If I could give people coming into the SEO industry any advice it would be. 👉 As you learn SEO always run a couple of hobby sites of your own to test things on. 👉 Do not use client sites for guinea pig tests – if you aren't sure about something test elsewhere. 👉 If Google says' it's releasing an update to tackle something, take it with a pinch of salt. 👉 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn't easy, do not fall for the marketing tack and flashy videos claiming that you can hack Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) with easy steps. SEO can offer quick wins, but they are often conditional. 👉 Clients can be brutal and totally NOT understand the work you do, don't take it personally, educate. 👉 Google updates are a fing headache – whether you've done things right or wrong, sometimes sites just suffer, sometimes they sail through. 👉 Following best practice doesn't always work, you have to test everything.
👉 SEO doesn't always work unless you are given support in the right areas. If a clients site has shit content but the client doesn't provide you with a content solution or if you cannot get content past the client then things will quickly break down. 👉 Copying what the top ranking sites do quite often doesn't work. There are often so many other factors at play. 👉 Don't spend 90% of your time focusing on things that contribute to a small part of what SEO is, those 500 alt tags can wait, sort content and page layout/experience first. 👉 If you inherit shit work / shoddy work from previous agencies/consultants then be prepared to be in the firing line if a G update hits the area where previous tactics were downright spammy/unethical – again, educate the client on findings as early on. 👉 SEO as a whole requires good organisational skills, you need to focus on being able to implement, test, organise the creation of new content, benchmark, evaluate, orchestrate technical fixes / dev interaction and more – broadening your skills really helps. 👉 Do not put up with rude or abusive clients, most clients will be great, but some will simply be too impatient or will expect every penny to be accounted for, which, in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be difficult – time is money. 👉 Third party tools = third party data, only use for guidance, it's not gospel, heck even Google ads keyword data is notoriously vague and unreliable. 👉 Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) / Trust Flow (TF) / Domain Authority (DA) and other metrics are VANITY metrics. If you want to evaluate how good links are, look at the traffic the website gets – that counts for more value than DR/TF etc. in isolation. 👉 Shit links don't work, so don't be tempted if you see competitors nailing the ranks by using mass spam and tiered links. It likely won't last for them in the long run. 👉 Google isn't always smart, if you have similar pages on a website GET RID with consolidation. 👉 DO NOT promise rankings or traffic, just do good work and eventually it will come. Sometimes it may take a lot longer than you initially expected. Again, educate the client where possible.
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abhinavthak Can we abandon link building as a whole, guest posting sounds great at first but it ain't efficient as the sites that offers guest posts are already low and the one which accepts it usually ask for money?
Vbort ✍️ It's a great thought but I disagree. You can still get some really good links if your content is out of this world.
Outreach and link building in volumes isn't as effective. Focus on a few targets that take months to acquire.
Get them and it helps immensely.
abhinavthak What is the usual ratio for paid:free guest post in your case Vbort ✍️ 100 / 0.
I never pay for links. Well, directly. I pay my team to do all the legwork and create wonderful content.
Paid links may give you an initial boost, if you can find some diamonds in the rough. But there still a major problem. These links typically have an expiry date.
Guest posts get removed, links change or get updated, some are turned into nofollows, websites completely disappear, Google deindex's some of these sites.
With quality domains, none of that happens. Well, rarely. abhinavthak Well that is true I always try to explain my fellow seo team members that getting quality backlink should be of importance, but usually clients gives an arbitrary number of 10 backlinks per month as a result they turn back to paying for guest post, which I find degrading. Vbort ✍️ That's on you and the team though. Why would a client come back with an arbitrary number of links if they understood what was going on?
They would realize that one link can be better than 100 links, depending on relevance, quality, etc.
I'm not trying to be rude, but that's on you. abhinavthak Hey man I only recently started working as a seo, the influence and recommendation that I can give to my team or client is next to none. So yeah I hope you understand where I am coming from Vbort ✍️ I do. You need to refine your service offering and polish up the way you communicate and educate your clients.
Work on that before trying to figure out the process or make things leaner :-) abhinavthak Well yeah that's the plan if the firm decides to let me handle the client's😂
AndrewStoller Amazing Advice. Yes, sometimes clients don't understand the reasons for falls. I become so difficult to make them understand.
