What is the fastest way to learn SEO?

The fastest way to learn SEO. The top 25 free SEO tools to get you started. PLUS! The future of SEO and how much you could earn

Want to know the fastest way to learn SEO? Start with this ultimate beginner’s guide for SEO. Or if you’re a visual person, watch tutorials on Youtube. 

Take an SEO for beginners course online. You’ll be able to find many free tutorials, but often the fastest way to learn is to pay for a dedicated course from a professional. Like these Udemy courses that start from just $10 bucks.

Be part of the SEO community. Join SEO forums or Facebook groups and see what everyone is talking about. See what’s trending and when things are changing.

Practice. Practice. Practice. Start using the knowledge you gain. Experiment with SEO tools. Play with your website. Try to solve warnings and errors on your site. Get it to load faster.  Record the changes you make then monitor what impact it has on your Google Search Console.

Find a mentor. Eventually, you’ll meet SEO experts who have been doing it a while. Try to find a mentor who can coach you through each stage as your skills develop. They’ll be able to point out specific solutions, tools and tricks, plus help you work through which techniques still work from the ones that have been outdated.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO LEARN SEO?

You can gain a basic understanding of SEO within 15 minutes just by reading this beginner’s guide to SEO, but like anything new, the longer you study and the more practice you put in, the faster you’ll develop your skills.

If you practise every day, you’ll have a pretty good grasp of it within 3 months. After 6 months you should be able to do a lot of it on your own – depending on if you are comfortable working with code. Generally, when you have been doing it for 3 years, you’re considered quite experienced. After 10,000 hours (4+ years), you should have mastered it. 

The good news is; SEO takes time to take effect on a website. So if you’re applying your SEO learnings to a new website – or a website that hasn’t done SEO before – you can likely learn what you need to know while you start getting traction on Google. An easy way to start is to run your website through a technical audit and start by learning and fixing technical ‘errors’, then move on to ‘warnings’. Go one by one and research what each error is and how to fix it. This way, you learn and get results at the same time!

TOP 5 SKILLS REQUIRED FOR SEO

All you need to get started with SEO in a computer, access to the internet and the will to learn. And to become an SEO expert, it’ll help to have or develop the below attributes;

1. Attention to detail – Being able to think critically about a problem and solution is what a good SEO does every day. SEO is often a lot of technical back end work. Mundane writing tasks and tending to the tiniest of details. 
2. Content creativity – SEO is also becoming more and more about content marketing, so being able to create cool content yourself, without having to rely on others, will be a huge advantage. Whether it’s writing a blog, writing meta descriptions or producing an infographic – creative is the variable of success.
3. Coding skills – Even just the basics will help. A lot of SEOs are ex-developers. And there’s no doubt having a basic understanding of code makes it easier day-to-day. Plenty of everyday SEO tasks are code related, and lacking in this area could limit your success without you even knowing it.
4. Marketing psychology – A strong marketing aptitude will help you get SEO traction. Because so much of SEO is about content, marketing, reducing bounce rates, and getting people to click. Being good at getting people’s attention and holding it will be key to your SEO success.
5. Analytics and data analysis – Being comfortable with numbers will help you track and monitor your SEO progress, particularly in the early days when they aren’t looking great. Understanding how people move around the internet and how one action over here might move the needle over there can be invaluable in proving ROI and validating the results of your SEO experiments.

TOP 25 FREE SEO TOOLS TO GET YOU STARTED

• SEO Site Checkup – If you have no idea where to start. Start here. Audit your website for on-page and technical SEO issues. Then start researching what the ‘errors’ and ‘warnings’ mean, and how to resolve them.
• Google PageSpeed Insights – Check the speed and usability of your site on multiple devices. Particularly handy to view your website from Google’s point of view.
• Slangspout.com – Getting started with content for your marketing or website? Discover thousands of topic ideas and what’s trending based on a single keyword.
• Google Analytics – Complete website traffic stats. Dive into the articles the pages that are getting the most traffic to understand what’s bringing people to your site.
• Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools – Constant website analysis, alerts, and error reports are just the start. They are essential if you want the big search engines to feature you.
• Google Trends – See the popularity of topics and trends so you can stay in front of the curve.
• XML Sitemaps – Build a sitemap so it can be submitted for indexing. You’ll need to do this right away if you’ve just built or made major changes to your site.
• Robots.txt Generator – Easily generate a robots.txt file for the pages on your site you don’t want to be indexed.
• Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker – Get a complete backlink analysis for your website. Not a huge priority if you’re just starting out. But you can use it to audit a competitor’s site and get ideas for backlinks.
• Ahrefs SEO toolbar – It can be useful to get SEO metrics for web pages as you browse the web so you get used to the metrics and typical benchmarks.
• SEO Web Page Analyzer – View a full on-page analysis of your website.
• Schema Creator – Optimise how your website appears in SERPs.
• SimilarWeb – View site stats for almost any domain.
• SERP Robot – See how you rank for up to five keywords.
• Browseo – See your website the way a search engine sees it. Pretty cool for looking at the content in raw form to see what stands out, or what’s getting lost.
• Yoast SEO – If you’re on WordPress, you need Yoast. Get suggestions for search engine optimizing your blog posts
• Smush – Another free WordPress plugin for compressing, optimizing, and resizing images on your site.
• LinkMiner – It can be hard to see broken links buried deep on your site sometimes. Discover broken links on any web page with this handy tool.
• Google Business Review Link Generator – Create a link to include in customer communicate which prompts them to review your business on Google
• Copyscape – Check for duplicate content to make sure every page stands out.
• Structured Data Testing Tool – Helps to provide context to the information on your page. 
• Responsive Design Checker – Checks the responsiveness of a webpage so you can find and fix errors that pop up. This can also be handy for conversion rate optimisation.
• Where Goes? – A simple tool for checking redirect paths for any URL. Not a burning priority if you have a new or small website.
• Whitespark Local Citation Finder – Finds citation opportunities for your business.
• Moz Local Listing Score – While it only works in a few countries, it helps to see how your local business looks online.

HOW MUCH DOES AN SEO EARN?

How much you earn depends on if you are a freelancer, in-house, or work for an agency. It also depends on where you live, and where your employer lives.

SEO is often outsourced to an offshore freelancer or agency because it can be done remotely and you don’t have to be closely wedded to the marketing team to get SEO results. But of course, you’ll get better results if you are.

Offshore agencies in developing countries usually pay an SEO analyst approximately $5-$10USD per hour. And those agencies usually charge out their team members at a retail rate of around 3x, so $15-$30USD per hour. Agencies in western countries usually pay SEOs around $30 per hour, which means they’ll charge them out to clients at about $90-$110 per hour.

Freelancers usually charge a little less than an agency – usually around $10-$20 USD per hour depending on experience – which is often how they get new clients (by undercutting agencies on price). Freelancing can be great for work/life balance, but as a freelancer, you usually need to maintain and budget for your own accounting, taxes and retirement, which should be factored in when comparing what you really get paid.

In-house in a big enough company can see you earning $30+ per hour, in a role that lets you focus on one client (your employer), usually one website, and a manageable amount of work. This often turns into faster results, which will help with your job satisfaction, too.

A ‘growth manager’ is a new and emerging digital role that usually comes once an SEO expert starts to gain a deeper understanding of other digital marketing channels like PPC, social, EDMs and analytics – and can start to drive holistic growth and marketing campaigns. They don’t teach this at university yet so these people are usually self-taught or may graduate in marketing and communications and have taught themselves the rest. This person is usually paid around $40 per hour. A ‘head of growth’ who manages a team of specialists is usually $40-$50 per hour in-house… or up to $150 per hour if employed via an agency.

When pitching yourself against other SEOs, you’ll need to consider that most digital roles are categorised as having 1, 3 or 5+ years experience. People with 1-year experience know what everything means but often needs guidance to get solve problems. 3 years experience is generally good value and is self-sufficient. Can usually work on their own and get results. 5-years + usually get big results but can be hard to find or are in demand so may be paid more.

DOES SEO REQUIRE YOU TO KNOW HOW TO CODE?

No, you don’t particularly need to know how to code. But it does help. Content marketing, branding and PR is becoming a bigger part of SEO which means creative marketers can be just as good SEOs as developers can. 

Knowing how to code will help in that you will be able to find and fix technical errors faster, reduce the use of unnecessary code, develop a faster website, reduce the number of technical errors and so on.

IS SEO A GOOD CAREER?

SEO is so much more than just a job or a career. When you grasp SEO, you have the ability to work with 200+ search engine variables that are constantly changing. This is a significant skill. This skill will help you not only develop and exercise your own logic and problem-solving skills, but it will certainly help you to excel in your digital marketing career. 

SEO is often seen as an entry into more senior digital marketing roles that come with more personal benefits. When you have an in-depth understanding of so many moving parts, how algorithms work and what all of the digital best practices are; you’ll be able to learn other digital marketing channels much faster.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF SEO?

Does SEO have a future? It does, it’ll just evolve like the internet itself has. The future of SEO will encapsulate a holistic approach to digital marketing and require you to have a better understanding of online user behavior. It’ll evolve into social media and voice optimisation as Google, Facebook and Amazon (and whoever the next big player is) start to get a tighter hold on our everyday lives.

More advanced algorithms will make SEO harder. In fact, some SEO gurus already say there are 880+ Google ranking factors. As algorithms get smarter, it’ll make it harder to keep up with all of the SEO technicalities or to game the system, and we will see a swing toward content and branding.

This means SEO will evolve into digital PR. Already, user reviews, mentions and previous brand interactions are a big part of SEO. This will go deeper as more data becomes available.

SEO and Social Media will become closely wedded. Users already use social media to search for things like pictures of restaurant menus and dishes, products, fashion and beauty tips. In fact, if you use an Android mobile, you’ll notice Google’s mobile search interface is looking a heck of a lot more like a social feed these days.

There are so many more things that will evolve, but the takeaway here is that SEO will become more business-critical. It will be the key to being found online. As more and more people go online, SEO will evolve. And what SEO evolves into in the future will be directly correlated to the growth of a company.