Follow-up: Some basic things about SEO - how's the life of a SEO? (2023.07.22)

Below my thoughts on how’s the life of a SEO.

A video is included.

Video:

What are the common challenges?
– Always needing to read a lot of things;
– You need to have results;
– You depend on external factors (Google, for example);
– PPC (paid advertising) can be easier to sell due to quick results;

What are the less pleasant aspects?
– There are some difficulties – see point above;
– For technical SEO tasks, I don’t find anything as an important not pleasant activity, I find it quite enjoyable;
– For technical SEO tasks, also – of course, this is a job with some repetitive actions and things like that. But, all in all, it’s quite nice!

How does SEO evolve?
– Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate in Physics and father of the atomic model, is quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!”;
– It’s rather pointless to talk about changes in the past, as they will likely not be like the ones in the future;
– Use a personal rule – you depend on other systems (Google, social networks, other entities), it’s not just you and the computer, like in programming, for example.

What are the most common mistakes?
– The ones that you’ll make; Google tries quite a lot not to make it easy for you to know when you do something wrong so that you won’t easily understand their algorithms;
– You can do many things in SEO: build links (here it matters that you follow Google’s rules), create content (try not to be repetitive, and don’t rely too much on AI), do technical SEO (audits, and keywords; here, it matters to keep a creative eye over a project), look at data and create reports (data analyst), do account management (you have to know how to understand others’ perspectives), sell things (sales), or do management (and inspire people)

Advantages and disadvantages of specializing in SEO:
Link building: a required skill; repetitive (if doing „classical” link building); it’s not easy to follow Google’s rules; it’s not easy to get good links;
Content creation: you get to learn new things; it can get boring;
Content marketing: a difficult task; either repetitive or too creative;
Local SEO: easy to understand the procedure; repetitive;
Small business SEO: you’ll learn a lot, small budgets;
eCommerce SEO: very interesting skill; learn new things; hard to implement changes, sometimes;
Big website SEO: likely big budgets; if you only work for a website, it will get repetitive;
Technical SEO: learn new things; you’ll need good procedures;
Data analyst: lots of projects; you need to be good with interpreting numbers; it can get boring;
Account management: requires people skills; might be difficult to progress;
Sales: can have big results; requires good people skills and self-confidence;
Management: bigger salaries; requires both people skills and technical skills.

What does a day look like for a person doing SEO?
Link building: contact websites to get links from them; finds creative ways to get links from other websites to your website; have contacts/connections/opportunities/lists of entities;
Content creation: writes a lot, but prior heavy documentation is necessary;
Content marketing: creates content, promotes content;
Local SEO: fills in some forms about a company; might use some advanced methods for filling out data;
Small business SEO: does pretty much everything related to SEO;
eCommerce SEO: finds solutions to improve sales for the business; a lot of technical SEO;
Big website SEO: a lot of technical SEO; looks at the website until they know it by heart;
Technical SEO: lots of different projects, audits, and keyword lists;
Data analyst (reports and data): you pretty much look at data, create reports and do meetings;
Account management: keeps in touch with the technical SEO team/implementation (IT) team/customer;
Sales: researches the market, establishes and keeps meetings, calls people a lot;
Management: keeps things running smoothly.

Career paths?
– Generally, you should have two big options:
a. Either go into management (you’ll need various skills and basically some years of experience);
b. Or go into a specialized senior member (you can be a senior member in link building, technical SEO etc., etc.).

About salaries:
US:

Worldwide:

Romania:

On salaries:
– The more technical the job is (technical SEO, data analyst), the likelier it is to be paid salaries closer to IT fields);
– The more „replaceable” you are, the likelier it is that you’ll have a smaller salary; for example, a lot of people can create content (write texts) and keep contact with people; sure, you can differentiate and write very good SEO content and be good with people, but the market dictates that you’ll likely get a smaller pay than the so-called „difficult tasks” like technical skills/numbers;
– Of course, the more senior and the more into management your role is, you’ll likely get paid better;
– Years of experience matter, but not that much as other things like the value added;
– For working abroad, remotely: Canadian and USA salaries are generally not representative of the whole market; it’s not easy at all to get a job in America working remotely; as a European, focus on the European market in a language you are familiar with;
– If you want money and a good future, consider taking a look at the IT Security field; huge salaries, and there will likely be a big demand in the future for positions like this.

How to start?
– If you’re good with people, start with account management; from there, you can transition to either non-technical/technical roles;
– If you want to go directly to SEO, start with a junior SEO position, but you’ll need either a personal project (website, for example), or minimum knowledge of the basic things related to SEO (do some courses, there are some books, read some blogs);
– Once you get your first job, you’ll likely get someplace better.

Follow-up: Some basic things about SEO - how's the life of a SEO? (2023.07.22)