Summary
- Becoming an SEO specialist is a rewarding career due to the demand and growth in the SEO industry. As of 2024, it's projected to grow by 18.3% and be valued at $88 billion.
- SEO is pivotal because it can drive direct revenue through intent-based queries, unlike interruptive social media marketing.
- To succeed in SEO, you must develop a diverse skill set combining creativity and data analysis.
- Potential earnings for SEO specialists in the US average $82,000 annually, whereas SEO managers can make approximately $113,000 with bonuses.
- There are different career paths in SEO: working at an agency, in-house for a company, freelancing, or starting your own agency.
- Freelancing and agency-building are riskier but offer unlimited earning potential compared to stable but capped earnings in agency or in-house roles.
- Essential skills for SEO include keyword research, technical audits, user experience optimization, and backlink acquisition.
- Mastering both on-page and off-page SEO is crucial; the latter involves acquiring backlinks and leveraging a network for comprehensive site improvement.
- Developing soft skills, like communication, is important for career advancement in SEO, especially for management roles.
- Gaining hands-on experience through personal projects or training programs can significantly enhance learning and understanding.
- Being passionate about SEO and staying updated with industry trends helps in long-term success.
- Many SEO roles require a bachelor's degree in fields like marketing, but practical experience can offset this requirement.
- Begin your SEO journey by understanding industry basics, progressing from agency work to freelancing, and eventually consider building your own agency for maximum growth.
Video
How To Take Action
I suggest starting your SEO journey by building your own side projects. This gives hands-on experience and allows you to test SEO techniques without much cost. Think of creating a blog or website about a topic you love; this makes learning fun and personalized.
A good way of enhancing your skills is to practice keyword research, technical audits, and user experience optimization. Use free or low-cost tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to get started. These tools help you understand what’s working and what isn’t on your website.
For those interested in working in SEO, consider roles at agencies or as a freelancer. Starting at an agency can provide varied experiences, but freelancing allows for flexibility and growth. When ready, building your own agency could be a great goal with uncapped earning potential.
If launching your agency, focus on learning how to manage projects and teams. Establish systems for efficient work and prepare to handle marketing, sales, and client interactions.
Remember, soft skills like communication are just as vital as technical skills, especially if managing a team or agency.
Lastly, make sure to follow industry trends. Subscribe to SEO newsletters or attend free webinars to keep updated. Passion and current knowledge in SEO can set you apart from others in the field.
Quotes by Author
"Becoming an SEO specialist is an amazing career"
"SEO requires many different skills"
"Businesses love SEO"
"The SEO industry will grow by 18.3% in 2024"
"A rising tide lifts all ships"
Full Transcript
so an SEO specialist specializes in the Art and Science of search engine optimization and their number one job is to help a business's website increase its keyword rankings in search results to get more organic traffic leads customers and sales and in this video I will teach you everything you need to know about becoming a top 1% SEO specialist my name is Nathan gotch and I'm an SEO specialist with over a decade of experience leading hundreds of successful SEO campaigns I'll show you what it takes to succeed let's Dive Right In so first becoming an SEO specialist is an amazing career here's why number one three of the most popular websites on the internet are search engines Google owns 90% of the traditional search engine Market YouTube owns almost 97% of the video search market and Amazon is the number one e-commerce search engine number two the SEO industry is growing so SEO haters love to say that it's dead but the numbers prove high demand according to business research company the SEO industry will grow by 18.3% in 2024 and will be valued at $88 billion in comparison the advertising industry grows at about 11% per year so SEO is outpacing the broader sector by a substantial margin number three businesses love SEO so SEO is the most popular digital marketing channel for businesses just look at the demand compared to digital marketing or social media marketing so why does SEO Crush all other channels it's simple because it can produce prod direct attributable revenue and the reason is because of intent when someone searches best SEO tools for agencies I know exactly what they want so I only need to deliver the right content that fulfills the searcher's intent unlike social media the Searcher is coming to you instead of you interrupting them number four SEO requires many different skills so SEO isn't just one skill it's a culmination of many different skill sets packaged together for example an SEO specialist needs both Art and Science to succeed on the art side you'll need to develop creative ideas to overcome the challenges you'll encounter you'll also need creative techniques to beat your SEO competitors on the science side you'll use data and testing to identify what works in each unique SEO scenario so building a compounding SEO skill set means you become more valuable to the marketplace as an individual contributor and the more valuable you are to the marketplace the more money you can make now speaking of that according to glass door the average SEO specialist makes $882,000 per year in the US SEO managers make around $113,000 per year when you include bonuses and that means you'll need to understand the potential paths as an SEO specialist to earn director level pay an SEO specialist can have three different roles number one work at an agency so SEO or digital marketing agencies are the best place to start because you'll get exposed to many different campaigns and as a result you'll build tons of SEO experience that'll translate well to later stages now it is possible to reach SEO manager or director roles in an agency but your pay will be capped compared to working in House at a company which brings me to number two work at a company so the next level for SEO Specialists is to lead an SEO division within a company and this differs from agency work because your SEO performance is judged based on how well it's working for just one company and within an agency you're usually responsible for the success of many different campaigns and you can make great money working for an AG agency or as a dedicated SEO specialist for a company but there is always going to be a cap on your earnings so if you're not risk averse there are two other ways to leverage your SEO expertise which brings me to number three work as an SEO freelancer so if you want to control your own destiny this is the best way to do it by becoming a freelance SEO consultant or specialist this is exactly what I did and funny enough I applied for every SEO position in St Louis in 2013 and I got one interview and I did not get the job so I decided to go out independently as an SEO freelancer and this was the best decision I ever made since then I've made several millions of dollars selling SEO services and I teach everything I've learned since then in the SEO entrepreneur book but there's no denying it this path is more challenging and way riskier you're no longer just showing up to work and doing SEO and clocking out instead you must consider Marketing sales fulfillment client experience hiring training building case study and more and this is why most SEO Freelancers top out around $10,000 to $20,000 per month and the only way to break through a plateau is to create leverage in short you can't do everything yourself so to reach the next level you must build an SEO team and leverage technology speaking of that this brings me to number four which is build your own SEO agency so the ultimate way to monetize your skills as an SEO specialist is to build an agency imagine if you could replicate everything you know and have other people do the SEO work for you well that's what a good agency does through systems you don't have to spend years building these systems because I've already done it within gacha Academy but the beauty of building your own agency is that there is no cap on your earnings yes you'll undoubtedly hit Revenue plateaus but that's just a wall you must break through but before you venture into any of these you must have a passion for this SEO craft yes you can make good money by learning SEO but to get there you have to actually enjoy doing it and that's why it's trting to paint a picture for you so here's what would appear on most SEO specialist job descriptions number one perform keyword research so keywords are an SEO fundamental that has stood the test of time and some will say that topics are more important than keywords and I somewhat agree but to be effective you need to find Target keywords that your website can compete on and build dedicated pages around those keywords you also need to understand how to filter qualify and prioritize large sets of keywords and remember that your keyword selection shouldn't just be about getting more website traffic an effective keyword selection process will consider business goals relevance to your target audience intent the Surs or surge engine results Pages organic search volume or search traffic potential competition and resource requirements number two conduct SEO audits so in SEO audit helps you identify Technical and website content opportunities on a website and you'll need screaming frog SEO spyer to conduct a proper audit this tool integrates Google analytics Google search console Google page speed insights and the hre's apis number three perform technical seos so once you've conducted your audit you must prioritize and execute technical SEO actions and these actions include optimizing crawling and indexing optimizing website architecture improving internal links optimizing web page loading speed fixing keyword cannibalization pruning and consolidating assets and fixing broken links just to name a few and sometimes you must collaborate with web development team members to execute these changes number four optimize user experience or ux so think of technical SEO as what's under the hood but ux is what a Searcher experiences when they visit one of your pages so Google's recent coure case revealed that their algorithms use user signals to determine the quality of a page and this means they're likely tracking engaged sessions if you're using Google Chrome an Engaged session is a metric you can find in Google analytics number five perform onpage SEO so onpage optimization places your primary keyword in the most important spots including your url title tag meta description H1 tag and first sentence this is on page SEO 101 but to take things to the next level you should also optimize Pages for NLP or natural language processing or nlu which is natural language understanding technobabble aside this means relevant keywords and topics that your competitors are currently using to rank so you can use a tool like rankability to extract these relevant topics from your top SEO competitors for any keyw for example I'm creating this YouTube script right now inside of rankability and I recommend viewing the keywords as topics in short you should fill in these topic gaps to build the most relevant page for any key word you're targeting number six lead SEO content creation so a quality content strategy is a big part of SEO and your involvement will very depending on the size of your team sometimes you'll conduct keyword research and collaborate with the marketing team to decide what keywords align with business goals then you'd go into rank ability and create a new content Optimizer report for any agreed upon keyword phrases then after that you'll create an SEO content brief and SEO content outline and you can do this manually or just tap into AI to do it for you and once that's ready copy the content brief link and send it to your copywriter and then from there they can use the n n LP recommendations to create a highly relevant asset and once revisions are completed the SEO specialist which would be you will add the final optimization strategies and then you'll add the finished article to the CMS to create a dedicated landing page or blog post now whether you use a page or a post will depend on the intent of the keyword typically pages are for commercial content and posts are more for informational content number seven acquire backlinks or off-page SEO so backlinks are one of the most critical Google ranking factors and you can get everything else perfect but if your website has a weak backlink profile you won't reach your full SEO potential so an SEO Specialists will often take on the role of Link Builder which involves developing link building strategies finding link prospects qualifying link prospects sending Outreach emails building relationships negotiating deals and organizing the link building campaign now the alternative to doing all this is working with an experien link building or PR agency like search intelligence when you use a service in particular like search intelligence what they do is they actually build back links a lot of their back links will be built to your homepage and so if you don't have a really good structure in place all of that beautiful link Equity that you're building through PR and uh and just traditional link building techniques you're not going to be getting the full benefit because what you really want to have happen is when we go to a website like Pottery Barn you'll see that if they get a link to their homepage from you know one of these really high quality sources that search intelligence will build well you want that link link Equity to not just hit the homepage you want it to flow to all of these other important category pages and that way it can lift the whole website a rising tide lifts All Ships so that's what we're thinking about we when we acquire links to our site we want to lift the entire website and so it is very natural to get a lot of backlinks to your homepage and when you look at the biggest websites on the internet the large majority of their links go to their homepage so that is absolutely a natural thing but to be able to get the most out of that you have to make sure you have good internal link structure and good architecture so that's the cool part about working with search intelligence they're going to get you these like insanely powerful links they're going to help you not just power that one you know homepage asset that you're trying to lift but will actually allow you to lift your entire website and now number eight is perform local SEO so everything I've shown you so far will support local pack rankings in Google however some variables are specific to the local pack rankings and that includes but it's not limited to optimizing the Google business profile cleaning up citations building new citations and building a review generation process and now number nine is understand web analytics so 80% of your time as an SEO specialist will be allocated towards leading measures leading goals are the work that produces the outcome and the outcome is defined as a lagging goal and that's when tools like Google analytics and Google search console can help these tools will help you see if your SEO efforts have been effective so if your SEO strategy is not performing as as expected you must develop analytical skills to interpret data and Trends and pivot so now that you understand some of the SEO best practices it's time to learn how to become a successful SEO specialist so there are endless opinions on this topic but here's what I believe is the best path number one build your own side projects I'm a firm believer that the best SEO professionals are Builders things change when your money is invested in a project you care more you do more and you want to see it through overall this gives you hands-on experience and SEO knowledge that's transferable to in-house work and that's why I recommend creating an SEO project with localized intent watch the video in my description to see a process that's working right now and if you're unsure where to start consider joining an SEO training program like got SEO Academy I build a website from scratch inside of our SEO agency accelerator program number two is practice secondary skills so some secondary marketing skills include search engine marketing or sem for short via Google ads and local search service ads copywriting cro or conversion rate optimization basic WordPress and CMS management skills basic coding skills like HTML CSS JavaScript and PHP and prompt engineering for AI tools like chat gbt now these are not requirements but they make you more well-rounded and the more skills you can accumulate the more valuable you'll become as an SEO professional and digital marketer it also allows you to reach New Heights outside of SEO if you're well-rounded you could be promoted to a digital marketing manager and this job title is responsible for more than just organic search performance instead you'd also be responsible for the whole digital marketing department and the overall online presence of a Brand number three don't forget about soft skills while technical skills are critical for SEO success many professionals limit their potential because they lack soft skills focus on this area to gain a huge advantage over other professionals and that's why you should practice your communication skills because they're fundamental for SEO managers or directors number four love the Art and Science of SEO you have to love the game of understanding how search engines work to stick with it successful people tend to have a learner's mindset and love to compete and you must also enjoy hacking search engine algorithms and studying industry Trends the better you understand how search engine rankings are formulated the more you'll succeed and this will require you to keep up with these search engine algorithm changes Google launches hundreds of minor algorithm updates per year and some are bigger impact updates like the Cor updates and to stay on The Cutting Edge you must pay attention and modify your strategy if necessary so number five understand the base level requirements for getting hired so we studied over 9,000 SEO jobs in the top 100 US cities and found that 99% of listings require at least entrylevel experience 94% of opportunities require a bachelor's degree or higher in a related field like marketing or Communications since there is no degree in SEO but you can overcome the experience issue by creating your own side projects so now that you know what an SEO specialist is it's time to take a leap of faith choosing to enter the SEO industry was the best career decision I ever made and I'm very biased but I think it's something you should consider in summary follow a natural progression of working in House at an agency then at a company and finally leveraging your SEO expertise to land clients on your own to build a business the ladder is riskier but it has the most upside so to start an SEO business check out the SEO entrepreneur or apply for gotch SEO Academy thank you so much for watching
