10 Things I Learned From 20 Years of Working in the SEO Industry

A seasoned SEO professional shares 20 of the most important lessons she has learned from two decades of experience in the industry.

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Being an SEO professional has its challenges and its rewards.

After working in the SEO industry for more than 20 years, I have come to learn a lot about myself and the peculiarities that come with optimizing websites.

I started my career in 2000 optimizing my pet supply website for search engines Excite and Lycos.

I learned from Microsoft’s bCentral for Business helpful tips and search engine submission.

My career took a turn when I jumped from the pet industry to the SEO industry working for an agency.

Since then I have managed SEO as a consultant and in-house for startups, medium, and enterprise organizations.

I now manage SEO for one of the largest and well-known companies in the technology world and throughout my years, I have come to learn a lot.

Now that I have reached my 20-year mark, I felt it was perfect timing to share the 20 most important lessons I have learned working in SEO as the landscape of search engine optimization has drastically made twists and turns.

With that has come lessons from 20 years of working on many different types of websites and organizations.

1. Things Change

In the early years of SEO, optimizing a website was less of a challenge than what SEO professionals face today.

You could pick a few keywords to work into a website’s content, in the title, description, and keyword meta tag.

They would submit the website to search engines and various directories to find the site would drive traffic and business would pick up.

There were no keyword tools or analytics, but there also wasn’t much competition.

Now there are more complex algorithms that filter out spam and black hat SEO tactics.

There is personalization, localization, machine learning, neural matching, RankBrain, and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

We have insights into keyword data, complex data-driven environments, analytics, and data science that drive the strategies we choose to make for optimization.

SEO has become a complex and more challenging world that is ever evolving.

2. SEO Was Dominated by Men – Not Anymore

Being a woman in SEO, I have taken notice of my surroundings and the people that I have come to know in this industry.

In the early years, search publications, agencies, conferences and reputable blogs were dominated by our male counterparts.

There have been many speculations as to why that is, but the number of women who are in SEO – and those who are being recognized for their work – is changing.

I have seen more women applying and interviewing for roles I have had open.

There are more women speaking at conferences than in the past.

There is even a Women in Tech SEO organization started by Areej AbuAli, who is transforming the way SEO pros look at women in our industry.

The women in SEO today all have the early adopters of SEO that include Rhea Drysdale, Dana Lookadoo, Ann Smarty, Lisa Myers, Jackie Hole, Laura Lippay, Cindy Krum, and my personal closest friend and mentor, the co-founder of SEOMoz.com, Gillian Muessig.

These ladies lead the industry and paved the way for the women that are now taking SEO by storm.

You can support women in SEO by giving them a follow on Twitter (check out my SEO Women list and Enterprise SEO Women list) and give them a seat at the table.

3. It’s More Than Just Knowing SEO

An SEO professional who delves outside of their roles and responsibilities will allow for creative approaches to solving problems.

SEO is about:

• Knowing the keywords a user is searching.
• Having an understanding of why they are searching it and what they are expecting to get out of the result.

Going beyond keywords in the content, URL structure, and structured data shows your users that your site is exactly what they are looking for.

Having an eye for design, a feeling for usability, marketing toward a target audience, and understanding the technology that makes a site run will aid in the overall success of SEO.

4. Tech Is Important

I can count on both hands the number of times I have been turned down for roles in SEO because I wasn’t technical enough.

While I may have started my career out as a developer and I tried to keep up with the latest technologies, I seemed to often come up short in my knowledge for some roles.

Ten years ago, I made it my goal to be the smartest in technical SEO that I possibly could and to know how to work on a large scale website – both backend and front-end – the same as the engineering team would.

That hard work has paid off in my career.

I can edit parts of the site just as any engineer would (which comes in handy when resourcing for SEO) and I am able to come up with creative solutions to extremely complex problems.

5. Relationships Are Important

To be successful at SEO, you need to know more than the best practices.

I often say that 90% of success in SEO is relying on the people you work with.

If you can’t convince engineers, content writers, designers, and even the stakeholders within an organization, then the effort optimization will be low and can lead to a lack of results.

If leadership within an organization doesn’t understand or believe in SEO, then the work that supports SEO won’t get prioritized and therefore could take months or could never get done.

If content writers don’t understand SEO then they won’t worry about the balance of keywords and synonyms.

If engineers are complacent about optimization then the site will have issues that drive the quality of the domain down.

I speak to this in more detail in my Search Engine Journal article Why Enterprise SEO Needs a Champion.

Getting buy-in from others and finding your champion within the organization will help get work for SEO completed and ultimately drive results for the business.

6. Argue without Arguing

Search engine optimization is often reliant on the SEO fighting for the work to get done.

While frustration is a daily occurrence in this industry, I have learned that arguing my case doesn’t get me anywhere, and certainly doesn’t get any work done for SEO.

Finding creative ways to express the importance of doing the work needed for SEO takes finesse and patience.

Letting numbers and small wins speak for themselves and presenting them in a clean precise manner will often get buy-in for you from the people that make decisions.

7. Understand Your Users

Taking the time to understand the people you are optimizing for will not only get you results, but also encourage users to complete the action that the business needs to drive revenue.

I will often tag my keywords with what the user is trying to understand when they search that term and guide the strategy around that intent.

A prime example is with an ecommerce website.

A search for a “tie” could mean anything from a men’s necktie or bowtie, a railroad tie or even a twist tie.

If a user is more specific with the keyword “necktie” then they could be searching for a tie to purchase or looking for ways on how to tie a necktie.

By taking the time to understand what the user’s intent is and creating the content that matches that user’s intent will ultimately help your SEO.

8. It’s a Nuance

There is a particular craft to getting SEO right.

It’s not a calculation, formula or exact strategy to follow that gets results every time.

It’s about:

• Understanding what users are searching for and matching that up with the website’s content.
• Understanding the competition and knowing what you need to do to obtain the position above them.
• Spending the time on what matters – adding structured data, writing title tags, and crafting descriptions that users will want to click, as well as URL hierarchy that matches the navigation so that search engines understand the topic flow of the site.

9. Telling a Story

SEO is about telling search engines the story you want them to know about your site.

If it’s an ecommerce website for shoes, then tell Google that you’re selling shoes and add content around:

• How to fit shoes.
• How to choose the right pair of shoes for a specific occasion.
• Maybe even what to look for in the quality of shoes.

When optimizing a site, I have learned to tell the complete story and present it in a way that search engines can digest it and fully understand what the site is about.

10. Agency Is Different from in-House

I have worked for an agency, as a consultant and in-house for startups and large organizations.

I have come to learn that working for an agency on client websites is completely different than in an organization and working on just one website.

With agency work, the focus is on keeping the client happy. I cover this in my article Partnering with an Enterprise SEO Agency: What You Need to Know.

A part of keeping the client involves getting results.

But if the client isn’t happy with the level of communication or the work you are doing, then they will choose to cancel the contract.

When working in-house as an SEO, the pressure is on driving revenue.

The shift in thinking changes to focus on SEO work that helps you report on revenue increase.

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