The toolsets and skills of a good modern search optimiser are incredibly large, and there is a steep learning curve involved when starting out in the industry.
I finished my degree in Entertainment Technology about 3 years ago, and at that time I had a decent grip of html and had been taught some project management skills, so felt ready to enter the working world. I applied for the job at Vertical Leap, and was taken on to learn the trade of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
My first task was to learn about the intricacies of keyword analysis, a skillset that is difficult to be prepared for at university. Trying to determine the user’s intent behind making these searches and working out whether or not your client is a good fit to attempt to target these phrases is no easy thing to learn, and the methods and tools we use for keyword analysis have adapted as time has progressed.
This was just the tip of the iceburg – since then I’ve had to learn a massive array of skills – coding pages to better optimise content from an SEO perspective, how to validate HTML so that it can be crawled more easily, how to create XML sitemaps, identifying newly developed tools to help speed up this process on bigger websites, analysing link profiles of websites, identifying duplicate content issues that can really damage a websites potential to rank prominently, making proper use of robots.txt to ensure that only areas of the site we want indexed are spiderable.
I’ve learnt how to rewrite ugly and non user/search engine friendly URLs through a variety of methods, how to geo-tag websites so that search engines know that they are targeted for a specific region and with all of these things I haven’t even touched on the link building and off page optimisation strategies that need to be employed – or the reviewing of analytics data, which can provide insights into what your website does well, or badly.
In recent years, we’ve added creating blogs for clients to the list of work that we do for them, ensuring that these are styled appropriately in keeping with the website (which can be challenging sometimes, as design issues aren’t something that we get to spend a lot of time on), and now regularly suggest topics and phrases to use in these blogs to ensure maximum visibility and return on that effort. I’m sometimes still amazed at the power of the blog – but if it works as a technique it’s certainly something that needs to be used!
Despite all of these really important tasks that we have all learnt to perform over the years, one of the most important skills that an search engine optimiser has to have is the ability to communicate effectively and providing tip top customer service. It’s all well and good achieving great rankings and delivering lots of traffic, but this needs to be communicated to your clients in a way that they understand how this effects their bottom line.
We are also constantly adding new areas to look at as part of our service. Over the last few years, search engine optimisers have moved away from being purely technical people (although it’s still vital to be able to do all these technical things) and now need to be very marketing focused – identifying phrases that can not only bring qualifiable traffic to the website, but also ones that will be monetisable and provide the returns on investment that your clients crave.
It is becoming much more common for us to be advising clients about ways to improve their conversion rates, how to reduce bounce rates – identifying areas that put people off from making the purchase that you need them to be making. The work on the post click issues is only going to increase in coming months as we become even more skilled at working out the best methods to get people to part with their cash or contact details!
I’m sure that the role of the search engine optimiser/marketer will continue to evolve in future weeks, months and years and the tasks that we perform for our clients are only going to grow further in number.
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