You Ask, I Answer: Who is an SEO Expert?

In today's episode, Masha asks, what does it really mean to be an SEO expert? Considering the depth and breadth of SEO, is it even possible to be an expert on all aspects of SEO? It's a good question. And it depends how we define SEO, because uh as uh Masha points out, uh it is a very broad discipline. There's a lot to it.

Um fundamentally, SEO is the uh process of optimizing our digital properties to be found in uh organic unpage search, hence the name SEO or search engine optimization. Uh the companion piece to this is SEM, uh, which is the ability to uh have your paid uh stuff uh rank well. Now to be an SEO expert, you've got to be able to essentially generate good results in search. At the end of the day, if if you're not driving traffic and leads and conversions and ultimately revenue uh through organic search, you're not an expert. Uh it doesn't matter how many tricks or how arcane your knowledge is, if you can't generate results, you're not an expert.

Now the question is, which aspects of SEO do you have specialization in? And there's four major branches of SEO. There is technical SEO, which is where you're looking at uh the servers themselves, right? The technical uh uh infrastructure. And this is almost borders on IT.

So caching, HTTPS, uh server-side certificates, uh, HTTP2, uh minifying your content, uh using a CDN, uh, all the technical things that go into uh a website and how well it runs. Um how smooth of an experience is the the backend architecture, and there is a tremendous amount that you can do uh with services for example like Cloudflare that can help improve your server's performance because one of the things that that is taken to account uh in SEO is how quickly does your page load Google does this for its mobile uh first indexing how fast is a page on a mobile device and as of May of 2021 uh the core web vitals will be a part and parcel of uh search rankings uh how quickly how uh a website a page paints um how long it takes to load stuff uh those will function as part of the rankings Google made this announcement not too long ago so that's one aspect of the of SEO the second is on-site uh SEO and this we talk about uh structure of stuff on site so proper schema proper markup uh json LD uh all the technical stuff that you can do on a web page itself to make it function correctly understanding how for example how Google renders a page and how Google indexes pages and structuring your content to function well making pages mobile responsive uh making them free of errors you know no four or fours uh making sure your internal linking structure is good uh there's a tremendous amount of stuff that again goes into on-site uh technical SEO using the right plugins and making sure that the plugins are configured correctly um is all part of on-site SEO. The third part is content uh and content is not necessarily the the we differentiate it from on-site in that on-site is technical stuff content is the content itself uh the topics you're writing about the the words the phrases the semantic associations uh the uh the interactivity of content the media types uh the making the stuff right how valuable is the stuff you know for example on on on this show we've got a YouTube video we've got a audio podcast we've got the blog post that goes with this got the imagery all that is the content and there are things you can do to optimize your content uh simple stuff for example like with YouTube videos if you're not uploading a closed captions file you're kind of doing it wrong. Uh if you want your videos to be found on on YouTube itself on your own site, making sure you've got transcripts for any kind of rich media to make sure that there's enough text for Google to crawl uh making sure that uh you're using words and phrases and topics that are relevant to what people are searching for in the language that they search for it. So doing a tremendous amount of research into your audience to figure out okay this is how my audience asks this question so I should answer this question uh in that same language.

And then the fourth uh branch of SEO is off site SEO and this looks a lot like public relations. This is doing outreach um making sure that uh you're getting links to your articles, you're getting links to your website, you're getting links to all the the relevant content you spent all that time creating, uh building relationships with uh media outlets, influencers, other bloggers, other uh websites appearing on podcasts, uh appearing on people's YouTube shows and live streams and uh essentially building a brand around the the content that uh uh that you've built um so that when Google and other search engines index all the links that are out there, you have a fair number of inbound links uh headed your way each of these um branches of SEO is a profession unto itself right technical SEO like I said is like IT uh off site SEO is like PR uh content marketing its own thing uh on site SEO is you know the in a lot of ways the job that we used to call back in the early 2000s a webmaster right all four are professions and can you be expert on all four of them? Yes you can um you will you can be proficient at all four. Are you do you have enough time the day to do all four on a on a frequent basis? Probably not uh particularly off site off site in uh is one of the most uh time consuming parts of SEO if you do it well if you do it poorly it's uh it's not so time consuming but you don't get good results that way um and so you'll probably have a specialization in one or two of these areas but not necessarily all four you you won't do all four all the time most of the time though um if if you have enough knowledge to be competent in each of the four areas you can then contract out with agencies or contractors or partners or whoever to handle aspects that uh you're not as proficient at or that you just don't have time to do.

So for example with technical I mentioned a service like Cloudflare um that is a great supplement to your technical SEO capabilities. It's not a replacement for knowing what you're doing but it is something that you can offload some of those tasks. With offsite, if you have a really good public relations team, uh, they can handle an awful lot of that workload, getting you links to your stuff, right? As they pitch, the just giving them the guidance. Hey, as you pitch this story, make sure that you get us a link to um uh you know back to our website.

Uh when it comes to content marketing, if you uh know that you need to work on video and video is not your strength, then you work with contractors to you know help produce videos and stuff, and then you use transcription software or transcription contractors to to build the content uh for tran to be transcribed. But you want that experience, you want that knowledge in each of the four areas so that you can act as a manager, act as a a project manager or coordinator to help keep your SEO efforts on the tracks. And there's a fifth area that is not SEO tactics that is important, and that is SEO management, uh being able to coordinate to build project plans to keep a team moving in the right direction, to uh broker arrangements with uh other contractors uh and agencies, particularly when you have interagency conflicts. Um those are all uh skills that are sort of at that fifth amorphous all-encompassing area of SEO, and uh again, like project management, a profession of its own. So an SEO expert has proficiency in at least one of these areas.

Um, they have knowledge of all four, and they have a specialization in at least one. Uh and can you be expert on all of them? Yes, if it's all you ever do day in and day out, and you fulf fulfill those different roles for different you know, clients or within a company, yes, you can be expert in all of it, but you will still have a strength probably in one area in particular. It's a good question, it's an important question because a lot of people still, 20 years later, uh are a little fuzzy on SEO. Um so important important stuff to know.

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