Search engine optimization, popularly known as SEO, is the process of optimising your website to attain higher rank on search engine results. For any new brand entering into the market, surviving the cut-throat competition and attracting website visitors organically is never too easy. Imagine targeting one such customer base which has been relying on a specific brand for years! Customer satisfaction and loyalty is built over time and even if your product has the power to do wonders, customers would never choose a new brand over the one that they trust. To begin with building your own customer base, your first step must be to make your presence felt in the market.

Today, as it is essential for every brand to have a website, the best way to let your target customers know about your presence is through the search engine results. As per an article by Forbes, 75% of Internet users never scroll past the first page of search results therefore, for businesses, doing SEO is important as it helps the platform to rank high on search engine results, increases their visibility, traffic, sales, profit, and make the customers realise that there are alternative brands to choose from in the market too.

Need for professional SEO executives

SEO is an umbrella term which involves a chain of activities including keyword research, competition analysis and website audit, site optimisation or on-page optimisation, link building and off-page optimisation, and finally, rank monitoring and content updating. Handling all of these on a continual basis is a complicated and time-consuming task. Thus, the requirement of professional SEO executives is increasing within every organisation. Through a detailed market and competitor analysis, SEO executives figure out the needs of their customers and publish relevant content that satisfies and attracts the customers while increasing their brand sales as compared to their competitors. To close the chain, they continuously monitor the performance of the brand and compare the current growth with the previous month’s statistics to figure out their limitations and work on them.

Skills required and responsibilities of an SEO expert

SEO executives are expected to hone multiple domain and soft skills as they directly communicate with the brand’s target market online. They must have strategy building skills and must be aware of the updated tactics being used by the competitors. Moreover, they should have data analysis, branding, time-management, and people skills. On a regular basis, SEO experts perform keyword research and come up with primary as well as long-tail keywords that fulfil the business objectives. They optimize existing content, website, and social media, and also come up with new ideas for content creation. They also build and nurture the online community, negotiate backlinks, plan and organise campaigns, manage digital marketing projects, and monitor the website, their target market, and competitors.

How online trainings help in building your career as an SEO executive?

SEO is one of the major components of digital marketing, and thus, to give you a great learning experience, there are various digital marketing trainings that you can choose from.

Prerna Rachel Seymour was pursuing PGPM in Marketing from IBS, Mumbai. While continuing with her full-time master’s program, she realised that her theoretical knowledge of marketing was getting polished, but there was no practical exposure. On the advice of her faculty, she took up an online training to get the practical experience of digital marketing. The tutorial videos, assignments, tests at the end of every module, and the mentoring played an important part in making sure that she understood all the concepts. From email marketing, SEO, and Google AdWords to various social media tactics, she learnt everything from scratch.

At the end of the training, she created a blog and devised an online marketing strategy as a part of the final project of the training. The training boosted Prerna’s confidence and gave her insights on how brands actually analyse their market, track customers, and finally create a path to attract them. The online digital marketing training further helped her during campus placement and she was placed as a senior market research analyst at Blueocean Market Intelligence.

Prerna’s story is an example of how online trainings can not only help in developing your SEO skills, but such programs also provide a full-fledged practical knowledge of various other concepts involved in digital marketing. The trainings usually end up within a few weeks ensuring that you don’t have to sacrifice extra time out of your regular schedule to learn something new at a specific location, you can learn anytime and anywhere. The affordable, accessible, and up-to-date course and exercises help in strengthening your theoretical and practical understanding of various concepts.

Why choose SEO as a career?

As the customers and companies have accepted digitalisation, SEO has emerged as a lucrative career opportunity in India. To fulfil every need, customers turn to search engines and look for the best alternatives available. To be apt, Google alone processes approximately 70,000 search queries every second (Hubspot), and not to forget, we have other search engines too! This has increased the competition amongst various brands that specialise in the same product or service and target the same market segment.

To increase the visibility and rank up on the search engines, companies are hiring professional SEO executives. The growing culture of start-ups adds on to the demand of such individuals. Apart from full-time jobs, people skilled in SEO can take international and freelance projects and can work as per their own convenience. Moreover, the market of SEO is expected to grow at an exceptional speed with new features such as voice search optimisation, mobile-first indexing, Blockchain technology impacting SEO and SEM, and rise of site-specific optimisation such as Amazon search optimisation making its way into the world. Thus, SEO as a career opportunity will never get stagnant. With technological advancements, the job would become more challenging, exciting, and lucrative for internet enthusiasts.

Courtesy: Internshala Trainings (trainings.internshala.com) – an online training platform