Being a successful SEO professional takes strong determination, thorough discipline, constant learning and a lot of consistent hard work. Your experience in dealing with difficult projects also matters a lot. So, if you are thinking it’s easy to be a really successful SEO professional, then you are wrong. Literally, all of them that enter this field want success but success only comes to those who follow the principles religiously and do everything absolutely right.
If you want to get to the top and become better than hundreds of thousands of other SEO professionals, then you have to be really strict and honest with yourself, and implement a few things the right way.
We’ve learned it the hard way, and based on our learning over the last 8 years I have composed 5 tips for you or anyone who wants to become a much better SEO professional fast.
The following 5 tips are going to be very useful for you. After you learn and implement the following tips you will surely become good at SEO and enjoy life as a successful SEO pro. So, let’s get started.
Do a simple target-oriented audit
What does an audit mean to you? And, what does it mean to your clients?
Well, it means everything to them if done the right way. And at the same time, it means nothing if done the wrong way.
So, what is the right way and what is the wrong way of auditing a website?
Let me explain this to you.
We used to send fancy looking 30-page audits to our potential and existing clients during the initial days. That was 8 years ago. In some cases, it used to work, but in most cases it was not working. I mean they understood almost nothing from the audit firstly because it used to be full of technical terms that are peculiar jargons to most non techie people in the world. (Yes, most of them are non technical).
With time, they felt like the audit needed to be simplified.
And even before they felt that we realized that we could generate a simple yet pretty detailed audit summarizing only the things that are required. It’s okay to decrease the number of pages, but the audit has to be comprehensible to the site owners, and it must be written in a language they understand.
So, what we did is that we began creating a simple, lovely and target-oriented audit that was still technical but could easily be understood by our potential and existing clients.
That was a great move, and they started liking the simplified version of our audit. We now practice generating premium technical audit reports for those who ask for it. We keep it short, simple and comprehensible. We try our optimal best to avoid using a high number of technical jargons that can trouble them. And they might not like that kind of audits at all.
The advantages of the simplified audit report are:
- It’s small, so they can easily read it in one sitting.
- It’s written in plain, easy to understand language, so they can fully understand it.
- It includes only the specifics: what the site lacks, what would be done and how, timeline to implement the things and what results to expect and achieve.
We got a wonderful result of simply altering the audit format and making it easy and precise. If you can make your audit better, you can be a much better SEO professional than most others.
Keep finding new ways of link building
Ranking websites on the search results is all about link building. Search engines were counting on back links 10 years ago and they are doing the same even today. But yes, the process of link building has changed over time. In fact, it has evolved a lot.
What was being considered as a high-quality link building practice back then is now not in the scene anymore. For example, directory links were working pretty well back in those days, but now directory submission is no longer an effective technique that can produce results.
We are not doing any directory submission for building links these days. Directory links are totally ineffective today, and cannot help your search engine ranking in any way. We learned many other techniques of link building and by implementing those techniques we accomplished something great for ourselves, and for our clients.
If there is anything I can suggest regarding link building to you today, it would be:
- You try to expand your link building process and keep finding new ways that are more effective. Also, try to earn links.
- Connect with people and understand what would make them link to you.
- This should be an ongoing process because search engines are coming up with new rules for counting on links while ranking websites.
Find the right clients
Not all clients are right for you. There could be wrong clients as well and you get more headache than money from them. It’s important to recognize right and wrong clients from the beginning of your conversation, so you can focus more on those that can be right or good clients for you, and save your time from talking to the wrong prospects or leads.
Right clients are those who understand how SEO works. They have patience and can wait to see the ranking. They give you time and freedom to do your best work. They are going to stay with you for a long time and therefore are the right clients for you.
On the other hand, there could be SEO clients that expect sales right from the first week. They don’t have patience and they never understand the SEO process. You try your best to make them understand, they act like they’ve understood but again come up with a hundred questions after the second week. A large part of your time is spent on answering their questions and it’s not worth having those 100-dollar clients. Yes, you read it right – they don’t like to spend more than a hundred dollars a month.
We learned this over time. Initially, we tried to work with everyone because we thought it’s not wise to say NO to money that is knocking on the door. But today, we are pretty honest with ourselves and with our clients. We know which clients can stay long with us. We tell them beforehand that SEO takes time and is a continuous process, and if they want really quick results, Adwords can be a better option for them.
So, my suggestion is you try and get clients that can become long-term clients. Research about the industries, keywords and the competition, and then choose your best clients.
Educate clients about all-round benefits of SEO, not just ranking
If you have already been running a digital marketing company or a search firm for a few years, I’m sure you have a reporting schedule that is more or less similar to what we follow here at our company because we understand the importance of creating professional SEO reports for our clients.
I don’t know about others, but we at SEO Extent, try our best to achieve the best results for our clients out of our efforts. Search engine ranking would usually take some time, at least the first few weeks before we see an improvement in the ranking. While the wait is worthwhile, not all of the clients understand that. So, to compensate for that, we try and achieve some growth in the website traffic.
 Search engine ranking and Traffic growth are not the only two benefits of SEO. Our SEO campaign includes Social media marketing. Optimized social media channels and good consistent work on those profiles also enhances the online reputation of the website and the business.
Another important benefit of our organic SEO campaign is we do local SEO and Google My Business Listing to support the local SEO efforts. With that your business is visible to local audience or users and there’s a great chance of generating sales through that. All that is part of our organic SEO.
So, the thing is Organic SEO is done and maintained by a real team that constantly monitors the results and performance of their work. There are all round benefits of SEO that is not possible to avail through any other online marketing campaign. You need to educate your potential and existing clients about these all round benefits of SEO. That will make you a better SEO that others.
Focus on your personal branding
Back in our initial days, it was not as important to build strong social presence in order to get clients as it is today. It was sort of easy to close deals then, but today, we get a ton of questions from them while doing the sales communication. And this is right, we cannot and shouldn’t complain about this.
Prospective clients have every right to know everything about us, understand our work process and know the results they are going to get. So, they should come up with as many questions as they can. They should trust us as their SEO partner before they give us a project. And to provide trust, we or any search agency must have proof of their past work, client testimonials, online reviews etc.
We started working on company’s online branding and the personal social reputation of our sales people, so every time a potential client is interested in knowing more about our company’s reputation or reputation of our professional on a personal level, they can see it.
That same thing I’d like to suggest to you too. Whether you are a freelancer, a small team or a big search agency working from multiple locations having a big list of international clients, you have to build a strong reputation online. Working on building personal branding is a worthy investment that gets you good long-term clients.
So, if you want to become a successful SEO professional and actually be better than your contemporary people in this field, these 5 tips can be really useful. I’m sure there are more ways you can learn, but don’t overlook these 5 that we have learned the hard way here within our agency. We are now a successful full-service digital agency with over 100 existing clients from across the globe. Please feel free to have us your SEO partner anytime you need.