Being a successful consultant means knowing the optimization of all website elements and factors.
Required Skills to Become a Successful SEO Consultant
The first foremost skill is to keep a vigil on the updates. Follow industry experts on social media, and subscribe to their blogs. You must have technical knowledge to at least some extent. Following are the actions as an SEO Consultant need to perform.
Audit and Analysis
This is the first thing you do before starting any SEO project. This action helps you understand the issues of the website, the requirements of work to be done. Check meta tags, HTML tags, PageSpeed, check the content. It should be keyword-rich, unique, informative, detail-oriented, and rectify if any grammar error is found.
Learn Creating a Content Strategy
A perfect content strategy can help you optimize your website without backlinks. The content should be unique and posted under relevant categories. Make a weekly calendar and always try to be stick to that. Content posted in a disciplined way always performs better because then search engines started knowing the posting pattern. Recently updated content is always prioritized by the search engines.
Internal Linking
Your content should be well defined and internally linked with context. Internal links tell the search engines what the particular page is about. Let’s understand this concept with an example of a family. There are 7 members A, B, C, D, E, F and I.
Case 1: One day an outsider comes to their home. Everyone calls everyone by their name. Now after staying for a few hours the outsider will easily understand what their names are.
Case 2: One day an outsider comes to their home. Everyone calls everyone with the wrong name. Now after staying for a few hours the outsider will get confused about what their names are.
Conclusion: If that outside (The Search engine’s crawler) is not able to know about their name, how will it tell others who these people are? What are their correct names?
A strong internal linking and having a good amount of content can complete 50% of the optimization process. Yes, the number of content also matters.
Projection of Traffic
Learn projecting the traffic. Use the search console and analyse performance data. If a certain keyword is generating x amount of traffic and ranking at y position. It will certainly generate 1.5x traffic if get ranked in y-1 position. How will you get the desired rank, it depends on the work you do for the result.
Projection of Sales
When the traffic increase, the sale may also increase. But the traffic must come from the keyword having the intent of buying. There is no use of those keywords that don’t have any buying intent but higher traffic. Buying intent keywords will be long-tail keywords and the traffic will be much lesser. But the conversion rate of such keywords will always be high.
Off-page optimization
Under this practice, you focus on creating a brand name and reputation. You share articles with other publications, share guest posts and participate in Q&A.
Love Metrics
Metrics give you the ability to think with new dimensions. You start analysing every step you are going to take and taken previously. You start analysing the impact with the number of metrics. You should keep spending some hours analysing metrics. These are available in your Google Analytics.
Prove Your SEO Skill
Your skills and experience can be proven with the assessments, certifications and awards. It is strongly recommended to enrol for the certification exam. Pass those exams and showcase them to your clients.