The Ultimate Guideline of Becoming SEO Specialist

Being an SEO specialist is not easy, it takes commitment and time to learn, as well as experience to keep up with developments in the SEO field. Only reading and studying theoretically is not enough to turn your title into a specialist. In this guideline, we will explain what it is, SEO specialist job description, and how to become an SEO specialist.

What is an SEO Specialist?

An SEO Specialist is a person who is responsible for increasing the ranking, visibility, and traffic of a website. In the digital business, they are needed to improve website performance, increase brand popularity, and achieve goals such as bringing more revenue and business growth.

If your business doesn't already have one, you can hire someone or become an SEO specialist for your own business. Indeed, it is not an easy thing to do. Experience is required to apply SEO best practices. We will discuss how to become an SEO specialist in detail. However, you might need to know SEO specialist job description first.

The job descriptions vary, depending on the company policies and goals. In general, here are what they do:

• Identify website problems and determine optimization strategies so that they can improve website ranking and performance on search engines
• Responsible for the website optimization process
• Budgeting for SEO campaigns using paid advertising services
• Collaborate with the developer team to ensure that the website has implemented SEO best practices
• Collaborate with editorial and marketing teams on content creation and marketing activity
• Conduct keyword research and optimization for the entire company site
• Monitor SEO analytics data using tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

How to Become an SEO Specialist

The important skills that need to be mastered are knowing how SEO works and its development. In addition, you must understand how to optimize the ranking and performance of your website on search engines. Here's what you need to focus on:

Understand How Search Engines Work

The first step to becoming an SEO specialist is to understand how search engines work. Therefore, SEO experts can determine the right formula to improve a website's performance, ranking, and traffic.

New content is uploaded on the internet on daily basis. Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and others certainly have their own algorithms to display the most relevant content for their users. The main process that search engines carry out to display user search results is divided into 3 stages, namely:

Crawling

The crawling process is the stage of gathering information carried out by search engine robots (crawlers). At this stage, the crawler will crawl new content and updated content from all websites on the internet according to the keywords searched by internet users.

Indexing

The information obtained from the crawling process is then stored in a database. Furthermore, the saved content is grouped into several categories such as text, multimedia, and others. This indexing process should not be missed, because a website that is not indexed properly will be hard to appear in search results (SERP).

Ranking

At this ranking stage, search engines will sort websites from the most relevant to the least relevant to the user's search query. You need to understand SEO best practices to rank better in organic search.

Understand How SEO Works

After understanding how search engines work, the second step to becoming an SEO specialist is to understand how SEO works. SEO is often associated with the process of increasing rankings in organic search results, but practically it is much more than that.

The main goal of implementing SEO is to provide the best experience and useful information for users who access your website. In that way, you will not only get more traffic but also have the potential to gain long-term users that are profitable for your business.

There are three main types of SEO, namely on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. The following is an overview of what it is about:

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the first that must be mastered by an SEO Specialist. This is the optimization tactic carried out from the internal website. It focuses on improving the quality of the pages and content on your website. To optimize on-page SEO you can perform the following tactics:

• Do some research to determine keywords
• Pay attention to keywords placement
• Optimization of the title and meta description
• SEO-friendly content optimization
• Pay attention to the structure of the content by using heading tags (H1, H2 tags, etc.)
• Optimizing internal and external links

Off-Page SEO

The next thing that is no less important to understand is off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is an optimization tactic that is carried out outside the site. It is usually related to promotion activity, content marketing, and link building. Take a look at off-page SEO implementation below:

• Optimizing link building
• Doing content marketing
• Website promotion through social media
• Use online forums

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is an optimization activity from the technical side of a website. This strategy is used to ensure that there are no obstacles in the crawling and indexing process and that the website has good performance for both users and search engines.

The technical elements that need to be concerned by are as follows:

• Using secure protocols such as HTTPS
• URL canonicalization
• Optimizing website structure
• Increase website speed
• Identify and repair broken links
• Use an SEO-friendly URL structure
• Optimizing the website on mobile devices
• Add structured data
• Find and fix crawling problems
   

Create a Website as Your Practice Medium

Understanding the basic concepts and theories of SEO is not enough. The most important thing to becoming an SEO specialist is to practice. Continuous practice will make you more familiar with SEO problems and the solutions.

Every website is unique and of course, requires a different optimization strategy. With hands-on practice, you can identify your website's problems and determine the optimization tactics to take. This is why you need to practice in order to find the best solution for your website's SEO problems.

In addition to practice, you can also read SEO case studies provided by Google and other websites to get inspiration for optimizing your website. SEO case studies usually describe the problems and solutions used to improve site performance in order to achieve the desired business goals. So, having a website as a practicing medium is a must.

Learn about Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Google has provided several tools that can help webmasters perform website optimization. The tool provides analytical data that can be used to analyze SEO effectiveness. Some of the tools that an SEO specialist needs to know are

• Google Analytics — It provides useful analytical data related to traffic, demographics, and reader interests, as well as conversion rates to help analyze your website.
• Google Search Console — This tool makes it easier for you to analyze your site's performance, find the crawling and indexing issues, and provides other analytical data that can help your site rank better in Google search.

Understanding fully these two tools is needed to support the analytical skills of an SEO specialist. If you perform an analysis based on data, then the evaluation carried out will be more optimal.

Up to Date on Search Engines Updates

Algorithms and ranking factors in SEO are ever-changing things. So, it is important for an SEO specialist to always keep up to date with the developments that occur on search engines. You need to implement optimization strategies according to the latest algorithms and ranking factors to get better performance in organic search.

You can follow SEO news sites and SEO forums to find out information related to SEO trends.. One of the sites that you can follow is Google Search Central which contains various information and a list of events related to SEO. 

Learn Content Strategy and Optimization

Making content strategy and optimization is the foremost SEO specialist job description. SEO experts should learn content creation strategies that can dominate search results. Content strategies include conducting keyword research, evaluating content performance, and making periodic improvements to the content.

Having high-quality content is not enough. SEO specialists must learn how to optimize the best strategy. Both in terms of technical and other things so that a website or business can achieve the dream results faster.

Follow SEO Experts

In the practicing process of SEO, you as a beginner may encounter new challenges that make it difficult for you to achieve the results. When this happens, you can find out and read the SEO experts' posts when they were experiencing something similar. Some of the SEO experts you can follow are Neil Patel, Brian Dean, Eric Enge, and others.

SEO experts often share knowledge related to their specialization through blogs and social media they manage. For example, publishing information related to SEO best practices based on expert experience, sharing link-building tips, and other SEO techniques. You can use it as a reference because the analysis used is quite easy to understand even for a beginner.

All in all, that is an in-depth explanation regarding the meaning, SEO specialist job description, and how to become an SEO specialist. Becoming an expert in the field of SEO is not an easy thing and it takes a long process to achieve. For those of you who are engaged in digital business, it is the right time to start learning SEO guidelines and doing optimization practices for your website.