What SEO can teach you about business
One of the most important assets for your career success is the business lessons you learn from your years of experience. Learning from your working experience is an ongoing process with good and bad times, but these business lessons are a catalyst for your journey to the top. Sometimes, learning from failure is the most important thing.
For example, life as an SEO expert is a constant adventure down the rabbit hole and is a profession riddled with highs and lows when looking at the fluctuation of traffic and keyword rankings. It’s also a life of undertaking new experiences, constant learning and keeping up with Google’s ever-changing algorithms. It’s also a profession where you consistently experiment and learn from failures of past tweaks to content and technical SEO.
Read on to find out all about what the world of SEO can teach you about learning from failure and business in general. Hopefully from this guide you’ll also learn why it’s important to consider SEO and will understand more on how to hire an SEO expert.
Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew
For most freelance SEO consultants, it’s quite typical to have several projects going on at once. While this is a sign of consistent work and precious income, it’s also potentially a recipe for disaster if you don’t have methods in place to optimise your workflow.
It’s a good idea to idea the 33% rule This means 33% of your time on clients, 33% of your time on personal projects, and 33% of your time doing side work and acquiring new leads.
While it may not seem like much time, just utilising time management will show that less can be more. Ultimately, success in SEO (and many businesses, for that matter) boils down to hyper-effective time management.
Continue to Evolve and Keep Learning
While many in the SEO industry will say that the core best practice techniques of SEO don’t change too much, over time, SEO algorithms come and go, keywords change, and no tactic will always work the same way forever. But this doesn’t mean your creativity and tactics should stagnate along with outdated principles.
Don’t blindly follow the SEO tips of online gurus and alleged “SEO masters” in the field (and yes there are many like this!) Commit yourself to the path of creative self-discovery. For example, look at finding new ways to build links by mixing your style up a little here and there.
Being lulled into a sense of complacency can spell doom for an SEO consultant or any business practitioner, no matter how long they’ve been in the game.
Like many things in life, there is one thing that never changes about SEO, and that is that it constantly changes from month to month, week to week and day to day. This can also be a business lesson that fits in any sector relevant to digital marketing and beyond.
Empathy Can Go a Very Long Way
If there’s any one thing that an SEO consultant needs to know above all else, it’s that you have to understand your audience if you want to make it to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). This reaches far beyond providing information and the tools your audience will need to succeed, it means understanding who they are and what obstacles they are up against. Crucially, it means whether you have the answers in your potential content to quench this need.
While a key arm of SEO best practice, there is sometime the temptation to appeal more to Google’s algorithms than the actual consumer in question. Of course, they are intrinsically linked, as Google repeatedly states it is changing to suit the user. However this is really a precursor to knowing people and what they wish to consume, and for SEO this means properly fine tuning your content and copywriting services.
The thing is, people want to be heard and understood. And, it’s our job to show the reader that we get them and what they’re going through. So, a good SEO consultant will fulfil all technical aspects of the content as well as succeeding in building rapport with the audiences and keeping them engaged through the duration of the article or content.
In this sense, humour can be a great tool to keep in your arsenal. If you can make someone laugh, you can capture their attention. Keeping that attention is up to you and your understanding of whom you’re speaking with. Keep this in mind when you’re writing content tod draw users in.
Appearance Matters
Have you ever found yourself landing on a website that was so appallingly designed, you can’t even bear the thought of staying on it for a second longer before you inevitably bounce right back off?
But on the flip side, have you ever landed on a website so well crafted, you spend hours browsing their blog post and visual content to the point where time itself seems to have utterly dissolved?
The latter is exactly the kind of content you want to be known for.
It doesn’t matter if you’re creating your own landing pages or if you’re writing content for clients, you have to ensure the “wow” factor is fully catered for.
Much like our content, the website should be designed to be visually appealing and easy to use. If this is beyond your skillset and resource, thinking about hiring a freelance web designer to help. Content should be engaging and humorous but contain credible information you can build a trustworthy brand in.
Once you start to gain traction, you will become an authority in your niche and people will come to know you as the person who has the correct answers over your competitors.
Conclusion
Being an SEO consultant is about so much more than just keywords and building links. To reach the level of the “SEO ninja” is a mix of knowledge and business lessons that can be applied and used in all manner of different business settings.
Granted, those things are still extremely important and should be the foundation for any SEO campaign. However, keywords and links will only get you so far.
Ultimately, SEO is about building trust and providing a product or a service with information people need. This is a crucial lesson for any business practitioner to take on board when looking to learn from experience and nurture success moving forward.
