One of the jobs in high demand now is that of a search engine optimization specialist.
An SEO specialist works as a freelancer or in a company and increases a website's search engine rankings.
In this post, you’ll learn everything you need about SEO specialists, including their job responsibilities, skills required, salary, and how to get into search engine optimization and start an SEO career.
What Is An SEO Specialist?
An SEO specialist is responsible for optimizing a website for search engines to improve its rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing a website's visibility in search engines and attracting more organic traffic. An SEO specialist has the necessary skills to do this.
An SEO specialist is sometimes known as an SEO expert, SEO professional, SEO Marketing specialist, or SEO consultant.
You don’t need to go through a formal education and get a university degree to become an SEO specialist. As we’ll see below, you can follow many online courses and resources to build the necessary skills.
SEO Specialist Job Description
An SEO specialist usually works in an SEO Agency, a Digital Marketing Agency, or as a freelancer, and a typical job description includes the following activities:
- Knowing the different types of SEO and how to work with each one
- Optimizing the technical infrastructure of a website for SEO
- Improving the site structure and usability of a website
- Analyzing a website’s SEO performance and doing SEO Audits
- Performing keyword research and finding which keywords to target
- Optimizing webpages for on-page SEO.
- Improving the internal link structure of a website
- Optimizing content for both search engines and users (SEO copywriting)
- Running link-building campaigns to improve a website’s link profile
- Monitoring the rankings of a website in the various search engines
- Be informed of changes in the SEO ranking factors and new developments in SEO
- Knowing how to create, analyze, and interpret SEO reports using Google Analytics and other reporting tools
- Good knowledge of various SEO tools like Google Search Console, Bing webmaster tools, Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.
- Knowing how to work with popular CMS like WordPress
- Having good knowledge of HTML
- Working closely with the other digital marketing team members (social media professionals, PPC experts, web designers).
- Designing and implementing an action plan for SEO.
How Much Do SEO Specialists Make?
SEO specialists can make from $50K to $150K yearly. The salary of an SEO marketing specialist depends on three factors:
- Experience
- Region
- Type of job (freelancer or employee)
Experience
SEO is not a skill you can master overnight or by following a course. It takes a lot of time, effort, and hard work to understand how search works and apply the different SEO techniques to increase a website's rankings and traffic.
This is reflected in the salary of SEO professionals. Experienced SEOs earn more than beginners (with less than 2 years of experience).
To be more precise:
The average hourly rate of an SEO specialist with less than two years’ experience is $79 per hour (in the US).
The average hourly rate of an experienced SEO with more than 10 years of experience is $140 per hour (in the US).
How much you can make depends on your monthly chargeable hours.
This concerns the size of your client base and the rates your clients are willing to pay for SEO services.
Sometimes, depending on the client and the current workload, you may have to negotiate the rates to secure a new client.
Region
SEOs in Latin America or India earn less than US or European consultants. The average rate in India is $60 per hour, with the most common rate between $10 and $25 per hour.
Type of Job (Freelancer or Employee)
The above rates are the typical rates charged by SEO freelancers. When working in a company, the average salary of an SEO specialist in the United States is between $51K and $64K per year.
Note: The hourly rate statistics were extracted from studies by ahrefs and credo on the salary of SEO consultants and from Indeed and Glassdoor for the yearly salaries.
SEO Specialist Skills
To become an SEO specialist, you must have a wide range of skills in your resume. These vary from speaking and writing skills to development and reporting.
To be more precise, the most common SEO Specialist skills are:
English Reading / Writing skills
Even if you’re doing SEO for non-English websites, you must have good English reading and writing skills. This will help you optimize content in English and follow up on any changes made to SEO algorithms and the industry.
Mastering SEO is ongoing; most courses and learning guides are in English.
Technical SEO Skills
Technical SEO is usually the first process undertaken when starting an SEO project. SEO professionals must know which settings to check and optimize so search engines can crawl and index websites without issues.
On-Page SEO Skills
The next step is to know how to optimize the SEO elements on a single page. This includes optimizing the page titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal links, and schema information to help search crawlers understand the context of the page and the type of content.
SEO Writing Skills
Writing content that makes both search engines and users happy is an art. It’s not easy, and learning how to balance what users want and what search engines want takes time.
Link Building Skills
Link building or Off-page SEO is a critical SEO success factor. If you don’t have the skills to manage link-building campaigns successfully, it’s very difficult to work as an SEO specialist.
Knowing how to promote a website online and what to do after you hit the publish button is an important step in the SEO process.
Analytical and Reporting Skills
A big part of your job will involve gathering and analyzing data about a website’s ranking, performing keyword research, and analyzing competitors.
There is a lot of data to analyze, and you need to know how to use Excel, Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, and other reporting tools.
Communication and Presentation Skills
While you’ll be spending most of your time working in front of a computer, there will be times when you will have to communicate with the clients to gather their requirements and inform them of the status of the SEO project.
If you work as part of a team, you may have to create a presentation for the management, so you must work on your communication and presentation skills.
Programming Skills
Although programming and web development are not required to become an SEO specialist, they are considered a plus.
If you are freelancing, you need to know how to edit a page and perform basic programming tasks so you won’t have to pay a developer or wait for others to do your work.
Research Skills
There are no straightforward answers when it comes to search engine optimization.
During your SEO career, you will have to answer many questions. Either from clients, bosses or things that you don’t know and need to find out an answer.
To do this successfully, you need to know how to research on the Internet. You need to know how to use Google as an advanced user, be familiar with tools that analyze social media networks, and, in general, find information on the Internet fast.
Digital Marketing Skills
Digital marketing is not just about SEO. Becoming an SEO specialist is the first step in the career path to become a digital marketing manager.
A digital marketing specialist has to possess a wider range of skills that go beyond SEO.
If your goal is to start a digital marketing career (and not just SEO), you need to start learning about other online marketing techniques, such as social media marketing, paid advertising, and email marketing.
Even if you plan to remain an SEO consultant, knowledge of how the other channels work is highly recommended and will enhance your resume.
SEO Specialist Courses
I mentioned above that you don’t need any official qualifications to work as a search engine optimization specialist, but you need to have a good knowledge of how SEO works (including practical experience).
Following an online SEO course is the best way to learn SEO fast. A reliable SEO course can teach you everything you need to know about SEO without spending time looking on the Internet for answers or losing your energy in SEO practices that don’t work.
We researched and compiled a list of the best SEO training courses (most Free) to help you build your SEO skills faster than any other method.
The top 3 courses you can follow today are:
The Complete SEO Course - This is our own course. It will teach you everything you need to get started with SEO. It includes step-by-step examples and real case studies to help you understand how the SEO theory is applied in practice. So far, more than 9,200 students have enrolled in this course.
Google SEO Starter Guide – This guide was made by Google and provides advice on how to optimize your websites for Google.
Search Engine Land’s Guide to SEO—Search Engine Land is a great resource for SEO professionals. In addition to providing industry news and updates, it offers a guide on how to get started with SEO.
Key Learnings
An SEO specialist is a person who knows SEO. He/she has a deep understanding of how search engines work and what it takes to improve a website's search engine rankings.
It’s not an easy job. It’s very challenging but rewarding. As an SEO expert, you don’t only have to do your job right, but you also have to compete with hundreds of SEOs for a place on the top of Google SERPS.
To successfully build an SEO career, you need to have many skills, and the best way to acquire those skills quickly is to follow an SEO course and start practicing SEO.
Besides formal qualifications and certifications, the best item to add to your resume is real SEO wins. Ranking websites high on Google and getting traffic is the best way to prove to your clients or potential employers that you are an SEO specialist they can trust.
Keep practicing and learning SEO, and as you get more experienced, you’ll be able to charge more for your services or earn a higher salary. It’s a job that is in high demand now (and for years to come), so the sooner you get started with SEO, the better.
