Building A Successful SEO Career: Top Things To Keep In Mind
Ever since the internet saw the light of day, it has completely changed the way we think about our lives and consume information. Nowadays, business organizations thrive to create a strong online presence so that it can get noticed by the target customers. The digital realm has opened up extensive opportunities even for smaller businesses to get engaged with their target audience. However, this also means that there is now greater competition than ever before among brands trying to captivate potential customers. This is why SEO has become an important tool for brands to promote themselves as industry leaders and ensure better financial growth. To keep pace with such trends, an SEO career has proven to be extremely lucrative. In fact, statistics show that 13.7% of SEO professionals are extremely satisfied with the results of their SEO efforts and 47.6% say that they are happy with the same.
Let’s explore why learning SEO and mastering SEO skills can be beneficial for your career.
Understanding SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process through which business owners can have their websites optimized to improve online rankings. It can also help in getting more organic traffic through the search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO career has become important among youngsters as they are trying to uplift the online marketing domains of business enterprises across the globe. Thus, business owners hire SEO experts who can use their optimization skills to bring more traffic to their sites and ensure more conversions into leads and sales. Since there are more than a billion websites across the world and more new sites are being built every day, a career in SEO is the best thing you can opt for when you are trying to decide on a rewarding career for yourself. Fortunately for you, there are now many institutes from where you can learn SEO and develop the skills you need for this profession.
How can SEO professionals help?
SEO is an essential part of a digital marketing campaign and this is why enrolling in SEO classes can be profitable for you in terms of learning new SEO tactics and techniques. Business owners are always looking to attain the number-one ranking for their sites. However, even to get a site ranked on the first page of the Google SERPs for a particular search term, you need to learn SEO so that you can optimize web pages for cloud platform keywords and cloud-based websites.
SEO is now considered to be an essential part of marketing which can boost the online visibility and credibility of a website based on specific search keywords. So if a website is not able to get a proper ranking for the target keywords and phrases, more optimization work has to be carried out.
There can be several reasons responsible for the poor ranking of a website:
- The competitor websites have got better content
- A website is using poor link-building methods
- The content does not have properly used keywords
- The website is characterized by poor user experience
- The loading times for the web pages are high
As an SEO professional, you need to rectify these issues and make sure that the website achieves a higher ranking consistently.
What are the benefits of SEO?
Many benefits of SEO contribute to ever-increasing SEO career opportunities for all.
Here are some reasons why SEO is considered essential for a brand’s online success.
- SEO can enhance brand credibility
When a site has a good ranking on the search engine result pages, it is automatically reliable and high quality by the search engines. This in turn convinces people of the trustworthiness of the products and services that it has to offer. As an SEO professional, you can further improve its ranking by adding better quality content to it and boosting the site’s speed.
- SEO is good for content marketing
High-quality content creation is an essential part of the SEO process. You can add new text, videos and images to the site for improving its online ranking. SEO can also help you with your content marketing goals. You can pick some relevant keywords and optimize your site’s content with them. It is also important that you keep your site’s content fresh by posting new content regularly.
- SEO is affordable
Compared to some of the other types of marketing channels and methods, SEO does not cost a lot for a business owner. A TV advert or a PPC campaign may cost a lot of money, but that is not the case with SEO. It always pays off to come up with content that delivers better results than those found at rival business sites. Joining an SEO career program will help you to optimize a site’s content in such a way that it is better than the competition sites.
- SEO works well with PPC campaigns
SEO works well together with PPC campaigns and boosts the online ranking of a website. While PPC can ensure great ranking for paid search results, SEO helps to do the same organically. SEO can be used to maximize the ranking for PPC campaigns.
- SEO can help to reach out to more potential customers
One of the goals of SEO is to get more people interested in a business so that they buy the products and services it has to offer. Unlike in PPC where the marketers use demographics for deciding on the marketing campaign, SEO works with targeted keywords and this helps to attract more potential customers. By creating a well-curated list of keywords and then refining it with competitive research, it is possible to come up with a more effective SEO strategy.
- SEO ensures a better competitive advantage
Investing in SEO can help a business to have a greater advantage over its competition. When businesses use SEO campaigns smartly to their advantage, they can help them to attain considerable market share. To achieve this, a careful and planned approach needs to be taken to boost traffic margins.
- SEO can help to improve local search rankings
Many businesses are local businesses and they need to use local SEO solutions to get their customers. By creating a Google My Business account, an SEO expert can work on local SEO strategies that would be suitable for the specific goals of a local business.
- SEO enhances the usability of a website
When you follow the SEO best practices, you can naturally enhance the usability of a website and make sure that the visitors have a positive user experience every time. By signing up for an SEO training course, you can learn about how you can add backlinks to the content, make the site responsive and fast and make other modifications so that it ensures better online ranking.
- SEO boosts user engagement
When effective SEO strategies get implemented on a business site, it helps to bring in good-quality traffic for a business. A site that has useful content for the users will naturally encourage them to spend more time exploring its content. Such engagement is going to result in increased conversions and better ROI. With better user engagement, customers can feel a strong connection to the brand. The customers can also recommend their friends to use the products and services offered by the brand and this can lead to further sales for the company.
What are the advantages of choosing an SEO career?
Is SEO a good career choice? Are SEO jobs in demand? Confusion arises when you are willing to choose SEO as a career. Truth be told, there is always a high demand for highly skilled and efficient SEO specialists who can use their understanding of search engines to improve a site’s ranking and bring in more traffic. The fact that there are hundreds of SEO jobs for freshers in job search portals at any given time goes on to show how SEO has become a very lucrative career option for so many people. So if you learn SEO by attending optimization training, there is a very good chance that you can start your SEO career.
Here are some reasons why you should consider choosing SEO as a career option.
- High demand for the best SEO professionals
Every day, hundreds and thousands of new websites are being made and this has naturally increased the need for SEO experts. An online business cannot cope with competition unless it uses effective SEO strategies. When you optimize a site properly, it generates relevant traffic and boosts the revenue margins for the company. It is thus no wonder that businesses depend a lot on SEO professionals for their financial success. Therefore, choosing to undergo SEO training and taking up SEO as a career can be immensely rewarding for you in years to come.
- Excellent job opportunities
When you are looking to shine in your career, you are not only looking for financial success but also facing new challenges that open up new growth opportunities. Even with SEO jobs for beginners, you can learn a lot and this can help you to easily manage challenging projects. You can also have the flexibility to work according to your personal preferences. For instance, you can get a full-time work-from-home job or go for a hybrid setup. Since the demand for SEO professionals is always high, you can easily compare job offers and SEO vacancy options from multiple sources and also negotiate a good salary for yourself.
- Great freelancing scope
Once you complete your SEO career internship and training, you can have the option of working from an office as well as doing endless freelance projects. With the advent of the gig economy, many people are choosing to work for multiple employers and have more control over their daily life and their finances. You can sign up with numerous freelance platforms and take up SEO projects that appeal to you.
- Specializing in a definite niche
Signing up for an SEO career-diversity internship program will help you to develop the skills you need to have when you want to specialize in a specific niche within the digital marketing industry. Digital marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses various practices like social media marketing, affiliate marketing, market analysis, search engine marketing, PPC and content marketing, just to name a few. By specializing in SEO, you naturally enhance your value as a professional and can secure better jobs than someone who only has generic knowledge of different types of digital marketing practices.
Now that you have considered why choose SEO as a career, it is time for you to get acquainted with its responsibilities.
Job Responsibilities Associated with an SEO Career
Your SEO career will require you to handle numerous responsibilities, some of which we have mentioned below.
- Optimization
The single most important task that you need to handle on a day-to-day basis is optimization. While your SEO classes will teach you many things about optimization, there are some tricks that you are going to learn only through hands-on working experience. You will need to do mainly on-page and off-page SEO work that will include the following elements:
On-Page SEO
- URL structure
- User experience
- Images and the ALT text
- Conversion optimization
- Keyword research and insertion
- Content creation and content optimization
- Header tags, meta description tags and title tags
Off-Page SEO
- Link building
- Press releases
- Guest blogging
- Asset creation (videos, infographics, etc.)
- Bringing traffic from various social media sites to a website
- Mobile Optimization
People use mobile devices extensively these days for conducting searches. This has made it important for businesses to focus on mobile SEO. Most SEO training programs these days focus on mobile SEO as Google has decided to change its algorithms to support mobile searches. Mobile SEO is one of the major SEO factors bringing traffic to a site, with almost 9.8% of traffic coming from it.
- Keyword Research
You will need to perform extensive keyword research for determining the relevance of certain keywords to a business. The goal here is to choose the best keywords for conversion.
- Analytics
Analytics help to determine which SEO strategies and methods have been able to deliver results and which of them failed to do so. This can help to improve the SEO strategies over time.
- Link Building
Backlinks are a great way to direct traffic to a site. It also helps to build the authority of a site in a given niche market. When a site has good-quality links, Google sees it as a reliable site and this can generate substantial traffic for it.
- Collaborating with other teams
As you work on your SEO projects, you will also need to collaborate with other teams in the office, such as content marketing, PR, paid search marketing, web development and social media marketing to align your marketing strategies and obtain the best results for the company.
What is the average salary for an SEO specialist?
SEO career salary depends on the skills you have, your overall job experience and the number of projects that you have handled so far. For instance, entry-level SEO professionals with less than 3 years of experience typically earn around Rs 2.4 Lakhs per year. The mid-level SEO experts having around 4 to 9 years of experience draw an annual salary of around Rs 4.6 Lakhs. SEO specialists with nearly 10 to 20 years of experience normally draw an average salary of around Rs 8.9 Lakhs.
Tips for starting a career in SEO
If you are wondering about how to start an SEO career, here are some tips that can help you:
- Work on your SEO skills by learning all about technical SEO, local SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, link building and content creation.
- Enhance your writing skills as you are going to need them for SEO. Not only it is important that you create useful content for your readers but also write titles, descriptions, meta tags and other notes.
- It always helps if you have some basic web development skills, such as working with HTML, understanding the functions of JavaScript and using WordPress and other CMS tools. This will help you to plan your SEO actions more effectively.
- You need to develop your analytical skills and combine valuable information from sources like Google Analytics and keyword research tools to create SEO reports. It will also help you to interpret and use such information correctly.
- It is important that you work with as many SEO tools as possible to know how they can be useful to you. Some of the most well-known SEO tools are Semrush, Yoast SEO and Chrome Developer Tools.
- Get thoroughly acquainted with the regulations of Google Webmaster Guidelines so that you do not inadvertently end up getting involved in Black Hat SEO practices.
- Learn how to work with Google Ads so that you can work on paid search campaigns.
- Work on as many SEO projects as possible; there is no better way to learn about SEO than through practical experience.
Wrapping up
By choosing to learn SEO, you can embark on a career that could open up a lot of great working opportunities for you in the future. Hence, make sure that you learn the core and advanced aspects of SEO from a prestigious learning centre. Once you have made up your mind that you are going to take up SEO as your career, make sure that you learn the tricks of the trade from eminent consultants. We offer comprehensive SEO courses for students who are looking to learn the basic and advanced lessons on optimization. Our courses are job-oriented and led by industry experts. Book your seats today!