Brock Murray My 5 Favorite Things About Being an SEO Brock Murray
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When you were a kid, did you have wild dreams about what you wanted to be when you grew up? Mad scientist. Magician. Explorer. Our parents, our teachers, and the world at large gave us a cold taste of reality and funneled most of us into more conventional career paths. Most of us.
There are still jobs out there where every day offers new discoveries and new challenges. Being an SEO is a career where you can be all of the above: inventor, wizard, adventurer and a detective!
What makes SEO such a great career choice? Here are my five favorite things about being an SEO:
1. Running SEO Experiments
This is probably the best part of the job, creating and implementing new strategies to drive traffic. Yes, there are the standard SEO tasks, which include planning out a campaign, doing keyword researching and discovering opportunities to capitalize on low-competition, high-value keywords, having a strong hierarchical page structure, implementing the proper tags – meta, open graph, and schema.
These core optimizations are essential, but they're essentially just following a predefined process. What gets me excited is the “out-of-the-box” experimentation. This is where you get to work your magic.
There's nothing like that feeling when you strike SEO gold after hours, days, and months of trial and error. When you cook up that secret blend of SEO herbs and spices, it's something special.
2. Getting Positive Results for Clients
There is nothing better than seeing positive organic traffic increases for a client. Consistency not only makes your life easier, but makes your client's life easier as well.
The days of simply set and forget SEO are long behind us. As the algorithms are continually refined and reward "white hat" tactics more and more, getting positive results for doing things the right way is all the more encouraging.
The days of simply set and forget SEO are long behind us. As the algorithms are continually refined and reward "white hat" tactics more and more, getting positive results for doing things the right way is all the more encouraging.
Whether it's getting a brand new website to rank on the first page, or helping an established client scratch and claw from #2 to #1 for a highly competitive search term, tracking that positive progress over the days, months, and years is a great feeling.
3. Beating Your Competitors
The barrier to entry in starting an SEO agency is so low (all you need is a laptop and a website) that the industry is competitive as ever. Not only are there lone wolves locally, there are tens of thousands of competitors outside your geographic area as well.
This means it's a buyer's market and clients are leveraging that. This forces existing experts to respond quicker, to expedite tasks and projects, and to be available morning, nights, and weekends.
The new breed of SEOs are willing to go the extra mile and put in the time to get exceptional results. Our clients are harassed all the time by spammy SEOs using scare tactics to reel them in. It's like trying to swat flies, but there's no better insect repellent than cold hard results.
4. Ability to Work From Anywhere
There is a good percentage of SEOs who work remotely. The good thing about doing SEO is that you can do it from anywhere – your home, your cottage, the beach etc. There are tons of lone-wolf SEOs who work from countries like Thailand, Mexico etc.
The downside is you can't actually meet your client face-to-face (which is becoming less and less important.) As long as your business processes and communication tools are on point, you're going to have success.
Leverage communication apps and tools to communicate on-going tasks and results for clients which will cut down on client meetings.
5. The Ups and Downs
SEO never sleeps. SEOs live for the next update. When I open the rankings dashboard and see HUGE increases – that is what it’s all about! Seeing this translate into increased leads and sales for our clients is even better.
The recent Google algorithmic update, Penguin 4.0, was the best thing that has happened in a while.
As long as you are doing things properly, following best practices, and avoiding shady tactics you won't have any issues. And even when the rankings dip in the wrong direction, that just means it's time get down to business. Rescuing a tanking site is an even better feeling than keeping an established website going strong.
You probably won't hear many kids on career day talk about how they dream of becoming an SEO… but considering how rewarding and adventurous the job is on a day-to-day basis, maybe they should.
What do you like about being an SEO? What has been your best experience with a client? Let's discuss below!
