How to Become an SEO Expert in 2021

 

in today's post i'm going to show you exactly how to become an seo expert in fact the strategies and 

approaches that i'm about to share with you help me

go from

absolutely clueless about seo to someone

that entrepreneur recently called

an seo genius i'm brian dean the founder

of backlinko the place where marketers

turn for higher rankings and more

traffic

and today i'll reveal how you can become

an seo expert

in record time i'll also show you real

life examples of how some of my readers

learned seo

and how they ultimately became seo

experts

keep watching i launched my first

website over 10 years ago and i quickly

realized that seo was gonna make or

break

that site success so i set out to learn

as much as i could

and i quickly realized that i had no

business becoming an seo expert

after all i studied nutrition in college

here's me at graduation

with my dad i knew nothing about coding

html

content or marketing and after years of

practice i

finally figured out seo on my own and

thanks to that real world experience

i now reckon the top three of google for

competitive keywords like

seo campaign seo checklist and backlinks

okay enough bragging let's get into the

steps starting with step number one

master the fundamentals of seo this is a

step that a lot of people skip over

and it hurts them and hey i'm not

judging when i first started to learn

about seo i pretended that i understood

stuff

that it really didn't i mean i kind of

knew what backlinks were and i kind of

understood why title tags were important

but i didn't really understand how it

all fit together

i was kind of like a basketball player

trying to hit half court shots

before i even learn how to dribble in

fact a buddy of mine jeff

recently fell into the same trap jeff is

helping the company that he works for

with his seo and he recently emailed me

saying dude so i just added a bunch of

keywords to this page

how long will it take to rank so yeah

jeff was like me back in the day

he kind of gets seo but not really which

is why it's important to drill down

in the fundamentals if you want a good

primer on how search engines work

i recommend checking out moz's

beginner's guide to seo and if you want

to learn more about

seo best practices and how they all fit

together

check out the seo marketing hub at

backlinko okay so now that you have the

fundamentals down

let's move right into step number two

put seo

into practice you can watch videos about
seo

all day long but if you want to be good

at seo you need to do

seo and when it comes to practicing your

seo skills you have three main options

your first option is to practice seo on

your own website this is how i got

started with seo and it's the way i

recommend that most people

learn how to become experts here's why

when you run your own website you can

make changes on that site

fast there's no need to ping your boss

on slack

to see if it's okay to change a title

tag there's no need to email your

client's web designer to add an image to

a page

see something that needs to be changed

change it and see the results

the cycle of test learn improve moves 10

times faster with your own property

than with someone else's website plus

when you work on your own website you

can see the million other things that go

into

making a site successful some of which

aren't really directly related to seo

i'm talking about things like

website design copywriting social media

building an email list

and more in other words running your own

site helps you become what's known

as a t-shaped marketer a t-shaped

marketer is someone that's an

expert in one area but you also know

about

other related subtopics for example if

you're watching this video

you obviously want to become an seo

expert so in that case

seo will be your main thing but it's

also helpful to know a little bit about

social media

ux and even email marketing for example

a backlinko reader named

gerald norden is a former nasa scientist

that recently launched his own real

estate website according to gerald

he was able to figure out seo on his own

super fast

because he was testing on his own

website as another example

another backlinker reader micah runs a

website that helps kids in the

netherlands

learn math and thanks to her seo

expertise

micah's site now gets 200 000 visitors

per month

which is even more impressive when you

take into account that there are only 17

million people

in the netherlands again micah reports

that practicing seo on her own

helped her learn the ropes in record

time that said
running your own website isn't the only

way to learn seo you can also become an

seo expert

by working with clients this probably

sounds a little bit weird i mean if

you're not

seo expert yet why would someone hire

you hi yeah i know nothing about seo

wanna hire me it's a good question

here's the answer

first off even if you're not a legit seo

expert yet

the fact that you're watching this video

puts you ahead of 90

of the people that run websites also seo

is a lot of work

and you'll find that most busy small

business owners will be

happy to pay you to take seo off their

hands last but not least

you're not going to get paid a lot for

your first few gigs

so you can think it more like an

apprenticeship or an internship

that way there's no pressure to perform

miracles for example backlinko reader

felix norton got started with seo

when he helped clients in his area with

their local seo

another way to practice seo is to work

somewhere as an

in-house seo or at an agency the big

advantage here is

instead of going at it alone you're

surrounded with people that already know

seo

and it's their job to help you get up to

speed so you tend to learn things

fast in fact that's how backlinko reader

ryan meribeck got started

ryan was interested in seo and he wanted

an environment where he could learn more

so he started working at an seo agency

and the seo knowledge that ryan picked

up

helped him grow his travel blog to one

of the most popular

in france which leads us to our third

step experiment

and learn if there's one thing that

separates seo experts from seo newbies

it's this seo experts are always testing

that said

seo can be a tricky thing to test so if

you want to run seo experiments here are

a few things to keep in mind

as you go through the process thing

number one is to focus on testing

the right things in theory you can test

literally anything but in practices

i recommend focusing on these things

and if you want to get more advanced you

can test link building strategies

content formats

and paid social media promotion for

example a while back i wanted to see if

interactive content would help reduce my

bounce rate so when i launched this mega

list of seo tools

i added an interactive filter to the top

of the page

as it turned out my bounce rate and time

on site on the interactive page

was better compared to other pages on my

site

so i decided to use the same interactive

element to

all of my really long list posts and the

results were similar this is something

that i never could have learned from

reading blog posts or watching youtube

videos it had to come

from an experiment so thing number two

to keep in mind as you test

is your change isn't always the cause in

other words correlation doesn't always

mean

causation for example take a look at

this organic traffic report

from my google analytics now over the

time span you're looking at here i

didn't make

any major changes to my site but as you

can see

my traffic went up and down as google

made various tweaks

to the algorithm after all google

reports that they make over

3 000 changes to their algorithm every

year and when i first started running

seo experiments i would assume

that if my rankings went up or down it

was because of something i did

but more often than not it was just

google making one of their 3 000 changes

that they make

every year for example i add a few

keywords to a page

see my rankings go up from number seven

to number five

and it assumed that my keyword

optimization caused the bump

it might have been the cause but it

could also just be google's algorithm

doing its thing which leads us to thing

number three

look for big consistent results let me

explain how this works

with an example look at the organic

traffic stats for a page from backlinko

over a 30-day period i didn't touch this

page but you can see that there are some

spikes and dips throughout the month if

you make a change to your page and see

fluctuations like this

it's probably just google's normal

algorithm updates at work

on the other hand look at the organic

traffic to that same page

after i made a significant change to

that page's content

is it possible that google rolled out a

major algorithm update

the same day that i pushed that change

live yeah i guess it's possible but it's

much more likely that my change

actually caused the traffic to improve

and if you want to be extra sure

roll out the same exact change across

several different pages or better yet if

you can swing it

different sites if they all react the

same way

you can be pretty sure that whatever you

did is behind the improvement

and now it's time for our last step step

number four

scale your seo tasks now it's one thing

to know how to optimize a title tag

but how do you optimize 70 000 title

tags

on an ecommerce site that's where

scaling comes into play and in this step

i'm going to show you two real-life

examples of people

that scaled important seo tasks the

first task that you'll eventually need

to scale up

is content production on the surface

scaling content is really easy all you

need to do is just hire a bunch of

freelance writers on upwork but scaling

good content

that's a different story for that you

need a system a system for finding blog

post topics doing keyword research

outlining writing editing and design

well backlinko reader bob warfield

founder of cnc cookbooks has a scalable

content system

that works great for his business bob's

company publishes 12 posts

every single month and despite being in

a quote boring niche

his content is really good his secret

bob and his team

follow a repeatable blueprint for

creating high quality content here it is

find keywords that customers search for

using kw

finder and ahrefs sort the keywords by

search volume

and download that list to excel then

toss out any keywords with a keyword

difficulty

of 30 or more use the skyscraper

technique model to create the content

and then optimize that content for seo

and bob uses a google sheet like this

to keep everything super organized as

bob put it the method i just shared with

you

is the foundation for making sure every

article comes out great

the other task that can be tricky to

scale is link building

especially if you're doing a hundred

percent white hat seo i mean

sending 10 outreach emails is really no

big deal but how do you send a hundred

or a thousand without being spammy the

key is

personalization when you personalize

emails not only do you avoid

sending lame emails like this but your

outreach converts

10 times better in fact backlinko reader

kalin yablonsky

makes personalization a top priority at

his agency

so in addition to having detailed

processes for every step of the link

building process

he also asks his clients to help him

understand the industry they're in

that way he can send laser targeted

outreach emails that will work in that

niche

very cool there you have it my four-step

process for becoming an

seo expert if you like this video make

sure to subscribe to my youtube channel

right now just click on the subscribe

button below this video and if you want

exclusive seo traffic techniques that i

only share with subscribers

head over to backlinko.com and hop on

the newsletter it's free

now i want to turn it over to you which

approach from today's video

are you going to try first are you going

to try scaling email outreach

or maybe you want to start running seo

experiments