-
Need advise from SEO experts!
Posted by on December 20, 2025 at 6:06 amLooking for some honest advice from people who are already doing SEO professionally.
I’ve been running a design & website development business for the last 1.5 years. One thing I’ve realised is that there’s a ceiling to pure web design work. Most clients are one-time projects, and it’s hard to sustain long-term unless there’s recurring revenue.
From what I understand, recurring payments only really make sense if you’re helping clients generate traffic, leads, or business consistently. That’s what’s pushing me to seriously learn SEO in depth and combine it with my existing design + technical skills.
My idea is to package this as an online presence” service…SEO, blog writing, social content, etc., not just building websites and disappearing.
I’d really appreciate guidance from people who’ve been in this space for a while:
- Are businesses actually willing to pay for SEO expertise on a monthly basis? Or is this market just as cluttered and price-driven as web design?
- Apart from SEO, what other skills or services genuinely complement online presence, traffic growth, and lead generation?
- If you were starting today in my position, how would you approach it? What would you learn first, and from where (courses, resources, hands-on methods, etc.)?
From my questions, you can probably tell I’m not looking for some guidance which can help me get started. I’m genuinely trying to understand the right direction from people who’ve already walked this path.
Thanks in advance.
-
1 Reply
-
good question, lots of solid experience in this thread already always smart to explore different perspectives and real strategies that worked for others looking forward to the tips everyone shares
-
You might have better subreddits to ask this. But to answer your questions:
1. Yes. Businesses want more leads, sales and rank ahead of competitors. It is cluttered with a lot of bad actors and very price-driven but what online business isn’t.
2. You could present yourself as a jack-of-all-trades for smaller businesses. Social media, email marketing and paid ads all help with online presence, traffic growth, and lead generation.
3. If I was starting today I would start by finding clients and learn on the job. Start small, do a good job, get word of mouth recommendations, and grow from there. If you are looking at immediate recurring revenue look at getting website maintenance retainers. -
1. Yes and Yes
2. Basically the entire digital marketing field of jobs – email, socmed, ads etc.
3. Start by reading through the entire Google Search Central documentation, then build your own website and apply what you’ve learnt. Check the top posts here in r/seo and read them – check comments also. If something is confusing, search for it.Just like programming and web dev, SEO is best learnt and “mastered” by actual practice and application.
-
[removed]
-
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.
Log in to reply.