7 Steps to be an SEO Expert in 2025

If you want to make serious money as an SEO expert by helping businesses reach their target audience fast, this blog is for you.

Since over 1 billion websites worldwide want to appear at the top of search engine results, the demand for SEO experts is at an all-time high.

Your role as an SEO expert is to understand the tips and tricks to get more traffic to the website to attain a high ranking in the search engines by optimizing it.

For that, you must have technical knowledge. You should understand how different search engine algorithms work and do keyword research and link building.

An SEO professional must have an analytical mind that can find answers to questions such as what happened, why it happened, and what should be done to address the issue.

Apart from critical thinking, an SEO expert should be able to guide internal teams through his speaking and writing skills. For that, you need to attend meetings and create case studies.

Here are 7 steps to follow if you want to be a successful SEO expert.

1. Basics of SEO

As an SEO specialist, you need to understand the basics of search engine optimization. You must have a good understanding of vital ranking factors and how search engines work.

You must understand that search engines have search engine spiders that crawl different pages and find relevant pages online. These pages are added to the search engine’s index.

In other words, when you search Google, you do not get live results; rather, Google picks relevant pages from its index and shows you the results. This is why you get the results within milliseconds.

Once you have a grip on the basics, you can move on to advanced topics like link building and Google analytics.

Google alone uses more than 200 ranking factors in its algorithm, but don’t be scared; you don’t need to gain mastery over all of them. Just keep in mind the following three factors:

Authority

This relates to how much a search engine trusts the website’s content.

Relevancy

This is about how well a website matches a user’s search.

Quality

It involves factors like the site’s structure, content, reputation, and, above all, how the audience interacts with your website.

2. Have Basic Technical Knowledge

To be an SEO specialist, you need not be a coding ninja, but you should know the basics of HTML. The reason is that Google scans your page through code, and if you do not understand basic code, your page will not be optimized. Programming knowledge enables you to solve technical SEO problems.

Your technical knowledge plays a critical role in ranking a website in the SERP (search engine results page). This knowledge includes site speed, JavaScript, mobile friendliness, and structured data.

3. Pick the right keywords

Finding the most relevant keyword by doing keyword research is a must-have skill for an SEO expert. If you select the right keywords, your site can quickly reach search engine results.

On the other hand, if you choose the wrong keywords, your site may lose its presence on the search engine results.

4. Know about SEO tools

In addition to proper keyword research, you have to work hard and do a lot of planning to apply the multilayered approach to optimize and curate your content across other platforms, social media platforms, and various search engines.

For this, different tools can help you conduct research, find what’s working or not, and create content. To make the most out of the SEO tools, you should have a clear idea about page indexing, on-page and off-page SEO, and snippets.

Some important SEO tools include Google Analytics, Semrush, Alexa, Ubersuggest, Serpsta, Keyword Planner, and Keywords Everywhere.

5. Create your own website

Creating your website and getting hands-on experience can help you a lot in becoming an SEO expert. With your website, you can make changes and apply new learning.

Since you will have your website, you must work on it proactively so that it becomes unique. For that, you can write engaging posts, interact with others, and write articles for other websites.

This approach of writing guest blogs will not only make you a thought leader, but it will also help you gain backlinks and more traffic,  which is the main factor in ranking your website.

6. Content Marketing

Without creating engaging and informative content, it is nearly impossible to rank in 2022. However, not only do you have to curate content, but you also have to optimize it. Things are changing fast; on-page SEO has become sophisticated in 2022.

Just including suitable keywords in the content is not enough; you should also know when, where, and how to use keywords, interlinking, backlinking and optimising the meta title and meta description.

7. Create a portfolio and display your SEO projects

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Once you gain mastery over SEO skills and completely different projects by offering your services — free or paid — it is time to create a portfolio and post your done projects on it as proof that you are skilled.

Your portfolio can help you a lot in getting jobs or winning projects on freelancing platforms as a freelancer. Your projects must show that you know how SEO works and demonstrate different strategies and tricks you use in gaining results.

In your portfolio, highlight that you have a firm grasp of processes, planning, research, and analysis. Demonstrate your skills and SEO training and courses you have taken.

This will help the hiring manager or the client to go through what projects you have already completed and how well you have done them. Your portfolio should also contain the data including statistics that endorse your SEO skills and how you showed good results, growth, psge views, and visitors.

Conclusion

In short, the demand for SEO experts will remain high in this digital world for businesses, and companies are always looking to draw traffic to their websites. Since new digital marketing trends keep on coming, you need to keep updating your SEO knowledge and put it into practice. For that, you can attend workshops and seminars, join industry associations and build your network with other SEO specialists.