic (for a period of time). Compare it with the same period of time (in terms of duration), after the change.
Monitor your rankings and traffic and give it enough time before taking further decisions.
Step 14: Read Blogs and Works of Established SEO Experts
Since there isn’t an encyclopedia of SEO and the algorithms are changing very frequently. You need to keep reading the works, research, and experiences of established SEO experts.
Since they have to spend a lot of time honing their art, they offer great insights into anything they discover. This information would be very useful for you.
Remember that there will be times in your journey to becoming an SEO Expert when you will be disappointed, frustrated, and ready to give up.
But, don’t worry, this is quite normal. Every SEO expert out there has faced those times.
If you read the stories of other SEO Experts you will understand that none of them became what they are today because they were lucky.
It’s the result of hard work, grit, determination, and endless hours of testing and experimenting with SEO best practices.
Qualifications Required to Become SEO Expert
This is the question a lot of people ask.
But, honestly, SEO doesn’t require any qualification. Even a high school pass guy can become an SEO expert.
But, it is safe to have a bachelor’s degree in case you want to join any organization as an SEO expert.
The only qualification required to become an SEO expert is having good analytical skills.
Also, SEO is not only required for content written in English.
It is required in almost every language content, be it Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Bangla, etc.
How Much Does the SEO Expert Earn?
Earning of the SEO experts depends on many factors, like, experience, the project they are working on, the client’s budget, results they deliver, the type of websites they are working for, etc.
In case you’re doing SEO for your own website, then the cost of hiring someone else is your saving.
However, as per the industry standards and payscale analysis SEO experts having three-four experience on average earn 6-8 lakhs a year.
This could go even higher. Many SEO experts earn more than 15 lakhs a year. Earnings completely depend on the experience of the SEO expert, client, industry type, etc.
SEO is going to stay forever. Now every company is going online and to stay ahead of the herd they need SEO experts. So, having the skills would always pay.
Conclusion
If you are associated with an online business you should learn SEO to become an SEO expert. Even if you have a website for anything you should learn SEO.
SEO is really helpful for web developers, marketing managers, app developers, webmasters, web designers, social media managers, PPC experts, solo entrepreneurs, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and e-commerce business owners.
Though these are not the only people who should learn and practice SEO to become an SEO expert. Everyone should learn SEO to get the right information or content while surfing online.
Why?
It is evident from the entire discussion so far that SEO is the base of all digital marketing activities. Implementing SEO best practices will not only ensure the maximum possible exposure of your website in search engines but they can help your website in more ways.
For instance, more organic traffic, low bounce rate, generate good quality leads for your business, more sales, and more revenue.
Since you have read the entire post you understand that to become an SEO Expert is not difficult. All you need to do is to read a lot, practice, analyze, and improvise to get better results. When you start out to learn and become an SEO Expert you should begin with good content.
Research your keywords well, and implement SEO best practices. Keep testing, analyzing, and improvising to get the best results.
Search engines are the doorway to enter the web world. And SEO is the key to keeping your website in the top search results. So, undoubtedly SEO has ever been and will always be there. And this is the activity you should invest your time, skills, efforts into.
