The lines between SEO professional and SEO blogger are becoming thinner – but not too thin
I love to look through Quora.com, a Q&A site mostly geared towards professionals and technology although I’ve read some pretty intense personal stories of battling cancer and other real-life triggers. The other day I came across a thread called, “What is the daily routine of an SEO professional like?”
Since Quora attracts legitimate professionals, including CEO and VP’s of businesses that I respect (Twitter, Facebook, DropBox, Wistia, Google, etc.) I generally have no hesitation in using it as a resource, just as I would something as established as The New York Times.
As a daily editor, my daily tasks in terms of SEO probably look similar to yours:
- Write editorial calendars for the week.
- Research keyword phrases that match the content/categories for that editorial calendar.
- Write daily blog posts, with headline and first few paragraphs optimized for one or two keywords.
- If I mentioned anyone in an article, I post the article on their Facebook page and and @ them on Twitter—letting them know they were featured, thus increasing retweets and likes, thus increasing rank on the individual article.
- Do the usual sharing on Twitter & FB business page.
- Look at analytics. If a page gets lots of traffic but has a high bounce rate, I might add contextual links to other articles within the text—a high bounce rate will eventually knock your rank down.
- Find ways to get inbound links to articles, which may include chatting in forums and answering questions while casually link-dropping when appropriate. Also asking bloggers to check out articles, free white papers, etc. to review and link to. This is only for our most special posts.
- Find opportunities to guest blog and create additional inbound links.
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But as an SEO professional, the “tasks” are a little more rigorous, a methodology that not every editor has time to make a part of their daily routine (but perhaps the marketing team does):
- Daily monitoring of traffic and conversions.
- While editors don’t necessarily watch the “funnel” closely, SEO experts certainly do.”Metrics I track on a daily basis – traffic & conversions. I’ll take a look at rankings too but high rankings don’t necessarily equate to traffic/conversions,” says Eric Siu, SEO Strategist at Break Media.
- Ankit Maheshwari, CEO and Co-Founder of Instamedia Network agrees, saying, “New trainees spend a lot of time in monitoring rankings on a daily basis. Seasoned professionals understand the importance of conversion and they focus less on day to day fluctuations in SERPs.”
- Determine priorities based on the timeline of your site.
- According to Ankit Maheshwari, CEO and Co-Founder of Instamedia Network, it depends on who you are and what step your client/site is in it’s own timeline. He cites these three goals, depending on the site:
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- New Sites – Do competitive analysis, keyword prioritization, trends etc
- Running Sites – Ensure new and fresh content is added continuously. Prepare linkable and viral content.
- Future Sites / Ideas – Spend time in various niche, explore potential in them, and unearth marketing strategies of competitors or market leaders.
- Reports, reports and more reports.
- Now considering that most SEO professionals have someone to answer to, there’s a whole lot of reporting going on. At Mequoda, we have our Google Visibility Report, which our clients and myself can tell you is quite the report. However, SEO pro’s have their own strategies and tactics, including a mysterious “Google Doc that grabs Webmaster Tools reports” cited by Internet marketer and author, Ian Lurie.
- Web development.
- Now here’s a task you’re not likely to see on your editor’s task list, (unless you’re a web designer turned blogger, like myself). “How an average workday will look depends largely upon whether you’re a one man show making your own websites, a consultant or an in-house SEO,” says Martin Hall. “If you’re a one man show, you might actually be building and maintaining websites in their entirety, writing both the code and the content etc., whereas if you’re an in-house SEO for a big company, you might focus almost exclusively on tasks such as keyword research, result monitoring and conversion optimization.”
- All the little things.
- “In any given day I might be called upon to pull a report, research an infographic, look over a blog post for SEO opportunities before it’s pushed live, tweak a page or two (or thousand), answer questions from our affiliates, draft contest rules, dream up a way to measure something, brainstorm link-building ideas, research topically appropriate blogs for a giveaway,write up basic SEO-friendly guidelines for the writers to follow, recommend sites to reach out to for guest blogs, ferret out the cause of an unexpected rise or drop in traffic, network on social media sites, figure out how to optimize X, mail a t-shirt to a giveaway winner… it never ends, it could be any number of things, all in the name of traffic and conversions,” says Rebecca Lehmann, SEO Analyst at BradsDeals.com.
- Webmaster Glenn Friesen concurs, saying, “I do have a daily routine, but it is quite dynamic, is calendared weeks in advance, and regularly includes unexpected, immediate tasks to add to my predicted schedule.”
So if you ever thought being a new-age editor tasked with SEO responsibilities was tough, just consider everything else you could be doing. Not that you’ve ever complained though, right?
