4 Prerequisites For Starting A Career In The SEO Field - CareerAlley

4 Prerequisites For Starting A Career In The SEO Field - CareerAlley We may receive compensation when you click on links to products from our partners. Used to be the case that people mostly fell in to doing SEO as a profession. Someone building a friends website, a freelance writer that converted to full time SEO, the scenarios are endless. Nowadays its actually becoming more and more frequent that people will actually go into an SEO career on purpose. This is largely because of two reasons 1) theres no barrier to entry and 2) the demand for honest and ethical SEO practitioners cant come close to being filled. Unfortunately, these 2 factors have created a perpetual cycle that breeds less than credible providers. But since youre not interested in being one of those providers, Ive brought you some prerequisites. These qualities will help you start your SEO career and stay several steps ahead of the low quality providers. Know What Youre Doing There are plenty of self proclaimed experts out there that, I can assure you, dont know what theyre doing. This goes back to the no-barrier-to-entry factor I touched on earlier. Theres no governing body to say who knows what theyre doing and who doesnt, so they can basically say whatever they want and get away with ittemporarily. Because the methods that these types of providers employ are outdated and can even put a websites health in danger, they often have high client turnover and dont get many referrals. To make sure youre never pegged with this type of reputation, make sure youre knowledgeable enough to fulfill your promises and not over promise on capabilities. You should be able to show a record of strategies that you have implemented for clients, and what kind of results the campaign had. Make sure youre able to explain the roles of link building, site structure, content creation as it relates to search marketing. If you have a website make sure you have case studies of your results, or even your resume on your site for the world to see. Its ok to know only a little bit about SEO, just know that little bit inside and out. Being knowledgeable (and working towards gaining more knowledge) like this will lead to more referrals, more clients, and a growing business that is in demand. Work You wont get very far without money, and if youre going the self-employed route, then clients are a must-have. If you have a full time job, you might want to start building your SEO clientele while you still have a job. Otherwise, any rough patch along the way could spell disaster early. If youre in a position to jump right in then sites like oDesk or elance.com are good places to find leads. You wont get much for your first few jobs (probably lower than minimum wage), but as long as you do good work youll be able to charge more with each new project. One recommendation when dealing with these type of sites treat these sites as a stepping stone. As your skills grow youll want to break off on your own so you can work on your own terms. With that in mind, always keep an eye out for projects on these sites that offer recurring revenue. These jobs can be a useful springboard to get into a fulltime business of your own. Depending on your skill level and what jobs you take, this strategy can put you in fulltime career in under a year. Be Honest Because our industry is filled with a large amount of not-so-honest providers, you can automatically increase your worth by being one of the good guys. This single quality was the biggest reason I got referrals early on in my career (cause I wasnt the best salesman). Many of my first clients first came to me after they had already had bad experiences with 2 or 3 bad providers. They stuck with me because I was able to be candid with them about my services and explain to them how the methods I employed worked. Having this mentality when starting your career in SEO is extremely advantageous. For your clients, they are on the outside looking in, and this will be easily recognizable because of how transparent you are compared to other providers. Never Stop Learning Without a genuine enjoyment of this industry and what it has to offer, youll probably never be happy with your chosen profession. This is largely because you have to be constantly reading and experimenting with new tactics. Otherwise youll lose any competitive edge that you might have over other providers, and youll always be behind in methods that youre able to offer to your clients. For me personally, this is so critical that I set aside at least 1 hour of time everyday to go through my favorite blogs and see whats new. Again, if you enjoy learning about the industry and its community, this wont be hard to do. You should always be able to look back at your previous year and laugh at how much more youve learned since then. Keeping these things in mind should start you well on your way to becoming a great SEO provider. More A Surefire Way to Amp-Up Your Career Long before starting his own search marketing agency, Jared Carrizales had an entrepreneur spirit. He tries to spread that part of his personality by blogging about search marketing, startups, and entrepreneurship. Catch up with him on Twitter @JaredCarrizales. This is a Guest post. If you would like to submit a guest post to CareerAlley, please follow these guest post guidelines. Good luck in your search. Joey Trebif