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1. Yes, I currently work in a digital marketing agency that exclusively only does SEO and SEM (although we are considering opening up to social media next year) and we do monthly SEO for over 150 clients.
I wouldn’t say it’s cluttered but that’s just me. If there’s a service people need, people will pay for it, and I’ve seen several hundreds of people pay for SEO services. At some point you may need to broaden the horizon of what you would categorize as an SEO-related task for your clients, but overall there’s still demand for these services, especially with backlinking. Organic traffic is and always will be an important traffic source.
2. Search ads (SEM/PPC), local service ads (LSA), to a certain extent social media, but most importantly (in my opinion) – conversion optimization. Getting organic traffic means almost nothing if that traffic isn’t converting at least 2% of the time.
3. Learn the SEO fundamentals directly from Google and John Mueller. Do not concern yourself with “SEO is dying, here’s what to do instead” Youtube influencers. SEO strategies haven’t really changed too much for the past 15~ years, although Google has tightened up their algorithm. I have used the fundamentals for literal hundreds of clients and it consistently works. There’s not a whole lot of crazy things you need to do.
I would have to write a huge post to tell you what I believe the fundamentals are. I’m sure you’ll figure it out, we all did. It’s really not too complicated. If you need help with anything specific just ask, this community is generally pretty helpful. Don’t mind the occasional heckler.
Then when you’ve conquered the basics, start getting into conversion optimization and landing page design theory. This is how you really make money from organic traffic and ads. The ROI for SEO and organic traffic is insanely high.
From there I think you can tackle SEM and LSA but you will definitely need to take some courses. Learning how to use Google Ads effectively took me a lot of time and careful learning. There’s also a lot of nuance that you can only learn from people who have used Google Ads a lot, so watch some videos and read forum threads about how to best optimize ad campaigns.
And most important of all, be open minded. Never assume your way is the right way. Always be open to the idea that there’s a better way to do things. That’s the “O” in SEO. To this day I’m still finding out things that I’m not doing as efficiently as possible.
