3 Must Do Things to Become an SEO Expert

SEO is a growing industry and there are many aspiring professionals that want to build a career in this industry. This includes college graduates that are passionate about digital marketing as well as SEO fresher or executives that have just kick-started their career in this industry. Being an SEO expert is a long journey because the algorithms are pretty complex, plus, it changes pretty often. I have been in this industry for more than 10 years and I would like to share the top 3 tips that you must follow to build your career as an SEO expert.

1. Read, Read and Read a Lot
SEO is not just marketing. It is intelligent marketing. The things that work or don’t work are not so clear. An SEO activity that works amazingly well for one project can do drastically bad for another. Thus, you need to build your logical and analytical skills. These skills can be built only if you learn from others’ experience instead of burning your hands and clients’ money all the time. There are many digital marketing experts that write a lot about what to do and what you mustn’t do with your projects. Read as much as you can. This will let you learn new things about your industry and other things as well.

2. Experiment Carefully
When you are working as an SEO executive, you will be following the things you have learned from your SEO manager or team lead, but don’t restrict yourself with the limited knowledge and things. SEO is a huge field and you can do better than your manager. You may know what your manager might not know. Thus, discussing new ideas and trying those in the projects will let you test the effectiveness of various SEO activities. A/B testing is necessary in the marketing industry. However, don’t be overconfident about something just because you read it on the blog of one of the best influencers or digital marketing companies. When you are trying something new, you have to be careful to assure you don’t hamper the project instead of benefiting it. Thus, be careful. If you are self-employed / extremely passionate, you can buy a domain for yourself and experiment on that. This will let you test new things without hampering your customers or company.

3. Dig Deep
SEO is an industry where everyone thinks they are experts when they are actually not!! Thus, when you read something, don’t just believe in it. You better dig deep and read some more articles on the same topic. If everyone says the similar thing, then it is good to go with that idea. For an example, I recently read a quote shared on social media handle of one of the leading IT companies in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. The quote reads,

“Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content.”

I was shocked reading this statement because Google is my best friend and I know him! Google is very particular about duplicate content. On the other hand, why would such a reputable IT company put their reputation at stake by spreading a rumor? I dig deeper to know the TRUTH, which says below:

“Google doesn’t penalize the duplicate content within the site.”

The actual meaning of this statement is as below:

First of all duplicate content is not allowed on the web; it is allowed only within the same website. Google lets you use the same content within the same site on internal pages and doesn’t penalize you. It makes sense because there can be some content that is similar in more than one page, so you can put the same content in multiple places without getting worried about the Google penalty as we all do because we know Google hates duplicate content.

The most important thing many so called “SEO Specialists” miss here is this,

“Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content, but at the same time it will give you zero benefit for those pages with the duplicate content. As per the Google, it ignores the duplicate content and put only one original copy of that content in the index. It means having multiple pages with the same content is not really helpful and makes no sense. On the contrary, using unique content will bring content benefits for you.”

So what is important?

Not getting penalized and having a multiple pages with the same content to save some bucks or investing some money on SEO content writing, get unique content and bring SEO benefits. The choice is yours!!

Coming back to the original point, a reputable IT company that shared the quote:

Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content.

The company is right, but it is half truth and half truth is more vicious. Thus, to become an SEO expert, the first thing you need to learn is to use your logic and dig deeper before believing on any “SEO Specialist.”

Conclusion
Being an SEO expert demands a lot of skills at your end along with the patience because SEO doesn’t give instant results. You need to have all the mentioned skills or will need to cultivate those to make a shining career in this field.

Still having some confusion? Get in touch!