I love the concept of SEO.

This is why I am trying to pursue this industry despite having a lot of competition and warning from other people. Since I started building my own website, I learned that everything on the internet that we are searching for is optimized for every person who is searching for a specific topic or term.

For example, when you search "how to make money online", you will see several results on the web:

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All of the content is optimized by the people behind the site also known as SEO Strategists to gain traffic for their website and businesses. It is interesting. So I decided to learn about it with my website and started looking for jobs related to this industry.

My first and second gig was an SEO content writer where I will need to write content for the client and optimize it with on-page SEO. It is easy to understand, but you always need to be careful and make it natural to avoid keyword stuffing that can hurt your ranking.

I need more experience. But this time, I don't want to be a writer but just a pure SEO strategist. Fortunately, I landed a job (that I am still working on) and still waiting for the result after one month of hard work.

Here are the things that I learned:

SEO is not easy

Learning about SEO is not easy. It is not just optimizing the meta tags, title, description, etc. You also need to start building backlinks, have a good hierarchy of headings, the correct way of using keywords, and do keyword research.

SEO is a broad topic because you have to focus on three subtopics:

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO
3. Technical SEO

It is too much to hear but you will know about this soon! I will try to write an article about SEO in Hive. But for now, you can look for the Basics of SEO on my website and get an overview from it.

You have to be organized

When optimizing every content, and if you are working on a website that is already running for years and has several written content, you must have an organized document and Excel sheet to monitor your changes. I had never done this before, but I learned about it after having an experience.

My client and I decided to use Google Docs and Spreadsheet to monitor the changes and the logs on their website. I am still working on how can I make it more organized because as of now, it is still kind of a mess.

Ask more questions before working

Since we are talking about a business, you have to know its background. Ask for the target audience, demographics, competitors, pain points, etc. Without this, you cannot work as an SEO strategist.

Learning about the business is also crucial so you will have a quick overview of the business and depend on it on how you can execute your SEO strategy. In my case, I asked for the competitors and analyze the keywords that they are ranking for and give it to my client so we can decide what keywords should we target to rank.

SEO is a long-term process

There are clients who want the result in a quick way (just like my client) but I keep telling them that SEO is a long-term process. You need to have long patience before getting the outcome that you are looking for.

For example, a newly launched website is expected to get organic traffic after 6 months to 1 year. But if you are inconsistent like me who is not publishing anything on my website, then pity on you, you will not get traffic.

Yes, SEO is not only about content optimization but also needs to start creating content consistently so Google will know that your website is active and start crawling to your posts and pages.

As of now, we are still waiting for the result of continuously optimizing the content on the website of my client so we can conclude if SEO is successful. Although I suspect that there will be no major changes, I am expecting at least small changes to the traffic of my client. I am excited to know about the result so I can add more case studies on my portfolio.

Do you want me to create a tutorial about SEO?

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About the author

_{Mark Laurence, also known as Laurenceuuu and anonymous02 is a student who is currently taking a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering. He is expanding his knowledge and skills by blogging where he mostly writes about digital marketing, productivity, and making money online.}

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_{Graphics are made and designed by the author using Canva. All images are mine unless stated otherwise. Page dividers are from TheTerminal.}