What's the "most valuable indirectly related skill" to SEO worth learning?
-
Hi, All!
I have a little time on my hands that's not taken up by client work or our own marketing. What would you say is a skill worth learning during that time?
My background is not techie, so while I've picked up a teeny bit of knowledge about code, etc. on the way, I still don't really know how to code, use APIs, etc. So I was thinking something along those lines, but anyone have specific suggestions? And resources for whatever you suggest?
Thanks!
Aviva
-
For years I would put "Expert with Excel" on my Resume because I thought I knew it all. Now I know that I only understood the surface of a gigantic beast of a program!
-
If the 'technical' side of SEO doesn't appeal then another useful set of skills is media production. Before I got into SEO my calling was working in video and radio production - writing, interviewing, filming & editing. I have found these skills invaluable particularly while working with small & micro businesses. If content is king, then the ability to produce high-quality multimedia content on a low budget will always be a welcome asset. I find it opens the door to more interesting SEO strategies.
The best book on film production I've ever read is Shot by Shot by Steven d. Katz. It's more tuned towards film directing, but it's a great way to throw yourself in the deep end if it's something you'd be interested to learn.
Radio, I've found, is not as useful online - unless producing a podcast. Probably the most critical skill to get your head around on radio is interview skills. Look up Nardwuar the Human Serviette - he's a bit.. different.. but probably one of the most professional interviewers in the radio world today. If he's taught me anything it's research, research, research!
Oh and Photoshop! Photoshop never stops being useful. I'd go mad without it. There are hundreds of great guides online.
-
Great suggestion... I use Excel every day... but I also use the Google Document Spreadsheet because it does most of the same things as Excel and is in the cloud and you can share documents with other people..
At my office we share keyword research, ecommerce databases, profit margin calculation, inventory, adwords data... all of that with google docs.
Very valuable.
-
Great suggestion... if you can increase the conversion rate of a site by 50% your client will be IMPRESSED!
-
I agree with EGOL but wanted to share another helpful tip, Microsoft Excel.
MS Excel can be learned via online classes or formally with an instructor. If I recall correctly when I learned many years ago the in person classes were broken up into Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced classes with each being 1-2 days. If you have not taken any Excel classes, I would recommend adding one to your mix of training.
-
Knowledge / deep understanding of code (html, css, programming of any kind) is a good to have set of skills in your SEO bag but I don't think is the main valuable skill a good SEO must poses.
In my opinion the set of skills targeting Conversion Optimization (rules, procedures, UX related, A/b testing) is the most important additional 'skill set' you need to master in order to be able to really provide good SEO advice and run a normal professional SEO campaign. CO (Conversion Optimization) covers a lot of fields but at least knowing the basis will make you a much better SEO.
Hope it helps.
-
I would start learning about code.... and I would start building my own website. Pick a subject that you know well and start to write about it and make a little money from it with adsense.
This way you will have a stake in your work - you will learn better that way. And when you see a little money coming in it will give you incentive.... it could become a profitable hobby and then develop into a nice business over time.
Do something that pays.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Changing URLS: from a short well optimised URL to a longer one – What's the traffic risk
I'm working with a client who has a website that is relatively well optimised, thought it has a pretty flat structure and a lot of top level pages. They've invested in their content over the years and managed to rank well for key search terms. They're currently in the process of changing CMS and as a result of new folder structuring in the CMS the URLs for some pages look to have significantly changed. E.g Existing URL is: website.com/grampians-luxury-accommodation which ranked quite well for luxury accommodation grampians New URL when site is launched on new CMS would be website.com/destinations/victoria/grampians My feeling is that the client is going to lose out on a bit of traffic as a result of this. I'm looking for information or ways or case studies to demonstrate the degree of risk, and to help make a recommendation to mitigate risk.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moge0 -
Canonical's, Social Signals and Multi-Regional website.
Hi all, I have a website that is setup to target different countries by using subfolders. Example /aus/, /us/, /nz/. The homepage itself is just a landing page redirect to whichever country the user belongs to. Example somebody accesses https://domain/ and will be redirected to one of the country specific sub folders. The default subfolder is /us/, so all users will be redirected to it if their country has not been setup on the website. The content is mostly the same on each country site apart from localisation and in some case content specific to that country. I have set up each country sub folder as a separate site in Search Console and targeted /aus/ to AU users and /nz/ to NZ users. I've also left the /us/ version un-targeted to any specific geographical region. In addition to this I've also setup hreflang tags for each page on the site which links to the same content on the other country subfolder. I've target /aus/ and /nz/ to en-au and en-nz respectively and targeted /us/ to en-us and x-default as per various articles around the web. We generally advertise our links without a country code prefix, and the system will automatically redirect the user to the correct country when they hit that url. Example, somebody accesses https://domain/blog/my-post/, a 302 will be issues for https://domain/aus/blog/my-post/ or https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ etc.. The country-less links are advertised on Facebook and in all our marketing campaigns Overall, I feel our website is ranking quite poorly and I'm wondering if poor social signals are a part of it? We have a decent social following on Facebook (65k) and post regular blog posts to our Facebook page that tend to peek quite a bit of interest. I would have expected that this would contribute to our ranking at least somewhat? I am wondering whether the country-less link we advertise on Facebook would be causing Googlebot to ignore it as a social signal for the country specific pages on our website. Example Googlebot indexes https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ and looks for social signals for https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ specifically, however, it doesn't pick up anything because the campaign url we use is https://domain/blog/my-post/. If that is the case, I am wondering how I would fix that, to receive the appropriate social signals /us/blog/my-post/, /aus/blog/my-post/ & /nz/blog/my-post/. I am wondering if changing the canonical url to the country-less url of each page would improve my social signals and performance in the search engines overall. I would be interested to hear your feedback. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | destinyrescue0 -
International SEO with 27 TLD`s
Hi Guys! Would like to have your expert opinion on the structure of a big international company. They are active over 27 regions, with all their own local TLD website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sie.SAS
Some of them are translated, but most of them are in English (big duplicated content, you know it). Next to that they have a webshop on 4 subdomains of theses 27 local TLD's. In my opinion it would be best to merge them all back to the .com domain and set-up a 301 redirect for all local TLD`s.
However what is your opinion on these 4 webshops? should I make them in the following structure : .com/region/shop (for example .com/fr/shop) Thanks for the feedback! Kind Regards S.0 -
Differences between "casas rusticas" and "casas rústicas"
Hi All, I've a client with this website: http://www.e-rustica.com/casas-rusticas It's a spanish realtor for special houses (rustic). We wanto it to be good posited as "casas rústicas" that it's the correct keyword and asl "casas rusticas" that it's like lot of people write it. Do you know if google see this two keywords as the same? Even we've done SEO for "casas rústicas" it's much better posited for "casas rusticas". Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbenzo_aficiona0 -
Google fluctuates its result on Chrome's private browsing
I have seen an interesting Google behaviour this morning. As usual, I would open Chrome's private browsing to see how a keyword is ranking. This was what I see... Typed in "sell my car", I see Auto Trader page on 3rd. (Ref:Sell My Car 1st result img) Googled something else, then re-Googled "sell my car" and saw that our page went to 2nd! I repeated the same process and saw that we went from 3rd to 2nd again. Has Google results gone mental? PaGXJ.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tmg.seo0 -
Is it worth submitting a blog's RSS feed...
to as many RSS feed directories as possible? Or would this have a similar negative impact that you'd get from submitting a site to loads to "potentially spammy" site directories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Use of <h2class="hidden">- SEO implications</h2class="hidden">
I'm just looking at a website with <h2class="hidden">Main Navigation and <h2class="hidden">Footer inserted on each page, and am wondering about the SEO implications.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
<a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a></h2class="hidden"></h2class="hidden">0