Community Discussion: The hardest (& most surprisingly valuable) thing you've gone through for your SEO career?

[FeliciaCrawford]

In the comment discussion for Thursday's blog post, An Essential Training Task List for Junior SEOs, there's been mild debate around some of the items, such as having a Junior SEO build a website by hand. It's a fantastic comment discussion (the kind that makes a blog manager's heart sing), and it's got me thinking.

We've all gone through the wringer when it comes to boosting our careers. Heck, I was a poetry major and found myself learning SQL last week. What hurdles have you jumped that have been painful and challenging, but have taken your career to the finish line? Maybe even gotten you the gold?* What would you recommend to newbies just starting out (or warn them about)?

*Yeah, I got Olympic about it. I went there.

[fatetmpwcosl]

I think the hardest part of SEO marketing is doing outreach and getting some good external links from the authority Site. I'm trying to get for my peakperformancehr.ca want some help.

[Junior484]

For more, link building is the hardest part for me. But, I did the best on my blog post.

[smokstore]

i think the hardest work is building links....

what types links you guys build now?

[Vettyy]

SEO Basics: Learn all the SEO basics back to front and well, don't just have a "general idea" of the basics. If you know all the basics "how long should a page title be?, What's a H1 heading?" you will connect the dots a lot better in SEO.

Reading: You have to (and should) read all the time and be on top of the latest news/strategies because it is always being refreshed and updated.

[KevnJr]

My largest obstacle occurred 2 years ago when the server we were on got blacklisted by Google. We hosted through my close friend - ally, he had leased a "less than secure server" and after a year something got hacked on his server and we (along w/ everyone on that server) were blacklisted. To add to the complication, my friend suddenly fell ill and was admitted to the hospital (he was down for 14 days) and I had no clue how to manage his server nor communicate with the server company.

Numerous long days and nights on calls, chats and emails, we (our new host & myself) were able to move our 2 sites to a secure server, and submit to Google and get re-listed. We were "Off-SERP" for 10 consecutive days, 8 of which were business days, our owner said sales went down $20,000 during that period!

Take-Away: If it's important, never just take someone's word it is right. Do the follow-up and confirm your status.

KJr

[BlueCorona]

At our online marketing agency, we stress the following phrase: track, test, tweak, repeat. Why? Because it can be frustrating to try different SEO strategies without knowing the outcome. Like others have said, patience is key for success in SEO. Want to a new SEO practice? track them and test them... and if they don't provide the results you were hoping for, tweak them and start the process over again. Being willing to try new things can be difficult, but it's one of the most fun parts of SEO! We hope you find that to be true, too.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I am completely with George here.

There is nothing that you can't learn, given enough time, but when I 'went it alone' all those years ago, I realised just how much time and effort had to be put into communication with clients.

OK, it might seem like just a part of what you do now, but what makes you stand out from the crowd, is being able to empathise with the clients issues and help control any situation that might come your way in a professional manner.

Take the time to understand their frustrations and take your time when replying - no good ever came from a hasty reply that ended up as a slanging match.

Remember, if a client keeps coming back looking for more clarification on something, it could simply be down to how you are explaining it.

-Andy

[George-Freitag]

Some of the most important (and overlooked) skills in SEO have nothing to do with SEO. They have to do with communication. You'll find that you'll pick up the fundamentals of SEO rather quickly once you dive down the career path. The hard stuff just takes time as you start working with different clients and encountering new issues with different websites. But you'll naturally get really good at diagnosing problems and researching solutions. Communication, though, is something you can start working on right away that will quickly set you apart from SEOs with years of experience in the industry.

First, get really good at being responsive and overcommunicating with your client or stakeholder. More clients leave agencies because of communication problems than competence. Be responsive, set up regular meetings, and always prepare. Just being prompt and thorough with your emails will cause you to immediately jump ahead of half of the SEOs out there. The most important SEO tool you have is the "Reply" button on your email. The second most important SEO tool is your phone.

Secondly, practice explaining SEO really well. Understand the concepts inside and out and pick a few favorite analogies to have on deck, if needed. Be able to summarize SEO strategies or concepts in a few sentences and without using industry terms like "link juice" or "pagerank" or even "domain authority." But, at the same time, be able to dive down into the specifics of a strategy, even if it's something as simple as a title tag.

**tl;dr: Answer your emails. Be ready to explain your SEO to any audience. Even your mom. **

[Nobody1560986989723]

Hi there,

Great question! The hardest thing I've had to learn with SEO...and therefore had to teach clients is the value of patience. Doing SEO right is a balance between showing short-term gains (say fixing website errors or correctly doing on page optimisation/content writing), but long-term sustainability (earning links the hard way). As an agency, SEO clients often want quick results - and most quick results in SEO either go against The Guidelines, or simply aren't sustainable.

Patience is also needed when you can see competitors using 'quick fix' methods but know they will get their comeuppance at some point. Just because a competitor is using a tactic that doesn't mean you or your client should. And that's hard for clients to swallow as they see their competitor benefitting from it, at least in the short-term.

This can mean great results taking months to show themselves. If you're doing all the right things and investing the right amount of time and effort, then good results will come to pass - but Google being Google, you can't always know when those results will surface.

Hope this helps!

Martin

[beaupedraza]

Be willing to take calculated risks that have a considerable chance at failing when it comes to your own education & development. View it as a dare, and if it backfires, continue to see it as a dare. Plan well, test often, and keep moving, as the industry is never static.

When I made the decision to leave my first professional SEO job, I took an aggressive stance and applied at an agency that I felt like I was unready for. My then-employer, a large Digital Marketing firm, took care of a freelance-local-guy-turned-professional like me, and I'm forever grateful, but after 18 months of SEO meetups, conferences, voluntary OT and projects, I felt like I was ready for a big step up.

Check that - I wasn't "ready", but I was ready to dive deeper. It just felt right, and I didn't know what it would take, but when I saw the job posting, I applied. I contacted the CEO directly, I told them the truth about my relative experience, and I got lucky and was hired.

I worked hard. H-A-R-D. I made it a passion project to exceed my employer's expectations. I studied daily, I dedicated myself to learning new tools, deep-end dives into Excel, mastering parts of SEO that used to scare me senseless (looking at you, URL Parameters), and within a few months, I was let go from the agency. The combination of not being a great fit and my rapid-but-not-rapid-enough education seemed to be the cause, and I was deflated. The CEO reached out, offered to give me a hand in finding a new job, and while I didn't need it, I was grateful and will always be. But I was at a mental bottom - all of that effort, and for what? I didn't have much of a pay raise and my taking the job was solely about learning how the top-level minds operate, and I kept asking myself as I applied for new jobs on LinkedIn, "What did I get out of it?"

Well, I ended up getting more education and experience in 4 months than I had received in the previous 12. All of that effort and work in trying to be better at what I do didn't just go out the window once I faced rejection. My first interviews were a breeze; I could explain not just that backlinks were good, but the theory behind links being seen as a "vote", all the way down to the logical theory, and when I landed back on my feet in my next role, I was ready for bigger responsibilities, and I had the confidence and the technical mindset for a solid foundation that I hadn't had in a very long time.

Long story short: Be hungry, take on projects, see where your limits are, and make it fun so you never have to work a day in your life.