“SEO is the fastest way to solifify a businesses authority in any given market…”

Sandy Rowley Shopify SEO Expert

By 2020, research shows that businesses will spend $80 billion dollars on SEO. If you’re going to put out big bucks on SEO, you want to know what you’re getting.

Since you want to know what you’re getting, you ask, “what is an SEO specialist?” and “What am I going to get out of these SEO efforts?” These are great questions and if a service you’re working with won’t tell you what they’re doing – run the other way!

Continue reading this article to learn what true SEO specialist will do for your business.

What Is an SEO Specialist?

An SEO specialist is a professional that keeps up with the latest and great in the SEO world. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the practice of helping your website get to the top of the search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and the almighty big G – Google.

Common Best Practices for SEO

Here are some of the things you can expect your SEO specialist to do for you when they start working on your campaign. While you might need an SEO specialist, you should know not everyone operates the same way. Some companies operate differently than what we mention below and you should know we can’t speak for all SEO companies.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important things you need to do before you even get started on your SEO. You need to focus on getting specific terms mastered so you can get to the top of the search engines.

An SEO specialist uses various tools to look at metrics for keywords. If the metrics are favorable, it is time to see where in the buyer cycle these keywords are. Even if a keyword is a high volume keyword, if there is little to no buyer intent, you likely don’t want to target this keyword.

If you have more time to build your base and can wait to get more clients, you may target keywords that are further up the funnel. There are more keywords at the top of the funnel where people are searching for information but it can take a long time for them to convert.

If you’re a local business, the SEO specialist will help you determine which local terms you need to focus on. If you’re a lawyer, you might find that there are more people searching for XYZ city attorney vs. XYZ attorney. If that’s the case, your specialist will advise you to focus on the term with the highest search volume.

Link Building Activities

Link building is one of the major points of SEO. Link building is getting other websites to link to your website. There are good ways to do this and bad ways to do this.

A true SEO specialist will do this through what is called white hat SEO while less than reputable people may try black hat methods. Black hat methods are spammy and won’t render long term results.

Some of the ways a good SEO specialist will build links are the following:

• Guest posting
• Broken link building
• Press releases
• Citation building

Guest posting is when you or someone else guest posts on your behalf. When you guest post, the website will link back to your site within the article. You may get an in-context link or you may get a link in the author bio.

Before you commit to doing a guest post, make sure to ask where the link will be. An in-context link is worth more than a link in an author bio.

Broken link building is when you find sites that have broken links on their sites that linked to similar content. Your content may be helpful to replace this information thus giving you a link from this website.

Press releases can get you hundreds of links from sites all over news websites. Even though the content is the same, you’ll still get credit for the links.

Citation building is important, especially if your business is a local business. Citations let search engines know where your business is located so you will show up in the right place in the search engines.

On Page Optimization

While link building is important, on page optimization shouldn’t be ignored. If you ignore on page optimization, search engines will be confused about your site. Without on page optimization, your website isn’t likely to make it ways in front of any of your target audience.

What is on page optimization?

A couple of things you need to pay attention to when you want to get SEO results with on-page SEO is your metadata and your alt text. Your metadata is things like your page title and description. Alt text is text that shows up in case a photo doesn’t load.

When you want to rank for a keyword, include the keyword in the title, description and alt text of images on the page.

Reputation Management

A good SEO company isn’t going to allow you to rank your website with a low rating. You need to work on getting a higher rating if you have low stars or even a lack of reviews.

Most of the time companies have enough business to get the ratings they need, it is just a matter of getting the customers to leave their reviews. When you make it easy for customers to leave reviews or simply ask, you are going to get a much better response.

Get the Help That You Need

Now that you have the answer to your question, “What is an SEO specialist?” and you understand a little more about what they do, you likely have more confidence in the service.

Understanding what SEO is and how it works can be complex, but we’ve done our best to break it down in simple terms. Most people need help with their SEO efforts. If you need help with SEO, contact us today for a free SEO audit.