How to Become an SEO Expert in 2024

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

About The Author

Hi, I’m Brian Dean.
I launched my first website way back in 2009.
And I quickly realized that SEO was going to be a big part of my site’s success.
So I set out to learn as much as I could.
And thanks to years of reading and experimenting, I’ve had a ton of success with SEO…
…including top 3 rankings for competitive keywords like “Google ranking factors”:

Contents

  1. SEO Expert Fundamentals
  2. Understand the Basics of SEO
  3. Master The 5 Keys of SEO
  4. Put SEO Into Practice
  5. Test and Learn
  6. Implement Advanced SEO Strategies
  7. Scale Your SEO Efforts
  8. Stay Current With Emerging Trends

Chapter 1: SEO Expert Fundamentals

What Is an SEO Expert?

An SEO expert (also known as an “SEO specialist”) is someone that optimizes websites in order to achieve higher search engine rankings.
Put another way:
An SEO expert is someone that knows how to get more traffic from search engines.

How Do You Become an SEO Specialist?

Here are the most common ways that people become SEO specialists:

What Skills Should an SEO Expert Know?

Here are the key skills that an SEO expert needs to have:

Chapter 2: Understand the Basics of SEO

How Search Engines Work

Understanding how search engines work is a key piece of knowledge for any SEO professional.

Important Search Engine Ranking Factors

Google uses 200+ ranking factors in their algorithm.
And no, you don’t need to learn them all.
In fact, most of the 200 ranking factors are different ways of measuring 3 things: relevancy, authority and quality.

Chapter 3: Master The 5 Keys of SEO

Finding and Choosing Keywords

Keyword research should be the first step of ANY SEO campaign.

Content Marketing

No SEO training would be complete without a section on content marketing.
The Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing from Moz is a great place to start.

Optimizing Content

Back in the day you could stuff your content with keywords… and it would rank.
Flash forward to today, and on-page SEO is much more sophisticated.

Link Building

There’s no way around it: link building is a HUGE part of SEO.
And that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Chapter 4: Put SEO Into Practice

You can read about SEO all day long.
But if you want to become an SEO specialist, you need to actually do SEO.

Chapter 5: Test and Learn

The best SEO professionals I know all have one thing in common:
They’re ALWAYS testing.

Chapter 6: Implement Advanced SEO Strategies

Now it’s time to take your SEO game to the next level.

Chapter 7: Scale Your SEO Efforts

It’s one thing to know how to optimize a title tag.
But how do you optimize 50,000 title tags on an eCommerce site?

Chapter 8: Stay Current With Emerging Trends

The SEO industry is ALWAYS changing.
Which means there’s always something new to learn about.