This guide will show you exactly how to become an SEO expert.
Including:
- Learning frameworks
- Emerging trends
- Must-read resources
- Lots more
So if you want to go from SEO rookie to SEO pro, this guide is for you.
Let’s get started.
This guide will show you exactly how to become an SEO expert.
Including:
So if you want to go from SEO rookie to SEO pro, this guide is for you.
Let’s get started.
Hi, I’m Brian Dean.
I launched my first website way back in 2009.
And I quickly realized that SEO was going to be a big part of my site’s success.
So I set out to learn as much as I could.
And thanks to years of reading and experimenting, I’ve had a ton of success with SEO…
…including top 3 rankings for competitive keywords like “Google ranking factors”:
“SEO best practices”:
And “Content writing”:
In fact, Entrepreneur called me an “SEO genius”.
And in today’s guide, I’m going to reveal how YOU can become an SEO expert in record time.
An SEO expert (also known as an “SEO specialist”) is someone that optimizes websites in order to achieve higher search engine rankings.
Put another way:
An SEO expert is someone that knows how to get more traffic from search engines.
Because the field of search engine optimization is so new, most people don’t learn SEO from a traditional 4-year college program.
(Although those do exist.)
Here are the most common ways that people become SEO specialists:
Here’s a breakdown of each of these six options:
Approach | Learning Speed | Ease of Learning | Cost | Personal Support and Guidance | Putting SEO Into Practice |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
SEO Course | 4/5 | 5/5 | 2/5 | 3/5 | 1/5 |
Your Own Site | 4/5 | 2/5 | 4/5 | 1/5 | 5/5 |
Work At Marketing Agency | 4/5 | 3/5 | 1/5 | 3/5 | 3/5 |
Take On SEO Clients | 3/5 | 2/5 | 2/5 | 1/5 | 5/5 |
Online Certification/Degree | 3/5 | 5/5 | 4/5 | 4/5 | 1/5 |
In-House SEO | 5/5 | 3/5 | 1/5 | 4/5 | 3/5 |
There’s a lot more to SEO than optimizing meta tags on a website.
In fact, the best SEO specialists are people that are proficient in a number of different areas of digital marketing. This includes “core” SEO skills (like title tag optimization). But it also includes other digital marketing skills, like writing and web design.
With that, here are the key skills that an SEO expert needs to have:
In the rest of this guide, I’ll dive deeper into each of these. And show you real-life examples of people that have become SEO specialists.
In this chapter, you’ll learn the essentials that ANY legit SEO expert needs to know.
These essentials include HTML, how search engines work, and important Google ranking factors in 2023.
And once you master these SEO basics, you’ll be well on your way to mastering advanced topics (like link building and mobile optimization).
Let’s get started.
Understanding how search engines work is a key piece of knowledge for any SEO professional.
Search engines send out search engine spiders to find pages on the internet.
Next, they crawl each page’s code.
Once the page is crawled, the page is added to the search engine’s index, which is a cached collection of pages.
In other words: when you do a Google search, you’re not getting back live results. Instead, Google is showing you pages from its index. That’s why you get Google results within milliseconds.
(Fun Fact: Google has over 130 trillion pages in its index!)
When someone searches, Google looks for pages in its index that match the person’s query.
And they rank those pages based on hundreds of factors in their algorithm.
Resources to learn about search engines
How Search Works: A very well-done visual guide to how search engines work… straight from Google.
How does Google Search work?: This video by former Googler Matt Cutts gives you an in-depth peek into Google search.
You’re probably wondering:
How do Google, Bing and other search engines figure out what to rank on the first page?
Keep reading…
Google uses 200+ ranking factors in their algorithm.
And no, you don’t need to learn them all. 🙂
In fact, most of the 200 ranking factors are different ways of measuring 3 things: relevancy, authority and quality.
Relevancy is how well a page matches someone’s search.
For example, let’s say you searched for “grey hoodies” in Google.
Well, Google is going to scan its index to find pages that are about “grey hoodies”.
And they’re REALLY good at it. This is why you almost never see a result for “grey sneakers” when you search for “grey hoodies”.
Authority is how much Google trusts the content on a page.
And they measure authority primarily based on links.
The more links a page has pointing to it, the more authority that page has in Google’s eyes.
Quality is based on a few different factors, like your site’s online reputation, your content’s structure, and how users interact with your site in the search results.
Resources to learn about ranking factors
13 Search Engine Ranking Factors: An updated list of ranking factors that are considered (by me) to be most important right now.
The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors: Very cool visual guide to “success factors” that can help your site rank in Google.
Google RankBrain: The Definitive Guide: Google has said that their AI-based algorithm, RankBrain, is one of their 3 most important ranking signals. Get the lowdown on RankBrain in this guide.
Now that you’ve got the basics down, it’s time for chapter 3.
Do you need to be a coding ninja to be good at SEO?
No.
But do you need to understand the basics of HTML?
Yes!
Why is this important?
Google doesn’t see your site as humans do. Instead, they look at your site’s code. And if you don’t understand that code, it’s almost impossible to optimize it the right way.
Plus, if you ever run into any technical SEO problems, you’re going to be completely lost.
But when you at least know the basics of HTML, optimizing your site gets A LOT easier.
Resources to Learn HTML
Head First HTML and CSS: A Learner’s Guide to Creating Standards-Based Web Pages: A fantastic guide that pushes you to take action after every lesson. This is how I learned HTML in an afternoon.
Introduction to HTML: An interactive HTML course from Code Academy. Great for picking up the basics.
One Month HTML: A very involved training for people that want to know everything there is to know about HTML.
If you’re serious about becoming an SEO expert, there are 5 “Master Keys” you need to know.
These Master Keys are the 5 most important topics in the world of search engine optimization.
And the better you understand these 5 core topics, the more success you’ll have.
So without further ado, let’s dive right in.
Keyword research should be the first step of ANY SEO campaign.
Choose the right keywords? You’ll see your site rocket to the top of Google’s first page for keywords that thousands of people search for every month.
Choose the wrong keywords? Your site will be buried at the bottom of Google’s 5th page.
Keywords really are that important.
If you want to learn more about keyword research, this guide has you covered.
No SEO training would be complete without a section on content marketing. That’s because it’s almost impossible to rank in 2023 without awesome content (even if your site is perfectly optimized for search engines).
The Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing from Moz is a great place to start.
And if you want to see a case study of how SEO and content marketing relate to one another, I recommend reading this case study:
Back in the day you could stuff your content with keywords… and it would rank. Flash forward to today, and on-page SEO is much more sophisticated. Sure, you still want to include keywords on your page. But that’s just the beginning.
Use this video to get an understanding of basic and advanced on-page SEO strategies (including tons of real-life examples).
Technical SEO is one of the most underrated parts of SEO. It’s important for just about any website. But technical optimization is ESPECIALLY important for big websites with thousands of pages (like ecommerce and news sites).
Whether you run a small blog or a media brand with 500k pages, these resources will help you master technical SEO:
There’s no way around it: link building is a HUGE part of SEO. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon. That’s why any SEO expert (even one that specializes in technical SEO or content) needs to be good at building backlinks.
These resources will help you learn about white hat link building approaches, strategies, and techniques:
Which brings us to our next chapter…
You can read about SEO all day long.
But if you want to become an SEO specialist, you need to actually do SEO.
And when it comes to practicing your SEO skills, you’ve got three main options.
I’ll cover these options (including their pros and cons) in this chapter.
This is how I got started with SEO.
And it’s how I recommend that most people learn how to become an SEO expert.
Here’s why:
When you run your own website, you can make changes FAST.
No need to ping your boss on Slack to see if it’s OK to change a title tag.
No need to email your client’s web designer to add an image to a page.
See something that needs to be changed. Change it. See the results.
The cycle of test→learn→improve moves 10x faster with your own property than with someone else’s website.
Plus, when you work on your own stuff you get to see the 100+ of factors that go into a successful website (beyond straight-up SEO). I’m talking about things like design, copywriting, email list building, social media, outreach.
In other words, running your own site helps you become a well-rounded “T-Shaped Marketer”.
For example, Jerryll Noorden applied what he learned from his time as a former NASA scientist to SEO.
Which helped him take his side hustle into a highly profitable real estate business.
Here’s how Jeryll described how his experience shaped his approach to SEO today.
“As an (ex) IHMC/NASA robotics scientist. I am used to figuring things out, analyzing it dissect it and make it better, 10X. My SEO strategies are in house developed and they work better than anything I have seen thus far. My secret is to bypass Google, by figuring out what Google looks for.”
And Jerryll isn’t alone. A few years back, Maaike de Boer’s daughter was struggling with math at school.
And when Maaike looked for resources to help her daughter, she came up empty.
That’s when Maaike decided to launch a website that now gets 200k visits per month.
(Which is even more impressive if you consider that The Netherlands only has about 17 million people.)
How did Maaike get so good at SEO? She learned as much as she could about SEO (from blog posts, online courses and SEO conferences). Then, she applied what she learned to her website.
And this fast process made Maaike go from SEO newbie to SEO expert in record time.
Or as Maaike told me:
“From the beginning of the business, I trained myself in SEO. I soon discovered that the main competitors focused more on television commercials and social media. I made a difference with in-depth articles with valuable information for involved parents. By constantly optimizing the website and the articles the results got better each year.”
That said, running your own website isn’t the only way to learn SEO. You can also…
The idea of cutting your teeth on SEO with a client’s site might sound weird. After all: if you’re not an SEO expert yet, why would someone hire you?
It’s a good question. Here’s the answer:
1. The fact that you’ve read about SEO puts you ahead of 90% of small business owners out there.
2. SEO is a lot of work. So even if a client knows more about online marketing than you do, they probably don’t have time to do SEO on their own.
3. Your first SEO client should pay you pretty much nothing (or, in some cases, actually nothing). Think of it as an apprenticeship. That way, there’s no pressure to perform miracles.
For example, Backlinko reader Felix Norton got started with SEO when he helped clients with their local SEO.
As Felix puts it:
“I worked on clients sites, testing out strategies, testing different markets and using their existing sites as a foundation to see what works and what doesn’t.
When I found things that worked I built them into my agency’s standard operating procedures, so I could replicate them on future client sites and on my own.”
Today, Felix runs a WordPress development agency. And that opportunity wouldn’t have opened up if he didn’t kick things off with client work.
Working at an agency or as an in-house SEO is a great way to become an SEO specialist.
The big plus here is that you’re surrounded by people that already know SEO. And it’s their job to help you get up to speed.
So you tend to learn FAST.
In fact, that’s how Backlinko reader Ryan got his start. Ryan was interested in SEO. And he wanted an environment where he could learn more. So he worked as an entry-level SEO at a big agency.
And the SEO knowledge that Ryan picked up helped him grow his travel blog to one of the most popular in France.
As Ryan explained to me:
“Naturally, I applied everything I learned about SEO from the agency to my travel blog. But I kept learning on the way and always keep myself updated. That’s how I maintain my top positions.”
The best SEO professionals I know all have one thing in common:
They’re ALWAYS testing.
In fact, I’d say that “testing” is the one thing that ultimately pushes people to the top of the field.
That said: SEO is a tricky thing to test. So if you’re going to run SEO experiments, here are a few key frameworks to follow.
Put another way:
Correlation doesn’t always mean causation.
Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm. In fact, according to Google, they make approximately 3,000 changes to the algorithm every year.
As you can see in this shot of my Google Analytics organic traffic report, variations in your organic traffic happen all the time… even if you haven’t touched your site.
This is a mistake I made early on. I’d assume that a rankings improvement (or drop) was due to a change I made.
For example, I’d add a few keywords to a page. See my rankings go from #7 to #5. And assume my keyword optimization caused the bump.
It might have. But it could also be Google’s algorithm doing its thing.
So how do you know if your change did anything? Well, that leads us to…
The bigger the result, the more likely your change was behind it.
I’ll explain with an example…
Look at the organic traffic stats for this page on my site over a 30-day period:
I didn’t touch the page. But you can see that there are quite a few spikes and dips throughout the month.
If that’s the type of change you’re seeing, it’s probably Google’s normal fluctuations at work.
On the other hand, look at the organic traffic to that same page AFTER I made a significant change to that page’s content:
Is it possible that Google made a major change to its algorithm that day? Yes. But it’s much more likely that my change caused the traffic to improve.
And if you want to be sure, roll out the same change across different pages. If they all react the same way, you can be pretty sure that whatever you did is behind the improvement.
In theory, you can test just about anything.
But here are some relatively easy SEO experiments to run:
And if you want to get more advanced, you can start testing different link building strategies, search intents, and paid social media promotion.
For example, a while back I wanted to see if interactive content would decrease my bounce rate and improve my time on site.
(Which I believe to be an important Google ranking signal.)
So when I launched this mega list of SEO tools, I added an interactive filter to the top of the page:
As it turned out, user interaction stats on that page were higher than other similar content on my site:
So I decided to use this same interactive element on long list posts like this one:
And the results were similar:
This experience taught me: “Interactive filters is one way to maximize user experience signals on super long content.”
This is something that I could have NEVER learned from reading blog posts or watching YouTube videos.
It had to come from experimenting.
Now it’s time to take your SEO game to the next level.
In fact, if you want to be considered an “SEO Expert” you should learn about the topics I’m going to cover in this chapter.
For example, you don’t need to be the world’s foremost guru on International SEO. But you should at least know what an Hreflang tag is.
And in this chapter, I’m going to outline a number of advanced SEO skills… and resources to learn more about them.
When I say “Analytics”, I’m mostly talking about Google Analytics.
Understanding Analytics is important for two main reasons:
Here are a few resources to help you:
In a perfect world, you’d work on sites that are almost perfectly optimized. They just need your magic touch to push it over the edge.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. 🙂
In the real world you’ll find yourself battling duplicate content, Google penalties, horrible UX, and lots more.
Enter: SEO Audits.
SEO auditing is important because it helps you break down a site’s SEO in a systematic way.
If you want to learn more about SEO audits, I recommend checking out this SEO audit tutorial.
Is User Experience a direct ranking signal?
Probably not.
But user experience indirectly impacts SEO in a major way.
For example, let’s say your site is hard to use. Well, Google searchers are going to “Pogostick” back to the search results, which can hurt your rankings.
With that, here are some resources that will help you get started learning UX.
If you want to be an SEO specialist, you MUST know how to use tools.
In fact, experience with tools is so important that most SEO specialist job postings list “experience with SEO tools” as a requirement:
If you want a crash course on SEO software, this section from the SEO Marketing Hub has you covered.
If you plan to run (or work at) an SEO agency, local SEO will take up a big part of your day. That’s because the vast majority of SEO clients tend to be local businesses, like dentists and lawyers.
This video by Sam Oh is a great intro to local SEO.
In other words: reverse engineering how your competitor is getting their links. This includes looking at the content that’s working best for them and WHERE they get their links from.
Here’s a starter guide to reverse engineering that I recommend checking out.
If your site targets more than one country, international SEO is HUGE.
If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend checking out our helpful international SEO guide.
Google now runs on a mobile-first index. Which means that mobile SEO isn’t optional. It’s required to succeed with SEO.
This mobile SEO guide I recently updated is a great place to start.
It’s one thing to know how to optimize a title tag.
But how do you optimize 50,000 title tags on an eCommerce site?
That’s where scaling comes into play.
Unfortunately, scaling SEO can be tricky.
That’s why, in this chapter, I’m going to show you three real-life examples of SEO tasks done at scale.
Like I mentioned in the last chapter, audits are a big part of an SEO specialist’s job.
Without a system, you’re going to have to start from scratch whenever you run into a new project.
For example, SEO consultant Felix (who we met earlier) does TONS of audits for his clients.
And to scale up, he created dedicated systems and processes to make the audits faster and more efficient.
Specifically, Felix documented EVERY step of the process.
That way, his team can execute audits without him.
For example, he has an Asana board that outlines every step (with a timeline):
And team members collaborate on each task using Slack.
Felix also has dozens of Google Docs that go into insane detail on how to find and fix technical SEO issues, set up the Google Search Console, and more.
All of which has helped Felix scale up this time-consuming process:
“The hard part has been in figuring out a way to scale this and transfer the knowledge and processes to colleagues. Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) has been critical to delegating and tracking work.”
Scaling content is easy:
Just hire a bunch of random freelancers on UpWork and hope for the best.
But scaling GOOD content? That’s a different story.
For that, you need a system for coming up with blog post topics, keyword research, writing, outlining, editing and design.
Bob Warfield has this down to a science. Bob’s company, CNC Cookbook, publishes 12 posts per month. And despite being in a boring niche, his content is REALLY good.
His secret? Bob and his team follow a repeatable blueprint for creating high-quality content:
Here’s a screenshot of Bob’s spreadsheet:
As Bob puts it:
“Once you get used to it, the articles almost write themselves. And I have successfully tested the method on folks that have no knowledge of my niche at all. My daughter wrote a series of posts for me one summer that did well.”
Scaling white hat link building is no easy task.
In fact, there’s a fine line between scalable link building and straight-up spam.
Well, according to SEO consultant Calin Yablonski, you can scale outreach without being spammy.
The secret isn’t necessarily the process (although his SEO company does have a detailed process using Basecamp).
Instead, it’s about guidelines that ensure your SEO team personalizes each and every email that goes out.
And what’s interesting about Calin’s approach is that he actually involves his client in the entire process.
For example, he asks new clients to fill out a brief intake form to get an insider’s look at their industry.
Which helps them:
As Calin told me:
“Link builders are the air traffic controllers of the SEO industry. Using scalable link building processes is absolutely critical to organizing and implementing a campaign effectively.”