Who is the SEO and how does a SEO specialist work
In the past few weeks we have dedicated an insight to the topic “what is SEO“, lingering a bit on the meaning of optimization for search engines and on possible strategies and tecniques you can operate on a site to try and maximize its performance and ranking on Google and, subsequently, its profits. Today, instead, we are going to focus on describing the role of the SEO, a.k.a the expert that can offer his advice, experience and competence at a project service.
Who is the SEO
According to the most common and popular meaning, the SEO is a specialist that works to optimize a site for search engines; more specifically, it is the professional figure to which one should entrust with the strategy to follow in order to enhance the ranking of a site of any kind (from eCommerces to blogs, from themed websites to online newspapers), or we better say to enhance its pages and all the keywords identified as more useful to his client’s goal, so to gain free-of-charge organic traffic.
What a SEO actually does
This definition seems somewhat limited, though, because the work of a SEO is something far more complex than this and touches lots of a site’s aspects, with a cross-sectional activity that ends to intertwine to the one of webmasters, developers, copywriters and all of the other professional figures that work on the project. This means, therefore, that a SEO should also have specific and tecnical competences on marketing and analysis, as well as be able to understand and guide the work of other people.
SEO’s competences
For instance, if we would draw up a list of the main skills a SEO should develop we could quote the knowledge (even a basic one) of programming languages, useful to effectively build up the architecture of a site or even just so to suggest the right path to webmasters and developers; also very useful would be a kind of familiarity with the most popular CMS (starting from WordPress) and their plugins, a deep knowledge of Web Analytics and Google Search Console ‘s tools, a familiarity with theorical notions on ranking, mainly because of all Google’s evolutions and regular search algorithm’s updates.
Lastly, we quote the tool factor: it is quite obvious that a SEO expert must be able to use a series of SEO tools that, on one hand, direct any intervention and, on the other, allow one to monitor its effectiveness: do we really need to say that SEOZoom is a reliable travel companion?
SEO strategies to maximize results
As we always try to explain through our pages, Search Engine Optimization includes technical and creative elements, because no one should never overlook and underestimate the importance of the content, as well as always give value to the site’s structure, its usability, presence and the nature of the backlinks coming from other digital resources that allow to land on the page and so on.
Who is the SEO specialist
In this vision, the SEO specialist turns out to be the freelance professionist that a company can hire as consultant to fix specific SEO related problems and seacrh engine optimization. The expert will have the job to analyze the site, detect its difficulties and indicate strategies and needed interventions to solve the critical situation.
What does the SEO specialist do
The SEO specialist professional profile is a true and proper analyst of the site’s health: he takes care of improving the mechanism, optimize the site, analyze the competitors, further study the market’s scenery, define the target and discover its interests, verify social networks’ feelings, create an effective link building campaign… a lot of work for a single person and, in fact, is often suggested to instead rely to a SEO Agency to enhance the project, a reality in which every aspect is entrusted to the expertise of a more specific figure, benefitting from teamwork.
Anyway, whether it is a whole team of SEO specialists or a single one-man-band SEO, the goal is the same: to use resources and perform useful activities to enhance a site’s results, to bring it high up among search engine’s SERPs, to increase organic traffic and raise sellings and gainings.
The actual work of a SEO professionists
The areas of intervention of a SEO professionist are therefore verywide and, often, have no clear boundaries: to simplify, we can divide the first two branches of the SEO work in on-page and off-page optimization, but that is indeed a macro-splitting that needs further clarifications.
Off-page activity is about all those interventions that can be developed externally to the page, hence mainly link earning and link building strategies, but also social management; far more rich is then the on-page optimization strategy, the one regarding internl actions on the site and its pages.
The on-page optimization of the site
As previously said, almost by definition the SEO professionist studies and optimizes web pages so that search engines and their crawlers can perform their scan, indexing and ranking activities in the best way possible, with the final goal to increase the project’s visibility among Google and other search engines’ organic results in order to guarantee more traffic and conversions, a.k.a gainings.
From this point of view, the SEO has the sensitive job to reduce errors, contain problematics and simplify operations both for automatic crawlers and the human reader that will reach the site’s pages, and on which truly depends all of the work and strategy’s success.
SEO professionals must optimize user experience too
The on-site optimization work starts from the creation af a path internal to the site itself, taking care of the sitemap and effectively setting the “robots” file to indicate to crawler and spider the right way to follow for their analysis of page composition aimed at indexing, a.k.a the placement among search results.
Pivotal to a competent SEO is to safeguard user experience and never lose sight of the “human factor”: this means both to take care of site speed and page loading also on mobile navigation, and to study content conformation in order to promptly offer the visitor what he needs and intercepts his search intent. We are talking about a correct text configuration, an effective tag, title and content management, as well as a strong internal link structure to lead the reader to further insights.
GM
