Why You Can’t Be An SEO Everything Expert!
Over the past 20 years, during the growth of the Internet, I’ve seen fields like the “SEO Field” come and go. Fields is a reference to a “new job field”. Usually it starts out as a minor technical task, like storage of files, designing a website, sending email, etc., etc.
It starts out as a minor thing tech guys do, and then suddenly one day they are like “wow people actually value this and pay for this?” It seems to happen over and over. The very first example is when I was sitting in an MBA class in 1993 at Farleigh Dickinson University and the professor came in and said his son’s friends were starting a hosting company and had just raised $25,000 to start it. I was like why is that a business and why is someone investing in it? At that time I worked at Bell Atlantic and things like server hardware, Unix and all that stuff was for engineers. Boy was I wrong. The biggest lesson from this is something you might find common is not so common and of value to a business customer. That’s why you should not underestimate anything technical. It all could be a service to somebody out there.
Getting found on Yahoo back in 2001, when we started Pre-Dating Speed Dating, the largest dating event company in the US, was important to the launch of that business. Notice I am saying Yahoo, not Google. That would all change by 2004, when it became Google. We did what we needed to do to get the web pages found by people who wanted to attend the events. Consistently over the years what is required to be found has changed. Like layers of sand, there is the tried and true stuff from the very beginning of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Let’s start right there, what is SEO? It’s simple from the perspective of how your website gets found by users. Plain and simple. Lots of SEO workers out there are probably going to read this article to pick out a nugget of wisdom.
We could end this article there and say, yep, it helps your web pages get found! That is all you need to know. Wish it were that simple. Well, today in a lot of ways SEO is not what it used to be. It is so comprehensive and holistic today, I could write a book about it. In fact I did, but only from the perspective of using SEO to find a job. You can look that book up here on Amazon if you need it… And SEO is now like making a website. There are layers; many layers of complexity to building a website from knowing tech, to knowing design, to knowing usability. Heck, knowing what goes into a website is now something you should know to be an SEO expert. If you are an SEO expert with no website building knowledge, well that does not sound right to me.
Then comes specialization… With every industry, corporations require people to become highly specialized in order to get the work done efficiently.
We have SEO workers and businesses who supposedly do SEO, who know very little actually about anything other than the basics of SEO. And quite frankly, if you learn Yoast in WordPress that could be true, you know more than enough to be dangerous!
You could be a simple keyword word master and master SEO. But you actually know very little in general about how the web works or how the Internet actually works. There is so much more involved in doing SEO successfully, and most of it is a little more technical, so not in the SEO person’s wheelhouse suddenly. Much of SEO today revolves around writing blogs, and popping keywords and links into the articles and optimizing for Google.
You could spend hours reading through “current” SEO strategy where mobile ready is everything, because Google will penalize you to the big question of http vs. https. It looks clearly like Google wants https, but then maybe not. I personally don’t spend hours reading up on SEO so there is always I just don’t know what’s current. You can’t keep up with it all.
The one thing that is now true and why you will never be an expert is it is a field that is constantly evolving and now becoming very vertical in nature. I will give you an example. Working on SEO in the drug rehab business briefly their idea of SEO, which is all about local strategy and what we call “The Bottom Of The Funnel”. That simply means they are not sending people to fill out a form or buy anything. There is no funnel and they want you to call now. So for that industry Google Maps is everything. If you are in the dating biz like me, then local and the keywords are critical to getting people to commit to giving up their email address for a long term funnel.
I keep using the word funnel, because that is the how the analytics of SEO work. You need a funnel with layers in that funnel to analyze how well you are doing at every level of the process.
So here is what this is coming down to. If you want an SEO person, a keyword hack, that’s not me. If you want a web analytics person, who knows how to just pop tags into a website, that is not exactly me. If you want a person that can push buttons and send emails, who is, and I am quoting what a head hunter told me last week, “Get me somebody who is Internet Anything”. That is not me. That is a person who knows how to surf. If you are looking for real work to get done, complicated, sophisticated SEO in combination with Web Analytics, my specialty, then that is what I do. If you are looking for a person to solve a problem, that is me. There is a big difference. And it is easy to find me. Just email me at dan@startuppop.com and you will find me. You can call me at 786–201–5123. Connect with me on Linkedin to ask me a question. Check out my background and history here. Connect with me through my twitter at @dgudema. If you are looking for a person to solve your SEO problem, figure out a plan how to build a dashboard from Google Analytics, build a solution, that could likely be me. If you are looking for a person to do this and they say they don’t know any of the following, then just move on:
Web Analytics, HTML and basic CSS, mobile ready, keyword building, Yoast, WordPress, Rich Snippets, Schema.org, Google Maps, Local, Metas, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, etc. etc.
For my regular readers, we are running a startup pitch event in Boca Raton now officially the week of September 10–12 (not yet confirmed), 2018 at 6pm. It is about to be announced. The event will be at Cendyn Spaces right near Mizner park. Please join the mailing list on StartupPOP.com if you have not done so already. We are going to be putting up an Eventbrite and Meetup page in addition to StartupPOP asap.
Thanks and have a great day.
Dan G.
