Tips for Getting into SEO with Zero Experience
Looking for new career opportunities is a common thing, especially during baffling situations in the global economic market. If you also want to change your professional focus – build your SEO career. You can get into SEO basically without any SEO experience and start gaining it by practicing. After learning SEO basics and some preparation steps, you will be able to get an SEO role in the job market.
Starting a new career path might be frightening but we will assure you that getting into SEO is possible. We have prepared valuable pieces of advice on how you can gain SEO experience and get your first job as an SEO expert.
How to Get into SEO?
Benefits of SEO Career Path
Before we go into the explanation of how to build your SEO career, we would like to mention some benefits about it. While working as an SEO expert, you can take advantage of the following:
- You can get into SEO fast and find SEO jobs easily
- SEO role allows you to work from home
- You can build your SEO career to the highest level
SEO Role Tasks
The next thing we would like to talk about is the typical tasks that an SEO performs on a daily basis. Depending on the company an SEO expert works in, the range of tasks may vary. However, all of them are dedicated to the optimization of the website for search engines by making its rankings higher.
The most common tasks of an SEO expert include but are not limited to:
- Backlink building
- Keyword research
- Content optimization
- Collaboration with digital marketers
- Social media optimization
- Website technical characteristics improvement
Whatever the company an SEO role is present in, link building would take most of the time. SEO specialists observe many solutions on the market, including fashion blogs that accept guest posts, to establish collaboration. Such activities make a huge investment in website ranking boost and visibility on the web.
Another huge part of daily tasks any SEO expert has to address is keyword finding. Luckily, there are lots of professional SEO tools that offer comprehensive solutions for keyword research. Thus, SEO experts could analyze what keywords have the potential for the content to outperform competitors and rank on Google.
SEO Career Path
As you already have an idea of who SEO experts are and what they are responsible for, let’s get into detail on how to build your SEO career. Even though there are not so many university programs that prepare SEO specialists there are lots of SEO courses. According to Artios, the demand for SEO courses has increased by 500% over the last 6 years – from 2016 to 2022. You can find SEO-related courses online in such academies as Udemy, for instance, or find a local offline school in your city.
SEO courses are perfect for those who only look to start their career with an SEO role. However, SEO courses would be also great for those who want to advance their professional skills and experience.
What Is SEO Experience?
In order to get your first SEO experience, you will need to learn lots of theory and do a lot of practice. SEO is more about practical implementation but without any theoretical knowledge that would make no sense.
Learn SEO Basics
The first and most fundamental thing you should learn about SEO is to understand how websites interact with search engines. Developing a basic understanding of that would help you perform optimization techniques perfectly.
Another important thing you should learn is how to find good keywords and integrate them into text. Properly selected and implemented keywords would help your website grow organic traffic fast. Moreover, you should learn how to use keywords in on-page SEO – metadata, titles, and headings, in particular.
Link building – this thing is not first on the list but could be the most significant. Learn to find the websites for link building and the ways to establish connections with them. The network of online connections for Google is like a list of customer reviews for potential clients – the more high-quality reviews you get the better your brand is perceived.
Explore SEO Strategies
As you take SEO courses, you will learn some theoretical background about SEO strategies. Each SEO strategy is a combination of techniques aimed to improve organic traffic for the website and boost online visibility. These methods relate to exploring your competitors’ performance, setting your goals and KPIs, improving existing pages, etc. Remember that any SEO strategy has a backbone but it could be adjusted or complemented at any time based on the website’s performance results.
Keep Up with Search Engine Updates
SEO experience comes from practicing with Google and other search engines on a daily basis. When you work on SEO optimization, you need to know exactly what to improve as you proceed. That is why, reading the most recent updates in Google’s algorithms is a solution. For instance, when Google published that it pays attention to the semantic context of a web page, keyword stuffing was immediately left behind as a website promotional strategy.
Analyze SEO Tools
Your work as an SEO expert would practically be impossible without the implementation of SEO tools within your workflow. You might have probably heard of such SEO tools as SEMRush, KWfinder, Serpstat, Moz, and other effective apps for website performance monitoring and analysis. Most of them are either free to use or offer a trial – take this opportunity to explore those SEO tools to effectively start implementing an SEO strategy in your SEO role.
Create Portfolio
Even if you get into SEO with zero experience, you need to think of the portfolio from the very start. Include your student projects description from SEO courses to help employers be aware of what you already know. See Thumwind for tips on how to create your job seeker profile and portfolio. As you advance in your career, you will replenish your portfolio with real SEO projects.
Skills Needed to Build Your SEO Career
According to Artios, the searches for SEO jobs have increased by around 300% from 2016 to 2023. So let’s have a closer look at a typical job description for an SEO role and common skills that employers are looking for in their potential entry-level employees.
By looking into SEO specialist job descriptions, we have detected that the following skills are the most frequently requested:
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- Curiosity, self-discipline, eagerness to learn
- Time-management skills
- Problem-solving and analytical skills
- Desire to grow professionally
- Familiarity and experience with SEMRush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics tools
Many job descriptions for any SEO role also often mention that experience in digital marketing would be a great plus.
Summary
If you want to change your career path or only looking for what do to in your life, then becoming an SEO expert is an excellent idea. Given that this profession does not require extravagant skills or a bachelor’s degree, you can learn this metier by taking SEO courses. There you will learn SEO basics, will get to know how search engines work, and see how to craft SEO strategies. Using this knowledge and compiling a portfolio will help you find the job of your dream.
