Advice for the employer…Advice for the frustrated employee
When you hire someone to work on your search engine optimization (SEO) you expect that professional to be, well, professional. The problem is that many a pro SEOer only takes a handful of classes and or courses on SEO and then goes to work for non SEO corporation. This is not to say that they will not be good at what they do, they just won’t be great…even if they have had past success.
The fact that a pro SEOer only takes a couple of course before they go off into the wild world of SEO is not by choice, but rather by design. That’s because there are only a limited number of resources available for those interested in SEO to take advantage of and the rest of the learning curve has to come by way of their own steam. Much of SEO is a ‘learn as you go’ process and while that may be alright for some professions it can be very harmful for the SEO profession (For example, the taking over a PPC campaign). An SEO pro who only conducts SEO thoughts and techniques between a certain number of hours per day will not only lack in the results department, but in the passion department as well.
A true SEO pro will be one that is infected with the SEO fever and will know that the only cure for their disease is MORE SEO. Along with anything else they do at their normal job for SEO you will find them at home working on their own side work. Blogs, websites, affiliate programs, social media, you name it. If there is an opportunity to conduct SEO then that is where a real SEO pro should also be. MOONLIGHTING…SEO by day and SEO by night (after the family goes to bed.)
SEO takes years of practice and honestly it is an art that can never be perfected. SEO/SEM, and organic traffic for that matter takes time…not days or weeks…There will always be new and advanced SEO techniques that come out and this will in turn always give the true SEO pro something new to learn. Many of the new advances will come as a direct result of an SEO pro’s experimentation. However, experimentation can go wrong and as Judith Lewis of deCabbit says, ‘Better that they try and fail on a test site than a live site. Better to get a blog banned than a multi-million pound (or dollar) e-commerce site.’ If your SEO pro is only working on SEO for a normal job then they have no time to experiment and learn the true art of SEO except for work time. The last thing you will want is to have your SEO pro ‘try something new’ on your website and have repercussions brought to your site because the experiment goes haywire.
So how pro is your SEO? If you are not sure you should ask. Your SEO pro should be the one who leaves the office only to go home to work on multiple projects of their own. Your SEO pro should be the one who gets very little sleep and when they do all they dream about is new and innovative ways to conduct SEO. Your SEO pro should have an absolute true passion for the SEO biz.
It’s your website and it’s your business and because of that you need to ensure that your SEO pro is in fact a pro and not just an SEO part timer who walks away at the end of the day only to return to job they really don’t like the next day. While finding the right SEO pro for your website may take a bit of time, in the end it is worth its weight in gold. When you find an SEO pro who lives, breaths, and eats SEO then your website will begin to flourish as a result. Once that happens there is only one thing after that which will ultimately occur; your bank account will begin to get bigger and bigger.
