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How did you learn SEO?
I'm a copywriter and I want to move further into the SEO world to futureproof my career options. I have a basic grasp of it, but how do I learn enough to be considered for an SEO exec role? And what do I need to know that I might not already?
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1 Reply
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I personally learned a lot from watching YouTube videos from experts in the field, it’s the closest experience to working directly with these people that live on the internet, so they know how to optimize search engine rankings. Would happy to suggest some people for you to check out!
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The Keyword Academy by Mark and Court
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I started a long time ago learning with theory and then you learn what actually works with experience.
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I started SEO before there were courses and before Google was a school project. I was there when… Whatever, who cares? I learned from trial and error, testing what works, with guidance from Google updates through the years.
PageRank was awesome to read the papers on it and better when recreating it in a smaller scale. Changed the web.
BERT (GPTs oldest “famous” ancestor) took some side learning to figure out, but it the best ever. Changed search, gave us GPT, sort of)
Each of the core updates incrementally refine G’s objective (often responding to what SEO start doing to game them)Avoid the Snake Oil salesfolks. Measure everything. It’s not rocket science, but it’s also not mudpies.
As far as true copywriting… your power is already in SEOs sibling, marketing. What do you do with the traffic when it gets there?
You could look more into the webpage and it’s overall role in the SEO ecosystem to begin with. Which parts of the page are SEO parts and how much and in what way do they influence the process of coming up in SERPs, being what the person wants to find, and marketing them into a conversion. The content itself is largely for humans, but certain “things” line up outside of the article itself to make the magic happen.
Most of all, don’t ignore ANY of the cornerstones of SEO. Those conversations might have truth or not, but they are pure geekery. Nerds with words. Kind of like this post?
All of the parts that go into SEO matter in the end. Some more than others, but, like, that’s your opinion, man. (cue Lebowski)
It changes. Dance with it.
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Just learned it a week ago by learning on the go, so far I still haven’t quite grasp the key thing in SEO. I still have more to learn
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Learning by doing. I owned a web design agency and a software outsourcing company. I used web marketing and SEO to get business
MSN (now Bing) was a big part of the game and Microsoft owned a big site called “bCentral” which was an early way to easily game the system – I think it cost $120 to setup a domain with up to 6 links (nofollow wasn’t a thing)
MAtt Cutts was a fantastic coach and still is. As many SEOs say – SEO hasn’t changed. The myths and tactics that SEO bros throw do change. And things like EEAT – which is built into what people do – its not a part of the algorithm – all of that nonsense “changes”. Just avoid the fly-by-night SEO speakers trying to increase their hourly rate or subscription model services.
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Building websites – its super easy to name (and compress) the images properly with ALTs, get the titles right, keep focus and on topic, etc., when you build the site yourself. You are in control of the relationships for the crawlers, page speed dynamics, etc. So for me, the best way to learn SEO is building websites with a focus on SEO because there are certain infrastructure issues that can affect scores and ranks as well.
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Start with Moz’s SEO guide and Ahrefs’ blog, then practice with personal projects.
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>I’m a copywriter and I want to move further into the SEO world to futureproof my career options.
If you want to futureproof your career then leave SEO immediately and don’t look back.
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Browsing forums and learning from guides, watching some YouTube videos. The best advice out there is to always learn from mistakes and don’t be afraid to test new things. If something works go for it, replicate and scale it.
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Watching people on Youtube (there’s a dozen of good people online – Look for the ones who speak at conferences to begin with) then trial and testing. Doesn’t come overnight unfortunately.
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Back in the day, 2005ish, I got hired to write a bunch of articles. They gave me so much work I made a company and hired 30 writers. Then I found out that company does seo. I started looking for more writing work and cold called seo companies. One of them flew me to their office, taught me how to hire tech students and setup an seo business, and bought me a program called IBP, or Internet Business Promoter. It basically helped you make your website more like the top ten search results for your key phrases. Working with that program taught me all about how to seo links, meta tags, alt tags, etc. I just setup a blog on my website this week and it’s got seo all built into it. It exists to add content but mainly to boost seo. And I tell you what else….. Content writing is dead. AI writes better articles than I could have expected from our writers. I have to custom write a lot of content for this site but a lot is also done by AI just for seo.
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Watched yt videos and created my own website and implemented on the current employers site at the time.
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