What Does an SEO Specialist do?

posted by Patrick Chemoul10/12/2020

Wondering why should you hire an SEO specialist?

You might be!

Because Search Engine Optimization can significantly improve your Google rankings.

How Can an SEO Specialist Help You?

To be concise, an SEO specialist is a digital marketing professional who optimizes your site for a higher ranking on search engines and increased traffic.

Want to learn more about the duties of an SEO specialist? Below is a list of everything that an SEO professional can do for you:

Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

We’re no strangers to the importance of an SEO optimized site, right?

It is absolutely necessary for improving your search engine rankings and increasing your online visibility.

However, Search Engine Optimization is commonly considered the hardest part of operating a website.

Which is why, most website owners resort to hiring an SEO specialist to get the job done.

Now, you must be wondering what major steps does an SEO specialist follow for optimization?

SEO experts optimize your site in accordance with their working knowledge of major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

And when it comes to optimization for Google, there are more than 200 ranking factors that form Google’s Search Algorithm.

Among these, the following eight are considered the most important ones by SEO specialists:

  • The structural design of your website
  • Backlinks to your site
  • A secure domain (HTTPS)
  • Relevance of title
  • Significance of keywords in content
  • Quality of your content and it’s structure
  • Meta tags
  • Loading speed of your site pages

In addition to this, an SEO specialist also makes your page more crawlable for Google to easily discover the content on your site.

So, essentially, an SEO expert’s job is to create more sales for your business, and he does that majorly by improving your online visibility to reduce the gap between you and your potential customers.

And by customers, I mean thousands of people who search online for the products and services that you provide.

Make Your Site Search Friendly

Weren’t we just talking about how SEO specialist make your site more crawlable?

Don’t know how they do that? Simply by making your site search friendly!

Because, search engines can efficiently crawl pages of sites that are search friendly.

In other words, Google’s bots must be able to easily search your site and find your content before Google considers it for ranking.

Which means, on-page optimization is also a major part of an SEO specialist’s job description.

Create Backlinks

In terms of on-page optimization, link-building is one of those SEO strategies that matters the most.

Apart from providing appropriate headers meta tags and alt tags for your site, creating links to the internal pages of your website is highly important.

So much so, that SEO optimization in the early days only majorly consisted of building a large number of links between your own website and external sites.

And guess what?

Earlier it didn’t even matter if the content on your site was related or not to the external site that you linked to.

Only what mattered was the existence of internal links.

Weird, isn’t it?

However, such practice of only creating an increased amount of links regardless of their relevance gave rise to numerous fly-by-night businesses, that sold links to website owners.

Which is why, Google now carefully examines whether or not the links are relevant.

Not only this, but Google now also considers the authority of the site that you link to.

Thus, building high quality backlinks has become a bit tricky, and if not done right, Google can penalize you, which has an immensely negative effect on your SERP ranking.

No need to worry though, because you can always hire an affordable SEO expert, so nothing gets messed up.

Improve Your Site Speed

Another of Google’s ranking factors, faster page loading speed or page speed is the key to improving user experience.

Wondering why’s that?

Because Google wants to keep its users happy.

And if the search results take too long to load, it’d lead to dissatisfied users.

So, SEO specialists use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check the loading speed of your webpages.

And what if it’s not up to the mark?

Well, then the best SEO expert would:

  • Enable file compression for files larger than 150 bytes
  • Optimize your code and minify JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
  • Reduce the number of redirects
  • Remove render-blocking JavaScript
  • Leverage browser caching
  • Work to improve your server response time
  • Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network)
  • Optimize the images on your site

Manage the Content on Your Site

When it comes to search engine optimization, SEO specialist is also in charge of content marketing.

So, if you hire an SEO specialist, he would:

  • Create page titles: Titles based on selected keywords are important for establishing a page theme, as well as a direction for additional keywords to be integrated in your content.
  • Create meta titles: Although these are not directly used for search engine rankings, however the best SEO expert won’t ignore them.

    Because meta description tags immensely effect the number of clicks that your site gets.
  • Add keywords on your web pages.

    To make it easier for search engines to find out what the page is about, an SEO specialist carries out a keyword research and makes sure to add the related keywords in your content.
  • Develop sitemaps for search engines: Search engines can easily index your site if the sitemaps are developed accordingly.

    So, SEO specialists often create both HTML and XML versions.
  • Submit your site’s URL to directories

    Although most professional search marketers don’t do it, it’s possible to submit your URL to search engines like Google and Bing.

    However, what SEO specialist nowadays do is that they add backlinks to your site, which we just discussed above.

    Nevertheless, you can ask an SEO expert to submit your site to directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, and Business.com.

    Doing so would most likely get your webpages indexed fast.

Utilize the Benefits of Social Media

An SEO specialist makes sure to closely work with a social media manager.

Why is this a part of an SEO expert’s job?

Because, in today’s world, social media has a really huge impact on your company’s digital marketing and SEO marketing activities.

Why?

Because your social media activity would generate signals that Google picks up on.

A social media activity could be anything, from a tweet on twitter, to the number of followers on Instagram, or even a simple like on Facebook.

Such social media activity shows how popular your brand is among online users.

And so, Google ranks your website accordingly.

In addition to this, the reviews left by your users or consumers on your social media pages tend to reflect in Google’s SERPs.

Which means, when a potential customer searches Google for your products or services, your reviews would convince him to choose you.

Sounds good enough? I think so.

Keep Up to Date with Latest SEO Trends

Remember we talked about the 200 ranking factors of Google that make up Google’s algorithm?

Well, the thing is that Google keeps updating its algorithm time to time.

Which means the consideration and importance of all these ranking factors keeps changing.

Due to this, it’s highly necessary for an SEO specialist to stay updated about the latest SEO predictions and trends.

Such as, the emerging importance of voice search optimization and mobile-friendly sites.

Moreover, while doing search engine marketing, SEO professionals use tools like Google Analytics to monitor and analyze your site.

All in all, only the best SEO expert can get your site to the top of search engine rankings and bring you more customers online.

So, hire one today if you want your site to generate maximum traffic!

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