How to Become an SEO Expert in 2024 (31 Pro Tips)
hi it's olgazar from SEO Sly welcome to SEO podcast by SEO Sly today I wanted to talk about a very important topic which is how to become a real SEO Pro someone who is way better than others someone who takes the lead there are a lot of ways seos can do to become better I've been in SEO for more than 10 years I have really seen a lot I have really done a lot experimented with lots of things I have been a mentor to many many people who are starting out people who have some experience and today I just wanted to share with you like 31 things that I think are kind of transformational if you apply them to your SEO career to your SEO job you will really become a very powerful even dangerous SEO so let's get started first thing about 99 don't quote me on that but that's more or less about 99 of seos do not do all of the things I'm going to share if you do all of them then you will be in the top one percent of seos who are really moving the needle who are really like taking the lead who are fault leaders in SEO industry so let me share those 31 tips things steps you can take to become a better more powerful SEO the order of those things is totally random it doesn't really matter in most cases in what order you complete the steps it's important that you are aware of all of those steps and you kind of somehow incorporate them into your SEO career so step number one if you are just starting out this is especially important if you are just starting out you need to really have like very very deep and solid understanding of how SEO Works how search engines work what is crawling how crawling Works what's like indexing how indexing works what's ranking how ranking works there is fortunately a very nice document called SEO starter guide created by Google it's available in Google search Central it's part of Google documentation and I believe everyone's starting out or even not starting out should always like refer back to search Central documentation because this is really a gold mine of of like best practices and tips and Technical knowledge for SEO so this should be like your essential reading even if you are as I said even if you are already in the field for some time you will definitely find something interesting something useful there tip number two you won't be able to become a powerful SEO if you don't create your own website I know a lot of people who are like doing everything to avoid creating a website they just want to consume the content read but they don't want to apply and this is probably the biggest mistake you can do you have to absolutely create your own website and I don't just mean one website you have to create a bunch of websites for example test them do all crazy things with them see them fall see them rise without doing that you won't be able to become a competitive SEO so my SEO career started with basically just creating websites building them destroying them breaking them everything I've been doing for the first three years of my SEO kind of career at that time was creating websites putting AdSense on them growing them killing them and we also I believe have to be doing that next is keyword research so without knowing the keywords the topics you want to create content around you won't be able to rank sites so keyword research is kind of the fundamental thing in SEO of course there are tons of different tools for keyword research and I recommend you play with a lot of them so that you find your favorite tool you create your own methodology for for doing keyword research because keyword research is like the basis of course like everything is now changing we have ai we have entities we have like entity SEO so we have to of course not only think about keyword research like about just looking for keywords we have to think about that in a more like from a bigger perspective that this is just that this is like looking for topics semantics entities stuff like that next is on page so you have your keywords you have your terms and the next thing for you is to actually know where to put them on the site on the page to so that Google knows what this page is about and is able to rank it so on-page SEO is crucial there are tons of great guys so non-page SEO this is one of them I strongly recommend you dive deep into on-page SEO because like on-page SEO and backlinks are basically the two things that work in SEO and I would say on-page SEO is like 70 backlinks is around 30 I would say this is what I'm seeing from my observations my my tests you can really nail down a lot of phrases with just doing on-page SEO number five technical SEO you should be fluent in technical SEO you should know like the most important technical SEO Concepts you should know how to crawl this site how to analyze the results because sometimes technical SEO optimizations in most cases won't translate into better rankings but if there are some serious technical issues on the site the site simply won't be able to rank so you have to be able to see that this site has no index tag and that's why it's not ranking so technical SEO become like familiar with the next thing is auditing skills so this is something that the more experience you have the easier it will be for you to look at the site and see immediately that what problems this site has there are a lot of videos on my channel where I do live SEO audits of websites so I strongly recommend you watch them but you have to know how to audit the site you have to know what to look for and don't use automated SEO audits like every tool is able to create and automated SEO report that SEO audit that will show you the all the mistakes or the issues but in most cases you have to like add your human element human human brain to interpret those things because very often in most cases this is not exactly what's happening with the site because those tools at least now don't think they just analyze based on the factors they have and you have to analyze it this data and SEO auditing skill is one of the most important skills for you as an SEO because this will enable you to work with clients to sell audits as a service and to really like understand what's going on with the site and why it's not ranking and what you can do to improve its rankings you have to know HTML and CSS number seven so at least the basics of course you don't have to be a web designer web developer but you need to know like HTML Basics and CSS Basics there are tons of free courses that will walk you through that even in a practical way so code academy is one of them so make sure you you know HTML and CSS basics number eight you need to know how to measure your SEO success there are a lot of vanity metrics you have to be wary of because like bounce rates the old metrics that's now going away this is a huge like vanity metric and you have to really know what to measure in most cases what's what will show you whether the SEO is working is is the site bringing more money more business are your SEO activities bringing more money to your client more leads and if they are bringing leads are these quality leads usually there is a connection to more business more leads more money in a huge natural of course there are a lot of other metrics like Organics traffic but then again we have to think about the quality of organic traffic the one huge vanity metric are keyword positions of course they are important because High positions usually mean more traffic but not always that's why I just blindly following keyword rankings tracking them without like looking at other aspects is usually a waste of time number nine I suggest you get certifications there are tons of ways to get certifications the one I started with when I was starting out in SEO was search engine optimization specialization at UC Davis it is available on Coursera it takes around I think six months and you will have all the basics even more advanced knowledge you will also learn about I think link building a bit social you will get like the the knowledge that an SEO theoretical knowledge and SEO should have and uh I strongly recommend you you take that course and of course there are other courses as well whenever you do that course complete that course put it on your LinkedIn and try to implement something practical from it number 10 there are so many tools most of the tools offer some kind of a free trial and so if you cannot afford to buy those tools at least play with their free trials of course ga4 Google search console they are like essential for you I strongly recommend you play with website crawlers like screaming frog or jet octopus you have to know SEO tools you have to like them and there is a link I will put a link to my favorite SEO tools I use on a daily basis you don't have to be using take 100 SEO tools to be a good SEO you just have to find the set of tools that work best for you and just make sure you are using them to their full advantage number 11 algorithm changes algorithm updates you have to know what they are how they can affect aside how a core update can affect aside the best person to refer to regarding algorithm updates is probably Mary Haynes Lily Ray and Glenn Gabe one thing you have to know is that if a site suffers as a result of an algorithm algorithm update in most cases it is not able to recover until another core update happens or yet another core update happens assuming that although like optimizations improvements have been done and you also have to have to know that core algorithm update is usually a relevance kind of update that Google is changing what it now values it is not a penalty like Google core update is not a penalty and you shouldn't be thinking about it like that 12.
Networking is invaluable you should be networking with other seos because this is how you will get the most experience this is how you will get connections of course SEO forums conferences even online conferences and of course places like LinkedIn and Twitter where a ton of very useful discussions are happening local SEO whether you do local SEO or you don't you should have a clue about what it entails how it works there are a lot of nice SEO courses this is the one I can I recommend you you check I haven't been deep into local SEO but now I am kind of learning a lot and soon I will be offering even local SEO as part of my services so stay tuned practice SEO on a daily basis so this kind of ties back to having a website but do something practical every day you can have a spreadsheet of all the URLs on your site and already on your all website and just do something practical every day so let's say you observed something in in serbs you think that you did analysis and you think that for example you should add more entities to like the first paragraph of your site or your pages you want to rank for a specific topic then you do that on this day next day you optimize title tag anything just just just do practical stuff because this is what will make you a better SEO 15 follow SEO thought leaders like latest Hollis like myself Barry Schwartz Glenn Gabe Lily Ray Mary Haynes the record I can just keep keep on going they are great and they are very happy to share their knowledge with you for free which is really like the best opportunity for you to learn everything I share for free so you can also like go back to my blog see my old blog posts watch my other YouTube videos Ali that's all this is also she has her learning dot IO learning SEO dot IO website where she kind of curates all the best content around SEO from all the seos make sure to check that join SEO communities the one I strongly recommend is SEO is Google search Central help Forum which is where I kind of started this is a great place to both learn practical SEO and also get clients so you simply go there and you answer people's questions around SEO in many cases you will have to look something up you will have to read something you'll have to check something maybe you will have to like crawl the site of the owner who asked this question and you will really learn a ton so when I still had time because now I don't have time I was doing that for a couple of hours every day and I was learning so much so I strongly recommend and if you like start answering people and fixing their problems they will simply directly reach out to you for more help 17 develop skills in data and Analysis like with the AI now everything is even more I would say focus on having those skills to analyze data to draw conclusions from data this is also the skill you should have and you should also know in the future how to use AI tool tools to do those types of analysis for you there is like one great course you can pay from Google it's free of course about Google data analytics so I strongly recommend you also get interested in that this is the biggest one never stop learning SEO like you should be learning SEO all the time at all times some ways I learn SEO like constantly is through SEO podcast so I listen to SEO podcasts whenever I can when I am walking the dog when I'm driving when I even when I run on a treadmill a hack here is to listen at a faster Pace recently I even switched to listening at 1.75 so you can really consume a ton of content in a way relatively short period of time and of course YouTube on YouTube you will also have a ton of interesting like videos tutorials guides lectures so both both YouTube and podcasts are a great way to learn SEO in addition to of course reading like popular SEO blogs or reading books about SEO and I invite you to subscribe to my SEO podcast and to subscribe my SEO Channel if you haven't done this done this already create an impressive portfolio assuming that you have done some of the things I have already talked about you have your own website you manage to bring some results to your website you had some client whom you helped maybe you you finished some some courses this is something you want to put in your portfolio this will be your credentials for your potential future clients or people interested in cooperating with you you should have like one Central place where you put all those things together so for me this is my SEO consultant page on my website where I put all the videos I appear in where I put all the Publications I am cited in or all the articles I write on other websites like on search engine journal and I strongly recommend you do that and of course you should also have that information on LinkedIn whenever you have some new project new certificate put it on LinkedIn too and maybe even share it with your audience that you are celebrating like getting like another certification 20.
It is not essential for you to be a coder to be a good SEO but having some basic knowledge of programming language will be will be really helpful you don't have to be a coder you don't have to be like someone who is creating programs but just like know how it works again there are tons of like basic courses which you can complete in like 10 hours or something and you will at least know more or less how it works the one I can recommend is this one at Udacity intro to python but there are of course way more other courses so check this out become proficient in GSC out of all the SEO tools that are out there Google search console is probably the most important one so you should be spending a lot of your time every day in Google search console because not only is it the technical SEO tool that is showing you from a technical SEO standpoint what Google is seeing what issues it's reporting it's also showing you users who are visiting your site through Google organic Pro through Google discover this is like the all-around I would say all in one SEO report for your site by Google and you should really spend a lot of time in it another one this is the one I'm struggling with the most and probably a lot of technical SEO people or people who are spending a lot of time at their homes who work remotely you should develop strong communication and Consulting skills this is something you can learn this will help you like get some more clients to have better communication with your clients there is one there's an interesting article about that on Bruce Clay's website which is about like five powerful soft skills that every SEO should have I recommend you you read this one another one content marketing seos especially technical ones are not really into writing but very often in our job we have to like do some content optimizations we have to create an outline even even if we are technical SEO those things happen and if you are if you become proficient in content marketing strategies this will make you a better SEO overall again here is a nice guide that will walk you through like content marketing how it works what it involves what are some of the minor small things you can do it's also that the page is better in terms of like content marketing not necessarily only SEO because on-page SEO is one thing but having the page nailed from a marketing perspective is is something a bit different 24 schema markup this is this is not a ranking Factor but schema is very important because if you use like this schema that results in Rich results then you will have better presentation in serbs there is also like different schema that's not like seen in search results in English results but which can really provide a lot of information for Google so I strongly recommend you take a deeper look at schema I would say go more advanced in schema I suggest like doing something that that in links can help you with where you mark in schema for example the entities you talk about the entities you mentioned with links to Wikipedia this is like I would say higher level because everyone is now using those rank math yoast plugins and they add this basic schema like person organization everyone is having that so I don't think those types of schema have any impact anymore because this is like the Baseline but if you like go a bit deeper especially in Rich results type of schema Google has like Google Rich results Gallery where they show you all the types of schema that can result in in Rich results and they should definitely take a look at that and analyze if those types of schema are okay for example for your website or for your client website another one AI you shouldn't be neglecting Ai and what's happening because it is certain that our job as seos will evolve is evolving but it doesn't mean that SEO is dead you just have to embrace AI that there is AI and that you have to know how to operate it to become more productive more efficient to automate some things and the the way search results look is also like going to change is changing right now so you have to know like what you are now aiming for probably looking at the latest Google generative search experience you may you may think that you probably aim for top three results because this is what Google is now showing alongside the AI generated answer so keep an eye on that here is a very nice live event we I had with Doda when we talked about the future of SEO Ai and how you should really approach Ai and chat GPT and those Technologies another one project management so this is also something that you have to have a clue about because if you work with more than one client if you work on more than one site you will have to have a place where this all those tasks around those sites will be organized like deadlines priorities so definitely take a look at that guide some of the project management tools you can use are for example Asana though I am I have everything organized in Apple notes and in apple reminders I have like special folders there and so for me this is like apple ecosystem and Google Sheets but there are a lot of other options as well but make sure you use some understanding as your reporting is also crucial you have to know what an SEO report should include what a good SEO report includes you don't want to be reporting on vanity SEO metrics because you will be fired so make sure you understand as you're reporting I also recommend learning about Google looker Studio this is the best probably the best tool for you to create impactful meaningful awesome looking SEO reports it is usually a good idea to specialize in one area of SEO then you will have very targeted people coming to you like for example you can specialize in dentist SEO in lawyer SEO in technical SEO this is not like necessary you can be an all-arounder but usually it's way more difficult so for example I specialize in SEO audits SEO analysis visibility analysis strategy creation and lawyer SEO and I suggest you also have like your Niche within SEO because SEO is a very broad niche know how to pitch as your services you may have to pitch as your services so you should have some skills here is a guide from me and in this guide I basically share with you how I was able to grow my client base and I have never pitched a single client I was able to do that because I was creating a lot of free content I was putting a lot of guides I was simply growing my visibility online and clients came to me through the content I was creating that's also a very good option but it requires a lot of time if you need a client right now and you don't have a following to ask for help then you probably need to use ads or some direct pitching conversion rate optimization so SEO is meaningless without conversions so that's why you have to know what a conversion is for your site for your client side and you have to know how to optimize for those conversions the final step is you can set up your SEO consultancy for me being an SEO consultant because always been my dream and this is something that I really enjoy it gives me the freedom the flexibility I can choose what clients I work with I can also choose like how much I charge when I work how much I work and I really enjoy that but of course this is not the only path you may simply prefer having a job and working at specific hours having free weekends because for me free weekends don't exist so it's totally up to you but I think you may consider becoming an SEO consultant because this is really cool so here is my full article about how to become an SEO where I go even into more details around what you can do what courses you can follow like some things you should do you shouldn't do so I invite you to check this one and of course I invite you to subscribe to my SEO newsletter I usually send the weekly SEO newsletter with all the best as you news like tips the best materials from other SEO so I strongly recommend you subscribe there are like more than 5 000 subscribers and we're happy that it is growing so I hope you will become my next subscriber as well of course subscribe to me on YouTube if you haven't already I am growing my YouTube channel and if you like this video please share it like it comment and yeah and I will see you in the next video I hope you like this video and it helped you and if you have any questions if I'm missing something please let me know in the comments below thank you and see you in the next video bye bye
