How to Become an SEO Expert in 4 Steps

in today's video i'm going to show you exactly how to become an seo expert in fact the strategies and approaches that i'm about to share with you help me go from absolutely clueless about seo to someone that entrepreneur recently called an seo genius i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic and today i'll reveal how you can become an seo expert in record time i'll also show

you real life examples of how some of my readers learned seo and how they ultimately became seo experts keep watching i launched my first website over 10 years ago and i quickly realized that seo was gonna make or break that site success so i set out to learn as much as i could and i quickly realized that i had no business becoming an seo expert after all i studied nutrition in college here's me at graduation with

my dad i knew nothing about coding html content or marketing and after years of practice i finally figured out seo on my own and thanks to that real world experience i now reckon the top three of google for competitive keywords like seo campaign seo checklist and backlinks okay enough bragging let's get into the steps starting with step number one master the fundamentals of seo this is a step that a lot of people skip over and it

hurts them and hey i'm not judging when i first started to learn about seo i pretended that i understood stuff that it really didn't i mean i kind of knew what backlinks were and i kind of understood why title tags were important but i didn't really understand how it all fit together i was kind of like a basketball player trying to hit half court shots before i even learn how to dribble in fact a buddy of

mine jeff recently fell into the same trap jeff is helping the company that he works for with his seo and he recently emailed me saying dude so i just added a bunch of keywords to this page how long will it take to rank so yeah jeff was like me back in the day he kind of gets seo but not really which is why it's important to drill down in the fundamentals if you want a good primer

on how search engines work i recommend checking out moz's beginner's guide to seo and if you want to learn more about seo best practices and how they all fit together check out the seo marketing hub at backlinko okay so now that you have the fundamentals down let's move right into step number two put seo into practice you can watch videos about seo all day long but if you want to be good at seo you need to

do seo and when it comes to practicing your seo skills you have three main options your first option is to practice seo on your own website this is how i got started with seo and it's the way i recommend that most people learn how to become experts here's why when you run your own website you can make changes on that site fast there's no need to ping your boss on slack to see if it's okay to

change a title tag there's no need to email your client's web designer to add an image to a page see something that needs to be changed change it and see the results the cycle of test learn improve moves 10 times faster with your own property than with someone else's website plus when you work on your own website you can see the million other things that go into making a site successful some of which aren't really directly

related to seo i'm talking about things like website design copywriting social media building an email list and more in other words running your own site helps you become what's known as a t-shaped marketer a t-shaped marketer is someone that's an expert in one area but you also know about other related subtopics for example if you're watching this video you obviously want to become an seo expert so in that case seo will be your main thing but

it's also helpful to know a little bit about social media ux and even email marketing for example a backlinko reader named gerald norden is a former nasa scientist that recently launched his own real estate website according to gerald he was able to figure out seo on his own super fast because he was testing on his own website as another example another backlinker reader micah runs a website that helps kids in the netherlands learn math and thanks

to her seo expertise micah's site now gets 200 000 visitors per month which is even more impressive when you take into account that there are only 17 million people in the netherlands again micah reports that practicing seo on her own helped her learn the ropes in record time that said running your own website isn't the only way to learn seo you can also become an seo expert by working with clients this probably sounds a little bit

weird i mean if you're not seo expert yet why would someone hire you hi yeah i know nothing about seo wanna hire me it's a good question here's the answer first off even if you're not a legit seo expert yet the fact that you're watching this video puts you ahead of 90 of the people that run websites also seo is a lot of work and you'll find that most busy small business owners will be happy to

pay you to take seo off their hands last but not least you're not going to get paid a lot for your first few gigs so you can think it more like an apprenticeship or an internship that way there's no pressure to perform miracles for example backlinko reader felix norton got started with seo when he helped clients in his area with their local seo another way to practice seo is to work somewhere as an in-house seo or

at an agency the big advantage here is instead of going at it alone you're surrounded with people that already know seo and it's their job to help you get up to speed so you tend to learn things fast in fact that's how backlinko reader ryan meribeck got started ryan was interested in seo and he wanted an environment where he could learn more so he started working at an seo agency and the seo knowledge that ryan picked

up helped him grow his travel blog to one of the most popular in france which leads us to our third step experiment and learn if there's one thing that separates seo experts from seo newbies it's this seo experts are always testing that said seo can be a tricky thing to test so if you want to run seo experiments here are a few things to keep in mind as you go through the process thing number one is

to focus on testing the right things in theory you can test literally anything but in practices i recommend focusing on these things and if you want to get more advanced you can test link building strategies content formats and paid social media promotion for example a while back i wanted to see if interactive content would help reduce my bounce rate so when i launched this mega list of seo tools i added an interactive filter to the top

of the page as it turned out my bounce rate and time on site on the interactive page was better compared to other pages on my site so i decided to use the same interactive element to all of my really long list posts and the results were similar this is something that i never could have learned from reading blog posts or watching youtube videos it had to come from an experiment so thing number two to keep in

mind as you test is your change isn't always the cause in other words correlation doesn't always mean causation for example take a look at this organic traffic report from my google analytics now over the time span you're looking at here i didn't make any major changes to my site but as you can see my traffic went up and down as google made various tweaks to the algorithm after all google reports that they make over 3 000

changes to their algorithm every year and when i first started running seo experiments i would assume that if my rankings went up or down it was because of something i did but more often than not it was just google making one of their 3 000 changes that they make every year for example i add a few keywords to a page see my rankings go up from number seven to number five and it assumed that my keyword

optimization caused the bump it might have been the cause but it could also just be google's algorithm doing its thing which leads us to thing number three look for big consistent results let me explain how this works with an example look at the organic traffic stats for a page from backlinko over a 30-day period i didn't touch this page but you can see that there are some spikes and dips throughout the month if you make a

change to your page and see fluctuations like this it's probably just google's normal algorithm updates at work on the other hand look at the organic traffic to that same page after i made a significant change to that page's content is it possible that google rolled out a major algorithm update the same day that i pushed that change live yeah i guess it's possible but it's much more likely that my change actually caused the traffic to improve

and if you want to be extra sure roll out the same exact change across several different pages or better yet if you can swing it different sites if they all react the same way you can be pretty sure that whatever you did is behind the improvement and now it's time for our last step step number four scale your seo tasks now it's one thing to know how to optimize a title tag but how do you optimize

70 000 title tags on an ecommerce site that's where scaling comes into play and in this step i'm going to show you two real-life examples of people that scaled important seo tasks the first task that you'll eventually need to scale up is content production on the surface scaling content is really easy all you need to do is just hire a bunch of freelance writers on upwork but scaling good content that's a different story for that you

need a system a system for finding blog post topics doing keyword research outlining writing editing and design well backlinko reader bob warfield founder of cnc cookbooks has a scalable content system that works great for his business bob's company publishes 12 posts every single month and despite being in a quote boring niche his content is really good his secret bob and his team follow a repeatable blueprint for creating high quality content here it is find keywords that

customers search for using kw finder and ahrefs sort the keywords by search volume and download that list to excel then toss out any keywords with a keyword difficulty of 30 or more use the skyscraper technique model to create the content and then optimize that content for seo and bob uses a google sheet like this to keep everything super organized as bob put it the method i just shared with you is the foundation for making sure every

article comes out great the other task that can be tricky to scale is link building especially if you're doing a hundred percent white hat seo i mean sending 10 outreach emails is really no big deal but how do you send a hundred or a thousand without being spammy the key is personalization when you personalize emails not only do you avoid sending lame emails like this but your outreach converts 10 times better in fact backlinko reader kalin

yablonsky makes personalization a top priority at his agency so in addition to having detailed processes for every step of the link building process he also asks his clients to help him understand the industry they're in that way he can send laser targeted outreach emails that will work in that niche very cool there you have it my four-step process for becoming an seo expert if you like this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right

now just click on the subscribe button below this video and if you want exclusive seo traffic techniques that i only share with subscribers head over to backlinko.com and hop on the newsletter it's free now i want to turn it over to you which approach from today's video are you going to try first are you going to try scaling email outreach or maybe you want to start running seo experiments either way let me know by leaving a

comment below right now [Music] you