SEO skills: types and the industry

SEO-skills-types-and-the-industry
SEO skills: types and the industry

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SEO is a technical skill that anyone can learn, the best SEO’s in the world however also require a track record of working in the industry as well as experience in knowing what elements of the ranking requirements are missing.

This is where the biggest differentor of SEO’s comes in – some can only work on sites that they have started from the scratch, whereas the better ones can look at an SEO profile and quickly figure out what’s missing for the ranks.

Non-client facing SEO’s

There are a lot of people that have solid SEO skills yet are not SEO consultants, but rather utilize the skills for their own projects. Usually, they either lack the skills to do consultancy or the opposite – they are the best of the best and can achieve the maximum hourly rate by working on their own projects or being involved in companies that utilize search engine traffic as a major part of their business model. If the latter is the case, they are nearly always also equity holders in the business. Basically – you can’t hire these guys.

super-skilled-seoThe not so well skilled SEO’s usually don’t call themselves that – they’re internet marketers. They know a lot about a lot and also have a business sense that they can utilize to create profitable projects for regular income. They keep up to date with different subjects and monetization aspects in internet marketing.

The types of projects are usually adsense based or lead generation of some sorts. Promotion of CPA network offers, affiliate marketing or sales of their own digital products. You will also find these type of “gurus” working in startups or established companies.

Client facing SEO – the consultants

The very well skilled SEO strategists that focus purely on developing the skill, keeping up to date with the algorithm and testing different things, almost always find running SEO agencies the most efficient way of monetizing these skills, unless they become super-advanced, as discussed above.

For them – they can look at an audit of a website and see what’s missing, use their back-end resources and tools to instantly fix these elements. The results can take a while and requires a constant re-evaluation.

seo-auditAfter the rankings are there, the site still needs maintenance to remain in those spots. This is why proper white-hat SEO can take 3-12 months to see any results. These type of SEO’s also have to maintain costly infrastructure to provide off-page services, so they work with multiple clients and are quite expensive.

The SEO consulting industry

The industry has a mix of elements, some of them overlap from the similar industries like internet marketing. Internet marketers and SEO consultants often times need the same tools and back-end-resources.

When it comes to the actual consulting industry, the services fall into on-page and off-page. Agencies usually do both, but as a rule – they’re usually better at the on-page and client handling. Highly skilled off-page SEO’s are rare, but we at ClickDo fit into the off-pagers – that’s how we rank for the most competitive keywords in London.

White-labelling is also incredibly common – often times you will be talking to people that know little about SEO and simply white-label the services. We don’t do that at ClickDo – in fact we get so many request from other agencies to do their SEO, but you can only hire us directly.

Author Profile

Fernando BiZ
The Founder & CEO of ClickDo Ltd. Writes about digital marketing and SEO for local businesses in International corporation. You can read more on OM HQ blog for more of my writings.
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