The SEO specialist is responsible for all your brand's SEO campaigns. His skills include digital marketing, web analytics, site source code analysis, semantics, and others specific to various website optimization situations.
An SEO expert is a person who works to improve the results displayed by search engines.
Because search engines, like the whole world around us, are in constant change, this means that the implementation and continuous development of certain working strategies is a permanent work, to achieve results in SEO. In other words, just as search engines are constantly changing their rules, so too an SEO specialist must constantly change his strategies/tactics/work methods.
The days when all of SEO was about keywords and meta tags are long gone. Today it is about 3 levels of SEO optimization:
- Technical level. It refers to the structure of the website and plays a determining role in how search engines index the content.
- The level of on-page optimization. It includes how keywords and HTML tags are used. Both are extremely significant to the traffic that websites get from search engines.
- Off-page optimization level. This is about link building and increasing popularity.
An SEO specialist knows how to develop strategies for each of these levels.
What skills do people need to become SEO specialists?
While there is still no college education required to become an SEO specialist, an education in general or digital marketing or even web design might help to get started.
There are several specific skills that a person must have to become an SEO specialist and these are just a few of them:
- Ability to manage relationships. A large part of the role of communicating with customers falls to the SEO expert. This means that he must know how to explain to his clients the strategies he operates with to increase the visibility of their websites in search engines. Moreover, sometimes he has to convince them that his strategies are working for their online projects.
- Analytical skills. This is a must when it comes to SEO expertise. Why? Because an SEO specialist must regularly report to his clients the progress of their websites, informing them of periodic analyses made by him. These analyses must be done with some clarity, otherwise you risk losing potential/current customers.
- Willingness to work within limits. This means that if you estimate the working period on a certain project to be a month, it must be a month! If we are talking about 2 weeks, 2 weeks must be. Each of us can make small mistakes in estimating the time we need to complete some task, also unexpected situations can arise, but let's be honest, we all like punctuality.
- Understanding of important IT concepts. HTML code, and content management system (CMS) – are just some of the IT terms that an SEO specialist needs to be familiar with.
- Ability to monitor/organize content creation. Writing, creating, and editing content on clients' websites are often tasks that fall to an SEO Copywriter, who is on the team of an SEO expert and receives technical tasks from him.
What changes can an SEO Expert bring to a particular site?
The best SEO companies usually include a variety of services that work like a universal recipe but are adjusted for each online project, since each site is unique in its way.
We list here just some of the duties of a specialist working in an SEO company:
- Technical and creative support.
- PR in the digital environment.
- Metrics Analysis/Statistics/Synthesis.
- Social Media Marketing.
- Strategic consulting.
- Pay Per Click Services (when needed).
- SEO audits.
- Getting backlinks.
- SEO consulting.
- On-page SEO.
- Off Page SEO.
- Content creation and copywriting.
- Conversion Optimization.
- Google Ads/PPC optimization (when needed).
- Recovery after penalties.
However, the most important aspect of SEO expertise remains to create good communication with customers.
The need to use the services of an SEO specialist
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the rules and trends in online marketing are constantly growing. Sometimes it is really difficult to keep up with them when owning a website.
We don't always find time to plan, make adjustments, and changes, create strategies, optimize, etc. Let's be realistic. There are a lot of SEO tools that we need to know when it comes to search engine optimization.
So what does an SEO expert do?
- He works to make your online business known (popular) in the virtual environment.
- He creates functional mid- and long-term strategies for your project.
- He makes plans that will bring you results for "later", not just for "now".
- He finds solutions where you can no longer find them, or where you would never have looked.
- He analyzes and tracks SEO metrics (and not just SEO metrics all the time).
- He periodically analyzes your niche and the level of competitiveness in this niche and reports changes.
- He communicates with all the promotion and programming teams and provides them with support on the SEO side so that the works are implemented/executed correctly.
- He comes up with "outside the box" suggestions, suggests new products and markets; and creates new promotional strategies for these markets.
- He measures the results of the work performed by the entire team and reports the situation at least once a month.
- And more than that, he creates sustainable methods to keep your business afloat in a "permanent state of health."
One thing is certain, in a world where we live more online than offline, there is no chance of survival without SEO optimization for most niches.
And maybe we manage to be a "one-man-show" most of the time, but we all know, somewhere deep inside us, that it's not about how much we manage to do in a day, but about the quality of things in what we do and how they influence the future of the business.
Let's face the truth. There are problems to which we can find solutions by ourselves and problems to which we cannot.
"You can't be a doctor today and a footballer tomorrow," someone used to say.
Each of us has a niche. Each of us is good at something. That's how the world works.
The goal of each of us should be to focus on what we can do best to be maximally productive.
If you need an SEO specialist to ease your work on your online project, we are here for you.
PS. Do you want to see another opinion about the work of an SEO expert? Check out Rand Fishkin's video on the daily tasks of a subject matter expert (one of our favorites that often motivates us):