How to Become An SEO Expert

SEO is among those streams that no institution provides degrees for. Hence, becoming an SEO expert entirely depends on how diligent an SEO professional is and how long he wants to go. Some people call them experts but have got not more than an hour’s knowledge. While others have decades of know-how and experience. Hence, it is all about your time, dedication, and experience. 

Moreover, always remember that no matter how much an individual learns about SEO, there will always be someone with more knowledge in the niche. Hence, his focus should be on gaining and strengthening enough knowledge to get results and not on getting the title of SEO expert overnight. 

If you are among those genuine learners who want to become an SEO pro from a newbie, these 7 steps will guide you through. So read this article till the end.  

How To Become An SEO Expert

Here are 7 things you must know and follow to become a proficient SEO professional.

1. Understand Search Engines & How They Work

Since SEO entirely revolves around optimizing websites for search engines, knowing about them should be your first step. Search engines basically perform the following three functions:

• Crawl

They crawl through the websites and understand their content. 

• Index

After finding the content they store and organize it.

• Rank

On the basis of the content quality and relevance, it ranks the content on the result pages. 

Besides, one also needs to understand the following, in order to become an SEO expert:

• Understand important terms like search index and algorithms

• Know what are they used for 

• What important factors do search engines use to rank pages

• How they monetize searches

• What are the most popular search engines? etc.

2. Learn the Basics of SEO, Its Tactics and Techniques

Understanding the basics of search engine optimization is another on the list of becoming an SEO expert. And adding to this is the understanding of tools, techniques, and tactics for effective website optimization. These include:

• Keyword research

Keyword research refers to finding words and phrases that people search in search engines. By researching relevant keywords, you’ll be able to know what is the user intent and what is the reason behind this intent. For every keyword, you need to look for the following considering factors: 

• Search Volume or how many people are looking for that keyword every month on average.
• Keyword Density or the estimated ranking difficulty on the search engine’s first page, on a scale from 0-100.
• Number of Clicks or the number of clicks that keyword has got every month. 

After considering the above factors, you’ll derive the best keywords, which will be those with the highest search volume and clicks, high business value, and low ranking difficulty. 

• Technical SEO

To be proficient as an SEO expert, one must also understand technical SEO aspects. As the name suggests, technical SEO refers to optimizing a website’s technical aspects. This type of SEO makes sure that crawling, indexing, and user experience are not adversely affected due to any technical inefficiency. It thus includes the following:

• Website speed
• Mobile usability
• Internal and external broken links
• JavaScript
• Structured data
• Canonical tags 
• Robots.txt, etc.

• On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO refers to optimizing web pages to improve their rankings and attract higher organic traffic. In addition to optimizing pages for search intent, On-page SEO also includes:

• Applying keyword modifiers in title tags.
• Forming appropriate and impressive meta titles and descriptions.
• Internal linking
• Using Alt tags for images, etc.

• Link Building

  Link building is another important factor that you must learn while studying SEO. It refers to earning external links (or backlinks) from third-party websites that point to the content of your website. However, make sure that the links that you are earning are quality in addition to quantity. This process boosts your ranking and attracts both organic as well as referral traffic.  

Also, read about internal linking for SEO. 

3.Create Your Website

After you understand the basics of search engines and SEO, the next step is to apply the knowledge to your website. So, create one. It can be a WordPress website or HTML. If you are choosing WordPress, guess what, another thing will add to your learning list. Do you know that one-third of the world’s websites are built with WordPress? If you want to become an SEO expert, you must know that WordPress is the best CMS for SEO.

In contrast, if you’re building an HTML website, learn about tags and their usage. Trust us, there is a lot to learn with HTML. Always remember, when you begin doing things by yourself, you get to improve and upgrade your skills. 

4. Study Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Once you have learned how to build a website, it is time to know ways to optimize the content and also analyze the progress from time to time. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search console help make this learning possible. 

While Google Search Console helps in optimizing your website, Google Analytics measure, analyze, and report the optimization progress. And an SEO expert needs to have a master knowledge of both tools. 

5. Keep Learning & Researching

SEO practices and techniques can change pretty quickly and may result in introducing several updates in a search engine’s algorithms. The best way to keep up-to-date on these upgrades is by regularly following the world’s top SEO experts on their websites and social handles. By social handles, we mean Twitter in particular. This way you can explore more of their knowledge, latest news, opinions, etc. 

Besides, there are other ways as well in the process of becoming an SEO expert, such as:

• Attending SEO conferences and meetups both virtually and physically. These are great sources of relevant information that can level up your skills. You also get to connect directly with the professionals during such meetups.
• Connecting and interacting with SEO experts on professional platforms
• Join online SEO groups that consist of content developers, marketers, and social media professionals. 
• Join Facebook groups, and communities
• Refer SEO blogs and vlogs by experts
• Listen to podcasts that talk about SEO, as these could be an easy and better way to learn things when you need to multitask. 
• Take up free SEO courses from reputed instructors and websites. And not just SEO, you can also learn content writing, copywriting, web designing, graphic designing, etc. to hone your skills. 

6. Learn Content- Creation, Strategy, Optimization, and Marketing

Learning about the major content strategies plays a significant role in the journey of becoming an SEO expert. You might have heard that content is the king and is the prime factor in the success of a digital marketing strategy. Hence, prioritizing understanding the content will help you improve a site’s performance, user experience, and many more aspects. 

We no longer live in a time when content used to be driven by keyword-first strategy. Instead, it is now driven by the user-first objective. Moreover, it needs to be optimized to be able to reach the audience and allow search engines to rank it well. 

Besides, it must also be marketed using multiple promotion channels such as emails, social media, advertising, mobile, etc.

Learn Content marketing priorities for B2B & B2C businesses.

7. Have Patience & Go With The Flow

Being patient may sound easy, however, is the most challenging. But you can’t escape it if you want to become an SEO expert, and that’s what every SEO professional does. It is childish to feel sad if your content couldn’t make it to the first page of the SERPs in the first few weeks. This is because it hardly happens.

You just need to make sure that:

• You develop relevant and quality content
• Research keywords the right way
• Follow the best practices of keyword research and analysis
• Optimize web pages
• Build good quality backlinks

By following these practices, your web pages will eventually rank. 

Conclusion- How To Become An SEO Expert

So these were the seven best practices to become an SEO Expert with time. While striving through the journey of becoming an expert, always remember two things. One, that SEO is ever-changing, and two, becoming an SEO expert is not an overnight process. Hence, take your time, keep learning, understand the basics, stay up-to-date with the latest techniques, follow the top SEO experts, and do all that is mentioned above.