How To Become An SEO

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for The SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show. I am Michael Costin and I am sitting opposite Arthur Fabik.

ARTHUR: How are you going? I'm doing very good. You never let me intro myself. Give it a go.

MICHAEL: And I'm Arthur Fabik. Oh, you want to do that? Let's try again. I'm Michael Costin. And I'm Arthur Fabik. And this is the SEO show. There you go. We've discovered something new. Let's, let's, let's roll with that. Let's do it. All right. Well, outside of intros, we do have a topic for this show today. You can do the topic as well. You're on a roll.

ARTHUR: Well, the topic today we have is, ready? How we got into SEO, or how do you become an SEO? Sorry.

MICHAEL: Mate, it's written right there.

ARTHUR: I gave you one job. I know that is my bad, my bad.

MICHAEL: How to become an SEO. Cause this question we get asked, actually got an email from a guy the other day, listens to the show. He asked how to get into SEO. And I wrote a big reply back to him, never heard back from him. So I thought let's just do a show about how to get into SEO so we can tell all of that know-how to the world.

ARTHUR: So this show is dedicated to him.

MICHAEL: Well, it's dedicated to anyone that wants to get into SEO. We're going to help you. We're going to give information away that would help you get a job in SEO. Cause a lot of people wanting to get into it. It's a growing industry. There's demand for people with those skills. So it's a good time to get into SEO, how to become an SEO. But maybe let's go back in time. Do you remember how you became an SEO?

ARTHUR: I do. I do. It was a long time ago now, 2013, almost a decade ago. So I had graduated from Macquarie doing a Bachelor of Commerce, majoring in marketing. I was looking for a marketing job, but didn't quite know what I wanted. I was just applying for any kind of entry-level marketing role. But at the time, it was very difficult to get your foot in the door. Everywhere was, they expected at least a year experience, even for entry-level roles. One of my friends at the time was working at The Iconic and she was doing SEO. And I was speaking to her one night, we were out having drinks and she was like, you know what, you should try getting a job in SEO. And she started, you know, listing off all the benefits and everything, you know. At the time, I didn't really know much about SEO. It wasn't something that was covered at uni. I did, I think there was like a digital marketing course, but very brief, like I just touched on everything. And yeah, everything she was telling me sounded super appealing. So I started applying for SEO roles, junior SEO roles and. Not long after that, I got a job at DGM where I met you as we came into each other's life. We did. I still remember the first time I saw you on the bus to the office. That's a different story. Oh, I don't even know that. You completely ghosted me blankly. I was sitting at the front of the bus, but you had to, you had to prove yourself in SEO before I'd talk to you.

MICHAEL: I don't even remember. I probably didn't see it. You probably didn't see me.

ARTHUR: But yeah, I started my career in SEO as a junior SEO link builder, where for the first six months, all I did was link building. So going through blogs for our clients, looking for sites that we could approach, hitting them up and getting links for clients. So. Tough work.

MICHAEL: That's right. That is starting at the bottom and working your way up.

ARTHUR: That's exactly it. Started from the bottom. Now I'm here. Hosting an SEO podcast. Amazing. Co-hosting.

MICHAEL: Well, um, what about you? I, uh, I was a DJ back in the day. That was my full-time job. And towards the end of it, I was like, I need to get out of this world and get a real job. I remember like it was, it would have been 2007. I was speaking to recruiters and one of them was like, have you heard about search engine marketing? 2007. Yeah. And I'm like, what the hell search engine marketing? And I looked it all up. And at that time I didn't go ahead with getting a job. I kept like being a DJ for a little while longer. A couple of years later, 2009, it was time to get a real job. And I got a marketing job at a car rental company. And because I'd learnt of search engine marketing, I decided to revisit it there. And I was running Google AdWords as it was called back then, SEO campaigns all off my own bat. Like I suggested it to the guys cause they didn't know it, but it got results, got customers in the door. And pretty soon I wanted to be doing that all day long rather than the other parts of the job. I was doing sales and stuff for them as well. Yeah. So I went and got a job in an agency drawing on that experience that I'd got myself, you know, off my own back working there and then worked at the agency and then have been doing some way, shape or form SEO ever since. So I guess we both fell into it, but the point of this episode is for someone that knows they want to get into SEO, how to become one in the moment. So we have, what do we have here? Seven steps that you can go through that we would recommend you go through to be strategic About becoming an SEO So first and foremost Before you go applying for jobs and stuff, you need to do a little bit of work and get familiar with the space, the lingo, the terminology, get some runs on the board yourself. So don't just apply for jobs, entry-level jobs, because to give you an example, we've got a job ad up at the moment for an entry-level role and it has like 200 applicants. So the ones that are going to stand out are the ones that have done some version of what we're about to cover. So. First cap off the rank is listen to podcasts just like the SEO show. But other ones we can recommend are Authority Hacker and The Recipe for SEO Success, which is another Aussie SEO podcast. Competitor. I guess. Would you consider? I guess they're competitors. I think so. I would say a colleague.

ARTHUR: I'd say competitor.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, whatever you can go listen to, you know, this show, those other two.

ARTHUR: There's so many out there. There's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of others, but authority hacker is probably one of the more known podcasts for marketing in general.

MICHAEL: And listening to that, you're going to pick up. You know, know-how, knowledge about the space, lingo.

ARTHUR: Tips, tricks, how to do SEO.

MICHAEL: Yep, pretty much. And it's not just podcasts, go on Twitter, follow SEO thought leaders. So people we can recommend them, Craig Campbell, he's been on the show. Nice plug. Yep. Christina Azarenko. Brody Clark, he's another Australian guy. And then there's a guy Ian Nuttall who shares a lot about programmatic SEO. There's literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people posting about SEO all the time. You follow a few of them and your feed pretty soon is going to have interesting case studies and threads that people put together, results, tactics that are working for them, that sort of stuff. Then go over to YouTube. and consume a whole bunch of SEO content on there. So an example, Matt Diggity, also been on this show. He posts a lot of good content on there. There's plenty of others. You'll find your groove with the ones you like. But the general gist we're making here is that the university of Twitter, YouTube, even Reddit podcasts.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Reddit's a big one for me because I wasn't big on Twitter back in the day. I loved Reddit. So when I was starting off at DGM, I was always in like, our big SEO, just reading through stuff, posting myself, you know, questions, seeing what the community had to say. Yep. Self-learning. Yep. I guess. Yeah. Self-learning.

MICHAEL: Self-learning. Absolutely. So that's really what you should do for like, let's say three months. I've just plucked that figure out of thin air, but if you do that, you're going to get a really good, you're going to be sort of tapped into the SEO world basically. Um, from there, you might want to look at doing a couple of free courses. So ones we can, I guess, recommend would be, you know, HubSpot and Ahrefs both have SEO focused courses. With HubSpot you get a little certificate and everything. The reason that you would do that is because it's something tangible to point to when you do eventually go to interview for an SEO job. You know, I've got these certificates from HubSpot in SEO. And then in the interview you might name drop, Oh yeah, I saw Matt Diggity talking about that. And on Twitter I was following so-and-so and you know, agencies, when they hear that stuff, that's what they're looking for, that you're engaged with the world. That's almost an instant hire there, isn't it? It's yeah. Cause I tell you how rare it is. Very, very rare. Very, very rare. So you've setting yourself up for success just by listening to all of that stuff first and foremost, and then name dropping it where you can in an interview.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And you don't have to just stick to free courses. There are paid courses, obviously not all of them are expensive. Moz have a free course. I don't like Moz that much anymore with these days, but I guess the fundamentals still make sense. So there's plenty out there. Yep. He's got to find them.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I guess the other thing as well, like what we're talking about at the moment is learning. You don't want to spend all your time in the textbooks, so to speak. What you also want to do is actually build a website and try to rank it and test things out. So that's creating content on it, internal linking, trying to improve speed optimization. So like all this stuff that you would have picked up from following people on Twitter and watching YouTubes and doing courses actually put it into practice on a website. set up search console on it, see how you're being indexed. All that sort of stuff, again, is you're not going to be expected to be setting the world alight with your traffic, but it is giving you skills, practical skills. Practical skills, very important. Yep. And it's stuff again, you can point to when it comes time to actually try become an SEO by getting a job or something like that.

ARTHUR: Exactly right. A lot of the candidates that have stuck out to me in the past were people that have had their own sites, have had little side projects and things like that, because it shows that they have I guess that drive and, you know, like even outside of SEO, people that have their own little side businesses demonstrates to me that they are interested in marketing and, you know, they have that entrepreneurial kind of mentality, which is appealing when you're looking for someone to hire.

MICHAEL: Like realistically, if you're trying to get a job in SEO and you don't even have a website or anything that you can point to, how interested are you really in it? Like, is it just trying to get a job in the space or are you actually interested in nerding out in this stuff? Exactly. So it's an essential that for an entry level role that you can point to at least some sort of tinkering with sites.

ARTHUR: I can only imagine if someone came in and had their own site could like list off all these, you know, SEO peeps. And to me that'd be, like I said, instant hire, you know. It would be. Yeah. Yep. A hundred percent. So if you're listening.

MICHAEL: Future potential hires do all this stuff and you're going to come in and blow us off. We'll be like, wow. Hired. But it's true. Yeah. No, it is true. The last thing I would say on this pre becoming an SEO would maybe with your LinkedIn, you know, add those certifications on there, drop a few posts about SEO, show that you're interested in that stuff because absolutely as part of the hiring process, anyone's going to go look at your LinkedIn. Definitely. You know, whether it's a recruiter, whether it's the agency people. So show that you're into SEO by having something to do with SEO on your LinkedIn, even if you don't yet work in it properly.

ARTHUR: Exactly.

MICHAEL: All right. That is, that's the groundwork. That's the foundation. So if you do all those things, you're guaranteed a job. With us? No, I can almost say for sure.

ARTHUR: But you'll definitely impress anyone that's interviewing you. I think so. For an entry level role, if you're just trying to get your foot in the door, if you do those things, I can guarantee you that you'll be I want to say guarantee, but you will definitely impress. You're setting yourself up. A hundred percent.

MICHAEL: Unless you're a total freak in the interview, you're probably going to get a job. But, um, I guess once that's all done, let's say it's three, four, five months or whatever, you've got a bit of success with your website. You know, you, you've done SEO a little bit. There's a few different ways you can get this four different ways you can get. The first one is you can try and get a job at an agency. Like the way we've been speaking about this in the context of so far, this is what we recommend you start with. What you could do. The second thing is go try and get some clients and just be a freelancer. You know, Hey, Mr. Business owner. I am an SEO freelancer because I've done three months of following people on Twitter. I'm ready to go. Let's do that. Uh, it's a tough gig, very tough finding clients, finding and keeping them, replacing them. It's, um, you're doing a lot of stuff. That's not actually SEO and learning SEO. You'll be doing sales sales. Yeah. Hustle training. Yeah. Trying to keep that client base then revenue coming in. So wouldn't recommend you do that. Like a good freelancer is going to be appealing because they have a lot of experience as well. So. probably not the best play.

ARTHUR: Um, what about using, uh, or utilizing something like fiber or Upwork and creating a profile and trying to get little dribs and drabs of work on there to build up a portfolio. So, cause you'll probably be more likely to find work on Upwork than for pitching to.

MICHAEL: Yeah. If you go in the freelancer route. Yeah. Maybe that start with that just to start because you can, you can,

ARTHUR: Essentially, you know, create a profile, start trying to find clients. Sorry, I moved away from the mic there. And get work that way, do keyword research, do, you know, dribs and drabs of different things.

MICHAEL: Not a bad idea. It wasn't on the list, but you know what? I like it. The only thing is you'd need an, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be doing SEO full-time if you did that. Presumably you'd need some other job on the side because.

ARTHUR: Oh, you would. Yeah, definitely. But I mean, yeah.

MICHAEL: Sure. Sure. No, but it makes sense. You could do that and then you could sort of segue that or leverage that into more and more and more. And if you just want to be a freelancer, maybe that's the way to go and never work in an agency. I think working in an agency is a pro we'll come back to that in a sec. But, um, the other thing you could do is just try and land a client side job, like at a SAS company or, you know, publishing company or any business that needs SEO people. But I think this is unlikely because.

ARTHUR: for someone just starting out.

MICHAEL: For entry level, they're all the types of jobs that want people with like three, four, five years experience. The last one is start your own agency.

ARTHUR: You know, there's plenty of people out there spruiking it on Instagram and TikTok.

MICHAEL: YouTube, there's YouTube videos, you know, start a digital marketing agency in one month and make a hundred grand a month or, you know, ridiculous things like that. Lots of them will start and then burn out because should you really be running an agency when you've never really worked in the space? No. Exactly.

ARTHUR: 100% no. Yeah. I mean, start off by trying to get your own clients, not build an agency. It's hard. Very, very hard. Unless you're a good salesperson and you're hustling people and just signing clients and not doing anything. which I assume a lot of these people might be doing.

MICHAEL: Yes. But that's not a good experience once those clients start getting annoyed.

ARTHUR: No. And then also you're probably setting up a bad reputation for yourself as an SEO.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So I'm going to say the best thing you can do if you want to become an SEO out of those four is get yourself an entry level job at an agency. So if you, you could approach digital agencies, we get approached quite often, To varying degrees of quality, you know, some people just like I want a job. Other people will write like a really clever outbound email that references personalized things about us in the business. And obviously that second one is the one that attracts more attention from us. But if you, in your own way, let them know you're obsessed with SEO and you're looking to transition it into it as a career and then talk about, you know, I listened to all these podcasts and people on Twitter and YouTube and I've done these courses and I've built this site and got results. And I'm just so keen to come to you guys because I've looked at your Instagram, I've looked at your YouTube, you look like the place I want to work and I want to learn everything from you. If the agencies are looking to hire, they're probably going to speak to you. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah. So get that job because in an agency, you're going to be working on a ton of different clients. You're going to get experience in all sorts of different sites. You're going to be working with people that have been in the game for years. So you're going to absorb a lot of knowledge. So I would say plan to work there for at least two years, you know, absorb as much as you can. Get as much experience across different types of sites as possible. Now from there. Look, if you stick with an agency, if you work there for two years and then three, four, five, you're naturally going to be promoted and given pay rises. If you're at an agency that's growing, let's say, like a decent agency that's growing and you stick around, your experience becomes worth more, you get trusted more, you get promotions, pay rises. As a company grows, you could expect bigger and better roles. So that's one option. Definitely a good option. The other option is those last three things, becoming a freelancer, starting your own or going client side all open up once you've had a couple of years experience. Exactly. Yeah. So the world is your oyster as an SEO.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I love working at agency life. Like, I mean, for me personally, the fast paced kind of, you know, it just works for me.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I agree. Done it for however long now.

ARTHUR: I know a lot of people go client side, but I think I'd get bored. Yeah. I mean, maybe, I don't know, but I love agency life. So if you're looking to start out in SEO, definitely approach some agencies, look for jobs and get your foot in the door.

MICHAEL: That's where you're going to learn the most, the quickest work on the coolest sites and variety while doing it at the same time, have fun, like-minded people skill up. And you know, like then, as we said, the world is your oyster from there. We like agencies, we've done it a long time. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. Different challenges. I haven't heard that one. They do, quite often.

ARTHUR: You've never heard any of these things? No, I really haven't. What have you, I don't know.

MICHAEL: What do you do when you hear sayings normally? Do you always say, I've never heard that one?

ARTHUR: Although I hear, but maybe it's just a bit of an age difference between us.

MICHAEL: Bit of an age difference? We're talking, what, two years? Two, you wish. Roughly? So anyway, that is how to become an SEO right there. All laid out neatly. If you've got the passion, if you've got the drive, you should be able to get a job with a few months worth of work. Cool. Well, that right there is an episode of the SEO show. We're going to be back with another episode next week, but until then, Arthur has something he wants to say. Do I? Happy SEO.

ARTHUR: Oh, happy SEOing.

MICHAEL: I was just playing off our intro where I threw the, I thought you'd pick up on it, but you know what? Happy SEOing.

ARTHUR: There we go. Bye. Bye.

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