What does an SEO Specialist do?

In our recent article entitled What does ‘SEO’ mean in marketing? we said that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about making the process of search easier for Internet users so that they can find what they are looking for easily. So a simple job description for an SEO expert would be that he or she would do SEO? Actually it’s a bit more involved in this. Take a look.

Duties of a SEO specialist

Make your website search friendly

For your website to be considered as SEO friendly, Google’s bots need to find it easy to search your site and find what it is that you want them to find. This means that an SEO specialist will be responsible for on-page optimisation. This process includes, for example:

• Providing the appropriate meta tags, headers and alt tag for your website that contain the keywords that you’ve researched for your website. (Read our article to learn more about Google Trends which will help you put together your keyword strategy.)
• Linking the internal pages of your site.
• Working with the website developer to increase site speed. (Yes, this is a big issue when it comes to optimising your website to make it friendlier for search engines and so contribute positively to your digital marketing strategy. This is because the slower your site is the less popular it will be with users and fewer people will visit it. Google will see it declining in popularity and will consequently rank it lower.)

Foster a link-building strategy

In the early days of Search Engine Optimisation, your website could rank highly if you just built a plethora of links between your site and other external sites. It didn’t matter if your site’s content was related to the site that you linked to. All that mattered was that the linked existed. Thus, a lot of fly-by-night businesses popped up which boasted that you could buy a large number of links from them and they would help to facilitate this.

Building links is still integral to your SEO and marketing strategy, however, Google looks very carefully as whether or not your site is related to the one that you are linking to. It also takes into account how the site that you are linking to ranks in terms of authority. If it feel that your two sites aren’t related, it will heavily penalise you and send you to the back pages of search engine results.

Harness the power of social media

The SEO expert will work closely with the social media manager in a business because social media has a huge impact on a company’s SEO marketing and digital marketing activities. A company’s activities on social media generate social signals which search engines pick up on. These could be a like or share on Facebook, a like or Retweet on Twitter or a like on Instagram. It shows that the content and, by default,  you brand are popular among users. Thus, they will rank your website higher as it sees that you are popular with users.

Another huge benefit of social media for your company’s SEO efforts is that the reviews that your followers leave on social media reflect in Google’s search engine results. So when people search for who you are on Google, your reviews will be front and centre on the first page.

Keep up to date with trends

SEO specialists need to constantly be researching the new trends in SEO, learning from others’ best practices and tweaking their own SEO strategy where necessary. As the Internet is changing so quickly, and often, it’s vitally important for SEO specialists to keep up to date with everything new and not wait to be told. If they do this, chances are very good that they will be left by the wayside.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to become an SEO expert yourself and help companies be visible on the World Wide Web? The Digital School of Marketing’s SEO and Web Analytics Course is the best digital marketing course for you to achieve your ambitions! As the only digital marketing college, whose digital marketing certifications, to be registered with the MICT SETA, with us you are guaranteed to be the best SEO specialist out there!