What Does An SEO Expert Do?

Many clients that I work with always have the question like “What do you do in the day-to-day work?” or “how you manage and execute our SEO campaign?”. Well, for a short answer, My work as an SEO specialist is to analyzes, reviews, and implements changes to client websites so that the websites are optimized for search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. In other words, my job is to help the business generate web traffic to their websites and convert the traffic to various desired goals which set by the client.

SEO has a long history back to 10 years ago when the search engines like Google started to became the major source for people to find information on the Internet. Today, SEO is still popular. It just changes the way we do SEO than what people do 10 years ago. Nowadays, an SEO specialist requires a whole new skill-set to work on SEO projects. See The Skills An SEO Specialist Should Have for more details.

In this post, we are going to take you insight and overview what does an SEO expert do in the day-to-day work. You will find out how the SEO work can benefit to the business growth of clients.

Many people have a misconception that SEO is a fit-to-all-task with the standard process that can be used by any types of business. However, in my opinion, SEOer is more like a business partner for a client.

So why is that?

In today’s world, SEO is now involves so many marketing activities such as keyword researching, competitor analysis, content development, blog outreach, content promotion, website engagement etc. You may worked with some SEO firms that claims their strategy is quite simple and cheap. Thus, to set the keywords and later to focus on building backlinks to rank those keywords in search engines. There are still so many SEO companies working in this strategy in the market. To be honest, the “set-and-rank” model is an old fashion process and it is broken in the search engine world today.

What is the purpose of SEO?

People may come to say that “set-and-rank” model still works, but what is the purpose of SEO? As I said, SEO is to help business generate web traffic to their websites and convert the traffic to various desired goals which set by the client. We need to generate the sustainable results for client. The sustainable results usually come to revenue growth for over 90% of businesses. So we treat ourselves as a business partner of clients and help them achieve the goals through SEO.

OK, so what does an SEO expert do? Let’s take a look insight of the SEO day-to-day work. The SEO work can be categorized by the level of the work.

• The project level
• The strategic level
• The implementation level

The project level SEO work

The project level of SEO work is referred to the common website audit cycle that many SEO companies are using today. That is site audit, identify fixes, works with teams, verify results. The project level of SEO work covers things need to be done in the client website and it’s focusing on pretty technical level of SEO

The project cycle:

• Site audit
• Identify fixes
• Works with teams
• Verify results

The client comes to us and we do a site audit to look at all the things on the site. We figure out what is wrong, what is missing, what needs to improve, what are the opportunities to make the website search engine optimized. The next step is to make a list of items need to be fixed on the website for our client. Once we have the fixing list set up, and then we will hand to the list to our team or the team of our client’s side who charge the website to make those changes. We will come back and validate the fixes and set a benchmark for the website. The last thing we do is to verify the results in terms of keywords ranks and traffic growth.

We repeat the project cycle every month on the client website. By having the project level of work, we can ensure the client websites always in the best status for search engines.

The strategic level SEO work

The strategic level of SEO work can be treated as a blueprint for the client and as a guideline for an SEO expert.

The strategic cycle:

• Identify top-level company marketing goals.
• Determine areas where SEO can best contribute.
• Create tactical lists of projects that move towards the goals.
• Implement projects and evaluate results.

The process usually starts just right after our first consultation with the client. We first get to know the business from the client like what they do and who are their current customers. After we have the basic knowledge of our client, we dig into more details to understand and identify the top-level company marketing goals with our client. For example, what are they trying to accomplish this year, this quarter, or next three years. The goals usually come with revenue growth, brand awareness, website traffic, web leads conversions etc.

Then, we work with our team to figure out the areas where we can best focus on in terms of SEO based on the information we collect and the site audit from project level of SEO work. After that, we create the tactical plan as our guideline and blueprint for the client. Once the client understands and agrees with the tactical plan, we then going to kick off the SEO campaign and implement the tactical plan for our client.

We will also regularly evaluate our plan and set priorities based on how each projects going and what are the best needs of our client. The strategic cycle usually repeats on a yearly basis.

The implementation level SEO work

The implementation level of SEO works usually the subset of the tactical plan from the strategic level. After we line up the tactical plan for the client, we will map out an action plan that is used by our internal team for SEO campaign implementation purpose.

The SEO implementation process:

• Customer profile creation
• Content topics creation
• Keywords list creation
• Content development
• New content launch and promotion
• Measuring and learning

The implementation level of SEO work starts with the customer profile creation which it will impact what the topics and keywords we need to collect for content development. The profile may involve many different personas. The personas are the types of person we are targeting in the market of our client. For example, we have the customer profile who is a male of age from 25 to 35 lives in the United States and like outdoor activities for an outdoor e-commerce website.

The content topics creation and keywords list creation can be arranged into one process. The purpose is to research, discover, and collect the content opportunities and keywords targeting opportunities for the customer profile we created. For example, as an SEO expert, I want to target my customers with the topics like digital marketing, lead generation, search engine optimization. Based on the topic I have, I can research a huge list of keywords that related to these topics.

Here we move to content development. It is obvious that we will use the topics and keywords we’ve collected to create the content for our targeting customers. The content can be anything from blog posts, videos, ebooks, slides etc. The purpose is to have good and quality content on client website to keep ranking high on search engines.

The last step as always is to measure the results from what we have done and learn new topic opportunities from the statistics we’ve collected. The implementation cycle will be repeated over and over again. Every time, we may have new customer profiles to come. As a result, we continue to research topics or new keywords to fulfill our goals for the client.

All the three levels of SEO work need to put together when we partnered with the client. With a solid website audit and a comprehensive strategic plan, the implementation process will generate much better outcomes for our clients. Our clients love what we are doing for their SEO campaigns.

• How to Become An SEO Expert?
• How to Hire An SEO Expert?
• What is A Google Certified SEO Expert?
• The Skills An SEO Specialist Should Have?
• What To Ask When Hire An SEO Consultant?