SEO is a masterful career change

Is a commitment to customer service way up there in your list of things you love to do?

Do you appreciate the necessity for making a brand, product or service visible to the marketplace to ensure its success?

Do you devour change like it’s a meal for the divine?

If so, then a career in SEO could definitely be for you.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can deliver to you the career of a lifetime. Understanding yourself is the first step in any career decision. The next step is learning everything you can about the day to day life of that career. Then you can build on skills and tactics to make it a success.

An SEO career can deliver flexibility, challenge, constant change and an income to be delighted with. What it won’t deliver is a cushy, isolated work alone tech-head job. A business team or network will help you gain success in the long term, as will a great relationship built on communication with your clients.

So where do you start your SEO career?

Start with the internet. Learn all about using the search functionalities within Google and other search engines. Read all about it – follow blogs like SEOmoz and myriad other interesting sites dedicated to SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC), your SEO career will blossom with information.

If you have the opportunity or background, make the time to learn a little about HTML and CSS or Cascading Style Sheets (very like the styles in Word). These will make it easier to become fully SEO conversant more quickly.

Similarly, be an Excel Expert! Microsoft Excel is such a simple, ubiquitous, useful device when it comes to data analysis and reporting that you must learn all you can about it. From data manipulation to trending, Excel will make it easy to understand, see patterns and generally explain data to others.

When you are comfortable there, formally learn SEO. Take advantage of the inexpensive courses and accreditations available through Google, such as becoming AdWords qualified. Move on to the creditable full SEO mastery courses available through organisations such as Search Engine Academy.

Take on the goal to understand more about marketing and business in general. Essentially, an SEO career is about internet marketing and unless you have a good sense of what marketing is, then you can’t do SEO. Talk to people. Ask them about their websites, what does it do for them now and where do they want it to take them. This gives you an insight into how others see SEO and how you can impact on their business by upgrading their websites with SEO. Understand their business and marketing goals.

The art of marketing with skills and technical knowledge will get you to an SEO career. Invest the time to learn about researching your client’s markets and understand keyword research. Master understanding the analytics with the available tools and work out how to formulate websites to make the most of how users are searching. You can’t change people, you can only control how the websites change.

Practice your SEO skills, you want to be not just capable, but exceptional; set up a domain and blog and practice optimising.

It’s always not what you know but who you know…don’t neglect networking. Those businesses and people you deal with in your community, your business, your social and political world all have a relationship with you – use it. Let people know what you are doing, how passionate you are about SEO. Most people don’t have a clue what it is, but would love to learn – offer to do free talks on the subject, inform, energise and invigorate those around you about SEO.

Being the SEO career supremo in your galaxy takes the same path as being the best in any business:

• Know your product (or service in this case)
• Understand the needs, wants and problems of your current and potential clients
• Stay current with your skills, read everything that is available by credible writers
• Let the world know what you do by networking and have the best optimised website that was ever created
• Do what you say you will – keep your commitments
• Be a great communicator
• Plan, follow through, analyse and adjust – be high performing, using best practice and aim for continuous improvement

As they say, ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get, what you’ve always had’. Why not take the plunge and do something you’re passionate about for a change?