SEO
10 Advanced SEO Skills To Level Up Your Career
![10 Advanced SEO Skills To Level Up Your Career 10 Advanced SEO Skills To Level Up Your Career](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1643393232_10-Advanced-SEO-Skills-To-Level-Up-Your-Career.png)
Many of us get to a stage in our careers as SEO professionals where we feel a little bit stagnant.
We’ve been optimizing sites for a while and feel pretty confident that we can do it well.. but there’s that nagging thought there’s more we could be doing.
That there is another layer of expertise that would make us more efficient, employable, and confident.
In this article, you’ll find 10 skills that can level up your SEO competency.
These aren’t necessarily essential skills for all SEO experts (you’ll find those here).
But developing these advanced SEO skills could help you go deeper within your specialism, become a more well-rounded marketer, and bump you into a new salary or freelance rate, too.
1. Intent Analysis
Intent analysis is the decoding of a user’s intention behind the keyword they enter into a search engine.
When someone types [pizza restaurant] into a search engine, what is the end result they are hoping for?
Do they want to know what pizza restaurants are nearby?
Are they in the market to open a pizza restaurant?
Are they looking for a job in a pizza restaurant?
Developing your understanding of the psychology behind what searchers want is a critical skill for those wishing to go further in their SEO competency.
This will help you both satisfy a user’s need when they land on a page and also increase your page’s likelihood of being ranked in their search.
It can’t just stop there, however.
You must also understand what the search engines perceive users to want from the content they are searching for.
For instance, from my location in the U.K., if I search for [pizza restaurants] in Google from my desktop device, I get a mixture of results.
I get the option to click through to search on other websites:
This is followed by the Map Pack and then a mix of review and editorial sites and restaurants’ websites.
If I am trying to rank a website all about the history of pizza restaurants in my country, I might struggle.
Google has identified the user intent as being either navigation – wanting to go to a local restaurant – or comparative, as in wanting to compare options in the local area.
Resources To Learn More
2. Coding
There is no question that understanding HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can help you to ensure your websites are set up in a bot-friendly manner.
Although SEO experts do not need to be fully-fledged developers, having an understanding of code can help you to identify issues with rendering, indexation, and crawlability.
There are times when knowing the basics of how code is created, or being able to read code that already exists, can help your SEO.
It can aid your communication with the developers who may need to change it.
It can assist you in pinpointing incremental improvements to your site’s performance.
Learning to code is not a prerequisite for SEO, but it is arguable that knowing the fundamentals of these three commonly used languages is going to set you up well for your career.
Understanding the syntax of code, how it is formed, and being able to see how elements relate to each other can also help you get better at writing and debugging schema.
Learning Python and SQL can also help you to streamline your SEO processes by enabling you to automate labor-intensive activities such as mapping URL redirects and keyword research.
Resources To Learn More
3. Understanding Server Management
No SEO professional should really be the one responsible for ensuring that a server can handle a load of visitors to a site.
However, understanding the basics of how servers can impact the crawlability, load speed and reliability of a website can propel your technical SEO understanding forwards.
The use of CDNs instead of static servers can aid in speeding up content loading, but without understanding the limitations of fixed location servers it will be difficult for you to argue the need for a CDN.
A better understanding of how web hosting can affect a user’s experience of your site and also Google’s ability to access it is necessary for strong technical SEO foundations.
You need to understand how aspects like uptime and location can impact your site’s performance in the search engines.
This is only the beginning of how knowledge of servers can aid your SEO efforts.
Better knowledge of server codes beyond the standard 404 and 301 can help you to communicate to those in charge of your servers where there are critical issues.
Know what a 502 error is?
Encountered a 504 status code before?
If not, this might be a quick and easy area for you to brush up your knowledge.
A 5XX status usually means there is something wrong with the server that is preventing the processing of a request from the client.
A simple way to find out what status codes mean is to look at httpstatuses.com.
From here, you can identify whether it is an issue with the client or the server and find a fix accordingly.
Resources To Learn More
4. Content Writing
Understanding the process of content writing is an important element of advanced SEO.
You may not be a great wordsmith yourself.
However, in order for you to better brief in copywriting for your colleagues who are, you need to understand what goes into a good piece of writing.
It isn’t enough to know that copy needs to be compelling and have sufficient relevancy to search terms used to discover it.
Get familiar with the process your copywriters go through in researching, writing, and editing their work.
This will help you to better ideate your own requests for copy.
Editing
Editing is another good skill to develop when working with content.
In many organizations, it is the job of the SEO specialist to take content created by others and optimize it further for the search engines.
In practice, this sadly can often result in well-written copy being butchered.
Adding keywords into the first couple of paragraphs to make them more keyword-rich might help you a bit with your rankings, but it could destroy your conversion and brand loyalty.
Learn how to take well-written copy and enhance it, not ruin it.
You may also benefit from having a conversation or two with your SEO copywriters and asking them for details of their process.
Better understanding how they go about copywriting could improve your abilities.
It could also streamline your processes when working together.
Resources To Learn More
5. Reporting
Being able to expertly communicate your progress, results, and reasoning behind your SEO work is crucial to being successful in the industry.
As an SEO expert, you are always juggling the needs and expectations of stakeholders, whether you’re working in-house, agency-side or freelance.
You will find gaining buy-in and budgets considerably easier if you know how to demonstrate the impact of the work you do.
Reporting isn’t just a case of adding labels to a graph or even noting down the cause of increases and decreases.
Truly good SEO reports allow readers to understand the context of the results, draw conclusions and make business decisions from them.
SEO professionals need to get really good at helping stakeholders understand the priorities and limitations of the work they recommend (as well as mistakes to avoid when reporting).
They also need to help their interested parties recognize how the work will benefit them via data visualizations and their objectives in the long run.
All of this can be achieved through well-constructed, clear, and truthful reports.
Resources To Learn More
6. SEO Forecasting
Similar to the need to be good at explaining past results, experienced SEOs need to develop the ability to calculate likely outcomes.
SEO forecasting is a complicated science.
There are a lot of external factors that are hard to isolate and predict.
A change in competition, the market, or political situations could all cause well-thought-out estimations to go awry.
We should not be putting pressure on ourselves to accurately predict the exact volume of traffic, or visibility, our work might gain.
However, being able to put reasonable estimates and likely ranges into our recommendations can make the budget-holders a lot more reassured by the work we are proposing.
It isn’t enough to shrug our shoulders and cross our fingers when asked about outcomes.
We’re often requesting a lot of time, money and resources go into the activity were recommending.
SEO forecasting is a skill that will not only set you apart when looking for new roles or opportunities, it will also significantly improve the quality and reliability of your work.
Resources To Learn More
7. Log File Analysis
Log file analysis is the process of understanding the records of who or what has accessed your website.
They can tell you when people have visited a page as well as what device they were using to do so.
They can also tell you when bots access your website.
This is particularly helpful in understanding Googlebot and other search engine crawlers’ behavior on your site.
By analyzing log files you can better understand what pages search engine bots can or can’t access.
You can identify where there may be spider traps on your site or the frequency at which certain sections of your site are being crawled.
Log files can appear daunting if you have not spent much time around them.
Thankfully there are some great tools available that make analyzing them a lot simpler than just wading through the naked log files.
Understanding what to do with the information once you have it is the real skill. If you know that a certain area of your site is rarely crawled by Google that should inform your technical SEO next steps.
It should raise questions about your internal linking structure.
Getting familiar with log files is a great first step but to improve your skills make sure you are analyzing the files and drawing actionable conclusions from them.
Resources To Learn More
8. Website Migrations
Getting good at planning and executing website migrations is not easy. It really does take experience.
Many SEO professionals who have worked exclusively brand-side may find they simply have not had the opportunity to carry out that many website migrations.
If you face a particularly complicated one, such as multiple websites merging, it can be very daunting.
Chances are if you have spent any length of time in an SEO agency, you will have migrated a website or two.
It may have been a smooth process but more likely there were unforeseen complications that made the processing time and resource consuming.
There are not really just one or two skills involved in website migrations.
They are usually a complicated mix of stakeholder management, communication, planning, processes-driving, technical understanding, and knowing when to say no.
But the skills you develop during website migrations will help you enormously with the rest of your SEO career.
Participate in one if you get the chance.
It can give you a great (albeit high-pressured) opportunity to see multiple moving SEO parts in play at once.
Resources to learn more:
9. Optimizing For Other Search Engines
If you truly want to advance your SEO skills, you might want to look further afield than Google.
We can often fall into the trap of thinking only about the traditional search engines when discussing SEO skills.
If we limit our training and experience to just these then we could be missing out on a much larger opportunity.
Traditional International Websites
Many search engines work on similar principles, but with their own specific nuances.
Traditional search engines more prevalent outside of your home region may be unfamiliar to you.
There are some great resources available to get you started in understanding the differences between them and the search engines you’re more familiar with optimizing for.
Nothing beats practice, however.
If you want to refine your knowledge and understanding of unfamiliar search engines then you need to try to rank a site in them and see what works and what doesn’t.
YouTube
For search engines like YouTube, the mechanics may be more familiar to you.
You will, however, still need to learn more about the algorithms in play to ensure you are carrying out the right activity to optimize your video content for the platform.
Other Non-traditional Search Engines
Don’t just stop at YouTube if you’re really wanting to advance your SEO skill set.
Take a look at some other search engines, like Pinterest and TripAdvisor.
These sites may not fit into your current remit as an SEO expert.
They are however still search engines that you can influence the success of your content in.
Resources to learn more:
10. International SEO
One of the most complicated projects an SEO might be involved in usually includes international elements.
It’s a complicated task because there are a lot of factors at play.
To optimize your website for international audiences you will need to employ technical SEO, digital PR, and on-page optimization skills.
There will be a range of questions you’ll need to ask yourself when you are considering expanding a website to international audiences.
These will include questions around the structure of the site – separate sites, sub-folders, or sub-directories?
Do you want to translate or localize the content? Do you want to target geography at the site or page level?
There are a lot of strategies and technical knowledge required to get international SEO right.
You may also need specific language skills or local knowledge resources.
Google has helpfully created an introduction to managing a multi-region website. It is a good place to start to identify the sorts of questions you should be asking.
You can also use it as a jumping-off point for further training or research.
This can help deepen your knowledge of the subject and sharpen your skills.
Resources to learn more:
Conclusion
These are just a few of the skills you can develop to become a more pragmatic SEO professional.
Even if you don’t want to learn all of them, it helps to have an understanding of what they all are.
Even more so, how they can help round out your skill-set as an SEO expert.
More resources:
Featured Image: Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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