Professional profiles in SEO, that is, SEO professionals, have only existed for a relatively short time. Once we entered the digital era at the turn of the century, more than 2 decades ago, companies and industries began to demand new job profiles experienced in an environment that was unexplored and whose rules were only beginning to be written. Nobody knew what SEO was, so SEO professionals, as such, didn't exist. But the most daring, who decided to keep pace with the technological developments affecting marketing and communication, began to wonder how our friend Google worked, and through lots of testing on 1.0 websites, you could say SEO professionals were born.
In today's business and social landscape, two realities collide when a business's need for digital growth emerges and it requests SEO services in Madrid or in another city:
- A high level of unawareness among users/companies about how SEO works
- A mismatch between expectations and investment
Although many voices have been raised, and still are, in the digital ecosystem about the loss of importance of SEO in favor of paid search in integrated marketing strategies, the fact is that, little by little, more technical, hands-on SEO professionals are emerging, up to date and highly knowledgeable, to meet the still high demand in the market.
What SEO professional profiles look like
SEO professionals come from diverse backgrounds . Mainly, we find SEO professionals whose core training is in:
- IT/programming
- Marketing
- Journalism
- Non-IT engineering (to a lesser extent)
Then, of course, there are those self-taught digital profiles who have been growing alongside the specialty since the early days of SEO at the beginning of the century, trying and testing, and who today are the most reputable SEO professionals because they have experienced the entire evolution and every phase of the discipline.
These profiles may well have no higher education of any kind, but in terms of SEO knowledge, they are the most qualified.
Technical skills of SEO professionals
As for the technical skills an SEO professional must master, ideally they would be both analyst and executor; that is, able to determine the strategy and define the action plan to apply, and also the one who carries it out (necessarily with outside help in most cases).
Their knowledge should be extensive in areas such as:
- Web environments
- Web architecture
- Web Content
- Usability
- CTAs (calls to action)
- Performance (server-level web optimization)
- HTML programming language (CSS, PHP and JavaScript are a big plus)
- Analysis of users' search intent in search engines (keyword research)
- SERP analysis (results pages on Google and other search engines)
- On-page and off-page competitor analysis
- SEO copywriting
SEO on-page
This is the area where SEO professionals with more technical profiles (IT specialists/programmers/engineers) make the most of their training to optimize the web environment to the fullest.
Given how volatile SEO is due to the many updates from Google, we SEO professionals cannot say for certain which optimizations carry more weight in an organic strategy, whether the on-page or the off-page ones. It will depend a lot on the niche in question.
What we can say is that, in ideal SEO work, you need to invest time, dedication and analysis in both. There are known cases of websites ranking with one of the two areas fairly neglected (again: always depending on the sector/niche in question), but when there is a lot of competition, you have to do a good job in both areas.
Main actions on-page:
Meta tag content
Following a thorough analysis of keywords and search intent for our brand's products or services (transactional and informational terms), selecting the key terms that interest us most for each rankable URL on the website (including images), and writing SEO content for each of the meta tags that bots crawl to understand the websites indexed in their databases.
Web Content
Linked to the previous action, and again after the keyword research, writing the web content for each page and structuring the headings hierarchically (h1, h2, h3…) according to the terms we have chosen to target on each URL.
Web performance
Clean, meticulous optimization of the technical performance of a website. For SEO professionals it is a very delicate (and important) area that we leave in the hands of web developers or design experts.
This includes everything related to:
- Unnecessary code
- URLs: duplicate, auto-generated, temporary, irrelevant…
- Web files (image size, PDFs…)
It is a work to be done at server level to achieve the fastest possible loading speed for the website.
Off-page SEO
A series of actions that we SEO professionals usually carry out ourselves, but not all of them. Certain ones are delegated to more specialized profiles.
Keyword analysis (keyword research)
The SEO professionals spend a great many hours dissecting the SERPs in search of the main queries users make about each client’s products/services/brand.
Starting a keyword research has to be done from the most concise term to the broadest, and in between, identifying other words and meanings that may be used to refer to the product/service in question. Only then can we cover every possibility.
Content Strategy
The creating new, original content on informational topics we see users searching for is one of the one of the most common and effective off-page SEO actions. Select the ones most closely aligned with our business and write the content to try to rank for that specific query.
A sound content strategy on a website’s corporate blog delivers very good results. First analyze which keywords we want to target, then analyze the SERPs to see which articles rank highest for that topic, and then create more comprehensive content with well-defined SEO criteria so that, over time, it shows up as the top result for the keyword o keywords targeted in the post.
Web usability (UI/UX)
Related to the layout of page content. Depending on the website’s goal, the arrangement of elements, content and headings, and how they combine with other interactive components such as banners, buttons or forms, will broadly define the user experience on our website.
For SEO professionals, user experience is essential. It will largely determine how likely that user is to visit the website again in the future.
Defining and establishing a well-designed interface (User Interface) and experience (User Experience) is based on 2 concepts that must be analyzed first:
- How the top-ranking websites for our product/service/niche are designed
- The client’s digital goals
Email Marketing
Regular corporate email sends (newsletters) are a promotion and outreach channel well worth considering in any digital strategy. Naturally, the larger the database available, the greater the potential for acquisition.
Sharing in newsletters links to our website is extremely common and generates referral traffic that can carry significant weight in improving a website’s SEO.
Especially recommended when we launch a new promotion, a newly created product/service, or when we organize, for example, an event or conference. The novelty of the action will encourage clicks, and in a short time we can rank a URL even if it is new.
Hosting
Much of a website’s good or poor organic performance is determined by the web hosting it has. If the hosting does not offer the performance the website requires in terms of resources, its performance will suffer and it will immediately affect the user experience and, consequently, the site’s overall SEO.
Most companies that, for whatever reason, have not paid attention to which specific hosting service they have are on a shared server that, depending on their needs, falls short on resources. Depending on the type of website we are dealing with (and the volume of traffic it receives, the resources it needs, etc.), we will need to choose a virtual server or another higher-performance option (e.g. universities, banks, online stores with many products…).
The necessary informative and educational work of SEO professionals
At the beginning of the article we mentioned the two realities SEO professionals usually encounter when we meet with companies or individuals. The first is the deep lack of knowledge about the actions that make up an organic ranking strategy; the second, the usual gap between what is requested and aspired to and the budget one is willing to invest.
Anyone working professionally in SEO knows that explaining what SEO involves using anglicisms and technical jargon to people who are not familiar with digital terminology ends in distrust. Especially if results are not achieved. Digital marketing agencies live on trust and results.
We must therefore:
- To Be transparent with the client and explain what the services in SEO contracts involve in the simplest, plainest and most illustrative way possible.
- Provide plenty of visual examples of each of the actions (case studies, for example).
- Use tools to explain how keywords work and how they rankor.
- Explain what updates (updates) of Google are and how they can affect a website’s SEO.
- Stress the need to commit to this type of service in the medium to long term, even more so if the website is new.
- Back to explain over and over again, with different examples, what we do if the client still has doubts.
Conclusions
Whether you aspire to be one of the SEO professionals who help individuals and businesses gain greater online visibility today, or you are a company ready to hire the services of these SEO professionals, it is essential to know what skills they master, what educational background they have and how they carry out their work, in order to know exactly what kind of professional and services we are talking about.
In Webbing Online we specialize in SEO and comprehensive digital marketing strategies, and we consider it non-negotiable to support our clients throughout the business relationship through, of course, the best service (achieving previously set corporate goals) possible, but also through an ongoing educational effort about what we do, why, and how the digital ecosystem works when it comes to SEO.
If you need advice on this, don’t hesitate to Contact Us 😉.