SEO
Over 67% of Domains Using Hreflang Have Issues (Study of 374,756 Domains)
We ran the largest hreflang study ever, nearly 10X larger than any other study. In total, we looked at issues on 374,756 different domains that used hreflang tags. Our findings show that 67% of them have at least one issue.
Let’s look at the most common issues you should actually care about.
Setting an x-default is not required. But it is recommended if you need a fallback page for users whose language settings don’t match any of your localized versions.
Hreflang works by the most specific match. Language+country is more specific than just language, which is more specific than x-default. X-default mostly serves as a backup or global default page, where you want to send people.
Self-referencing hreflang tags are included in the guidelines. But they’re really more like a best practice and not actually required.
In the old days of hreflang, before the systems and plugins handled it, having a missing self-referencing tag meant that when you copied the tags to other pages, at least one of the connections would be broken. This is less likely to happen on modern websites, so it’s not as big of an issue.
If you link to an incorrect URL, then the tags are broken and pages can’t swap properly in the search results. They work in pairs to form a cluster of pages. This is what an hreflang cluster looks like.
If the broken links are temporary while you’re still setting up pages, it’s OK to leave them. If these broken pages don’t exist and you don’t plan to have them, it doesn’t really hurt anything—but you may want to remove the references anyway.
Redirected pages included in hreflang tags are OK only if you have an auto-redirecting global version of the homepage.
There is an approved setup for homepages only that uses a 302 redirect for dynamic redirects based on location and language settings. I see people try to change this all the time, but it’s a documented setup that has been recommended and working on many sites for years.
In all other situations, a redirected page referenced in hreflang tags will mean that something is broken.
As I mentioned, hreflang tags work in pairs. If both pages don’t reference each other, they can’t establish the connection and swap properly in the search results.
This is especially important when you have multiple versions of a page in the same language. You may end up sending the user to a version of the page for the wrong country.
Hreflang is one of many canonicalization signals that Google uses to determine which version of a duplicate page it should index. In many cases I’ve looked at, the canonical tag was ignored in favor of the URL specified in hreflang.
However, this is just a signal like many others and can be ignored, so it may work differently.
Hreflang requires two-letter language codes (ISO 639-1) and two-letter country codes (ISO 3166-1).
Some of the common incorrect values are people using the country code instead of the language code, typos, trying to use region codes when they aren’t supported, or trying to use three-letter codes instead of two-letter ones.
Some people just use codes that are wrong as well. For example, they use things like “la” for Latin America, but that doesn’t work. Another common one is “uk” when they should use “gb.” But the funny thing here is that “uk” is a specially reserved code, and Google actually accepts this one!
This issue shows pages with different language codes declared in the HTML language attribute and hreflang annotation for the URL.
These are different systems, but both are used to say what language the page is in. If they don’t match, something is fishy and you should check which language the page is actually in.
For an hreflang language or language and country combination, you should only have one page specified for each unique value. If you specify “en” for a page and use “en” again but say it’s a different page, then Google is going to have to choose one or the other. They can’t both be the correct version.
While this sometimes happens in the code of the page, it’s often a mismatch between the code of the page and sitemaps. Ahrefs’ Site Audit looks at all the supported hreflang implementation locations, including the <head>, HTTP header, and sitemaps.
In this case, pages were referenced for more than one language in hreflang annotations. For example, you may see this issue if you reference the page in an hreflang tag that specifies the page is for English and another hreflang tag that says it’s for Spanish.
You shouldn’t have two languages on the same page, so check which one is correct and remove the other one.
Final thoughts
A huge thanks and shoutout to my colleague, Oleksiy Golvoko, for helping me gather this data! I’m surprised the numbers weren’t worse in the study, but I suspect that a lot of these sites have basic implementations.
Hreflang is complex and hard to get right. It can break in so many different ways. Here’s what Google’s John Mueller has to say about it.
Want to see if your site has hreflang issues? Run it through Site Audit or try it for free with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
Hreflang is a topic I’m passionate about and one that I’ve written and presented many times, so I was happy to write this up. One of the first blog posts I made edits to when I joined Ahrefs was our hreflang guide. I’d recommend that if you want to learn more about hreflang and some of the nuances of it.
If you have questions, message me on Twitter.
SEO
7 Content Automations Used by Real Content Pros
Content marketing can become complicated and effortful very quickly.
Content teams need to manage ideation, writing, editing, proofing, publishing, promotion, analytics, and reporting across a team of writers, reviewers, and dozens of articles each month. Smart content leads find ways to automate some of these processes to let them focus on what really matters.
So, to inspire you and show you not only what’s possible but also the kind of things that are really worth automating, we asked three experts to share their favorite workflows.
You can’t automate everything, but you can automate your entire content production workflow.
My interviewees use Airtable as a “central base of operations,” as Tommy Walker puts it. A base like that controls everything:
- Topic ideas with keywords and their SEO data.
- Briefs.
- Outlines.
- Articles.
- Tasks with their statuses and different ways to view them (calendar, kanban, etc.)
- Contributors and their roles.
- Notifications.
The general idea behind this is the use of triggers and actions. A complete set of a trigger and at least one action is often referred to as a Zap (coined by one of the automation tool providers Zapier).
All of our experts have this kind of central base, and I guess it’s hard to resist having one once you start automating things. So here’s one of those systems by Eric Doty:
Eric mentioned using Ahrefs as his source of keywords. If you’re going to do the same, here’s a quick tip for you — use automated keyword clustering right inside Ahrefs, so you won’t need to figure it out later on.
Tip
All you need to do is click the Cluster by Parent Topic tab in the Matching terms report in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. You can also export the list and use it in Airtable, Notion, or similar.
Returning to our central content base, it’s important to note that not everyone will need to visit it regularly. As Tommy pointed out, a content automation system can integrate with processes your teammates follow (and possibly even other automation).
For example, some stakeholders need real-time notifications about status changes, while others only require a weekly digest of content output. Automation handles this excellently.
You can also have people fill out forms that will feed into system. For instance, sales team could use a form like that to request new content without needing to enter your Airtable setup.
Caitlin showed me how she automates assigning tasks to three types of contributors based on the work progress: writers, subject matter expert reviewers, and editors. All this is to maintain the output of 20 – 30 published articles per month, without leaving Airtable.
Caitlin was very generous, so you’re about to see not only what this workflow does but also copy the conditional logic for Airtable and ready-made Zaps!
The whole process starts when Caitlin assigns the status of an article to “Writing”.
This triggers an Airtable automation that adds the brief to the writer’s Google Sheet. A Zap is then triggered by the new row in Google Sheets, which adds the assignment date and sends an email to the writer, notifying them of their new assignment.
Here’s what the setup of this part looks like in Airtable:
When the writer finishes their part, Caitlin gets an automated notification in Slack.
Next, the article goes to the expert for a review. This is crucial for Caitlin’s strategy because it enhances the content with unique expertise and real-life experience.
Thanks to automation, all Caitlin needs to do is change the status to “Reviewing”. This adds the article link, brief, and word count to the reviewer’s Google Sheet.
On top of that, this automation sends an email to the reviewer notifying them of the assignment. And here’s the cool part: the email will differ depending on whether article is a completely new one or a second review. Here’s how you can set this up in Zapier.
When the reviewer is finished, they check “Done” and select a field in a “Next steps” dropdown in their sheet to reflect whether the article is approved or needs changes made by the writer. Then Caitlin gets a message like this in Slack:
If the writer needs to make changes, there’s a special status for that, too. When Caitlin changes the status from “Reviewing” to “Writer is updating”, this automatically changes the status in the writer’s Google Sheet. And to make sure the writer won’t miss that status change, there’s an automated email notification, too.
Finally, we have the editing stage. Now Caitlin changes the status to “Editing,” which adds a row in the editor’s Google Sheet, just like it did for the writer and the expert.
When an article is done, the editor changes the status in their sheet, and adds any comments if they want to, Caitlin receives this message:
You can copy the exact Zaps Caitlin used here:
The more you publish, the more people in your organization, the more you’re going to need this type of automation.
First, Eric will show you how to set up Airtable so that whenever a new blog post is published, it triggers an email to the writer, a message on Slack, and a status change in Airtable.
Now, let’s say you’ve a big content inventory and want to help other teams access it for use in prospect calls or newsletters. You can use another of Caitlin’s workflows, which adds an AI-generated summary of all published articles to Airtable through a Zap.
If you’re like Eric (and me), you get content ideas in various, often random, situations, and it’s not always quick or easy to pull up your content dashboard to jot them down. Luckily, you can set up a Zap to handle that, too.
In this example, Eric explains how he created a nifty workflow to send content ideas noted in a Slack channel straight to Airtable.
- Eric notes down a keyword idea in a Slack channel with a predefined hashtag.
- A Slack bot confirms adding the keyword to Airtable, appended with a link to the Airtable base.
- Now that the keyword is in the keyword list, Eric can add SEO data when he’s ready.
If you’re creating briefs for other people or outlines for yourself using the same document format, time and again, I’m sure you’ll appreciate this workflow.
- The trigger has two conditions: the topic must reach the “brief needed” status and a brief must not have already been created.
- The action: a Google doc is created which acts as the template for the content brief. The document already includes some information from Airtable passed down through variables such as the keyword, topic, and format.
Here’s inspiration from Tommy Walker, sharing how you can automate podcast production by connecting a few different tools to Airtable.
Here are the steps:
- Tommy sends out an invitation to book a time slot for an episode via Calendly.
- When the guest books a time, this creates a new record in Airtable with status “Booked” and their details filled.
- This also triggers Google Drive to create a new folder and two subfolders within in (one of them is for the guest to upload their headshot).
- Uploading a headshot into the folder notifies the designer.
- Next, an Email goes out to book a precall with the guest.
- Now, Tommy can click the “Create page” button right inside Airtable which creates a page and a blog post in WordPress (how cool is that!).
- Once the broadcast is complete on YouTube, it goes into the RSS feed in Castmagic. This allows Tommy to use the tool to create a transcript and use an AI chatbot on it.
You know how there’s no notification when someone uploads a new file to Google Drive for you? You still need to manually notify that person about the file which feels very manual; it feels like doing the same thing twice.
Until Google fixes that, Eric will show you how to make a Zap to save you time and peace of mind. Use this when working with designers, writers, and your video team.
- Trigger: a contributor drops a file in a designated folder in Google Drive.
- Action: an email goes out to the Eric with the name of the contributor and the link to the file.
I’ve answered a handful of common questions for those just starting out with content automation.
What’s the difference between content automation and automated (AI) content?
It’s easy to confuse these two terms because they’re quite similar, and one is a subset of the other:
- Automated content is generated mainly by AI without human input.
- Content automation uses tools to streamline content creation, management, and distribution.
Thus, you can have content automation without automated content. Moreover, it’s advisable not to fully automate your content if you want to rank well on Google.
Is automating content good for SEO?
TLDR; if you want to fully automate content, as in not even look at it before publishing, it will most likely be bad for SEO, even though Google is not against AI content per se.
Various SEO experiments and case studies have proven one thing beyond doubt: gaming the system can bring only short-term gains. Google catches up to bad content and spam sooner or later, whether that’s automated content or not. And when this happens, your traffic charts will look like this:
You could disclose making content with AI, as Google suggests. But paradoxically, trying to adhere to the guidelines can compromise the user experience (especially for YMYL topics). Although consumers don’t seem to be against AI content in general (study), they are likely to be cautious about it (study).
Finally, the content automation experts I talked with don’t use AI for content generation. Given their experience, I wasn’t expecting a different answer. They might use AI for other things like generating outlines, finding content gaps (check out our AI Content Grader), or looking for relevant subtopics, but not for actual writing.
Is content automation for all team sizes?
Our experts agree: big, or small, every team can benefit from content automation.
It’s honestly for everyone. I use it for every level of content creation — from 10 articles/month to 100. At HealthMatch, we published between 150-200 articles per month, so I very quickly had to figure out how to use automation to make that scale possible. Sending an email to one or two writers a week with new assignments is doable. Sending emails to 20 writers is not.
Additionally, Tommy Walker has a unique take on this:
The value proposition for big companies is going to be different based on the size. For bigger companies, it’s more about automating information exchange so that it happens effectively and efficiently. For small companies, it’s more about time savings.
If you want to use AI for SEO effectively yet safely, we’ve got fourteen tried and tested ideas for you.
What are the common pitfalls of content automation?
According to our experts, you should watch out for two things.
The first pitfall is creating infinite loops. This is when a task runs over and over again until you max out your automation tool’s plan. If you’re using Zapier, here’s how to avoid it.
Another pitfall is automating everything just because it’s possible.
Follow Eric’s advice: automate tasks you’ve handled manually a few times. Avoid automating new processes immediately; first, do them manually to see if they’re worth automating. Otherwise, you might waste time on ineffective workflows or overwhelm yourself with too many automated tasks.
Final thoughts
I’d like to wrap this up with the number one content automation tip for beginners from each of our experts. They all seem to agree: smart small.
If you attack automation with a particular problem that you want to solve rather than trying to become a content automation expert, then you’ll learn by trial and error, you’ll learn much quicker, and you’ll solve problems for yourself rather than learning the abstract. So start small, and start with a manual process that you do all the time but would love to stop doing.
SEO
9 Surprising Takeaways From Analyzing HubSpot’s SEO Strategy
They have a special place in content marketing and SEO history. They were among the early champions of inbound and content marketing and living proof that SEO is a great marketing tactic. Just copying what they do for SEO would be enough for a complete SEO playbook, especially for SaaS.
I dug deep into Ahrefs data to share these nine surprising takeaways from their strategy.
We all know that the sun is big, but when you see one of those at-scale depictions of the solar system, you instantly realize that “big” is an understatement. The same is true of HubSpot’s blog.
I found no bigger corporate blog than HubSpot’s. If you know one, do let me know, and I’ll be more than happy to take this back: HubSpot’s blog is the biggest corporate blog ever regarding search traffic.
Their blog generates an estimated 8.2M organic visits per month, worth over $5.3M in ad money. Just a few months back, it was even larger — over 10M visits.
And since this is how HubSpot’s “solar system” looks…
We need to travel to another “system” to find bigger blogging stars. We need to look at blogs in general to the point where it’s unclear whether these are still blogs or news sites.
So, HubSpot’s blog isn’t as big as Mashable, and Health.com, but it’s bigger than Harvard Business Review, RollingStone, Coindesk, The Verge, and comparable to Wired. And these are all businesses of their own.
In case you’re wondering how big the blog is, it’s over 18K pages with 148 blog posts published in May 2024 alone.
You probably expect their best-performing posts to be about marketing or sales… and you’d be wrong.
“Shrug emoji” and “famous quotes” together account for almost 10% of all blog traffic, and there are many more topics like that.
Now, it’s common sense this is low-intent, unqualified traffic they won’t convert quickly, if ever. But it’s also common sense that the more traffic, the better. So which common sense wins?
Naturally, this is no accident that HubSpot fights for these loosely knit keywords. If you try to outrank them, they will fight you, because they’ve been fighting with Goodreads for “famous quotes” for years.
Ahrefs’ Page Inspect tool shows that they’ve been making some major changes to keep this page ranking.
Why bother with these topics? Because when you’re the size of HubSpot and you share their freemium model, you’re going to need “irrelevant” traffic more than small companies. We’re explaining this phenomenon in more detail in Why Big Companies Make Bad Content.
Good luck copying this stunt:
Why is this a big deal? Because it’s very, very rare to rank twice on the first page of Google with the same type of content (blog posts in this case). I wrote about this in Keyword Diversification: Cannibalization’s Good Twin (SEO Study).
Is this one of those “too big not to rank” situations? Why do we need to be told what HubSpot thinks product marketing is twice? When Ahrefs ranks two times on page one, we at least give you two different things: knowledge and a tool.
Maybe it means that there’s something broken with Google? If you ask me, that one SERP is a great topic for one of those panels where search engineers gather to talk about the quality of the ranking systems.
Sidenote.
HubSpot once discussed using an SEO strategy called surround sound, which involved being featured in multiple top rankings (through its own content and third-party content). What we just saw could be a consequence of that strategy.
HubSpot tried to rank for “crm” (183k monthly volume and 85 KD) with a typical product page https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm (green line). They never got to that #1 spot.
So, years after, they made a page in a more educational style https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm/what-is, catering to a purely information search intent and it worked (blue line).
All it took was explaining on that page the definition, who should use it, when, and a bit about how they developed it. What a great lesson about search intent.
Interestingly, it’s not a problem for Google that the page starts with a product pitch. Which is weird because the H1 refers to information but visually, everything leads to that sign-up button.
I guess it’s good enough for Google, since the page says “sign up or learn”; Google sees the entire text, the human eye, the picture and the buttons.
Actually, that dual purpose may even be an advantage — searchers don’t need to return to the SERP to search again, all their needs are served via that landing page.
Another interesting thing — they didn’t link from the crm directory to what-is-crm. Once you’re on the first page, you’re not supposed to find the latter one.
Every year HubSpot publishes an industry report about the state of marketing. For this, they poll their audience about hot marketing topics and partner up with other big brands like Wistia or Litmus. I’m sure you’ve seen it at least once.
Here’s why this is a backlink goldmine. Not only the landing page for this report gets tons of backlinks but also every other page they spin out of that report.
To illustrate, here are their most linked pages: their homepage, legal page, and the annual State of Marketing twice.
Combined, these two pages alone earned 88,892 backlinks from 21,496 domains, and there are a few more pages like that.
Part of the reason why those numbers are so high is that they keep the report under the same URL, so every year a new batch of backlinks come to basically the same page. And they get some high-profile links this way:
Backlinks are not the only benefit here. That report, its spin-off landing page, and articles heavily drawing from the content of the report, all get organic traffic.
For example, here’s the State of Marketing ranking only #10… but that’s ok because a spin-off ranks #3.
There are three things that are for sure now: death, taxes, and that HubSpot is going to publish the state of marketing report next year.
HubSpot has eight free, stand-alone tools that act as lead magnets. One of them clearly stands out in SEO terms: the Email Signature Template Generator.
“Email Signature Template Generator” — these four words make up nearly the entire content of the page.
But it’s enough for the page to rank for 5.9K keywords, bringing in 134K of free traffic from Google each month, and it even earned 22.7K backlinks.
This traffic is worth $172K in ad money that HubSpot doesn’t have to spend (instead they “only” spend an estimated $2.6K on search ads—more on that later).
Why do those few words work so well? It’s surely search intent. Most people looking for help with their email signatures simply want a tool for that, not a guide.
And here’s a tip for Ahrefs users. You can use the AI Identify intents feature in Keywords Explorer to see what kind of intent could get you the most traffic.
HubSpot has 5 big content hubs which you can see right away when you look for the most internal links to pages on the site:
But they’re nowhere to be found when you look for pages with the most organic search traffic. Which is a shame because their respective target keywords would bring tens of thousands monthly visits:
It’s proof that you shouldn’t expect content hubs (aka topic clusters) to rank at all times. And it’s kind of ironic that it comes from a brand identified with this content marketing tactic.
That said, these hubs are probably great for UX (and driving referral traffic), and could be helping other pages rank, as HubSpot’s article on the tactic suggests.
While browsing through the data, I found that Hubspot has an unusual number of lost pages.
I’ve cleaned the data a bit and found out that they are no stranger to pruning content. At least 84 pages have been redirected to other pages on the same or similar topics between April and June 2024.
Why? I think they do it to help some more promising pages rank. I’ve seen this on some other pages, and it worked.
For example, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-create-embed-codes-generator-infographic-content-ht, with all of its 102 backlinks from 75 domains, was redirected to https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-add-html-embed-codes-ht.
That last page actually ranks (unlike its donor).
Smart. Something you may want to try, too, if you have a large content inventory.
I’ve recently collected opinions of 100 markers, SEOs and business owners on the value of SEO, and most of them said this: SEO is money better spent compared to search ads. And many markets do SEO instead of search ads. But not HubSpot.
Despite the huge volume of free traffic, they still buy a portion of their traffic from Google. According to Ahrefs, they’re bidding on 2367 keywords, with CPC from $0.01 to $45.7.
These are the types of keywords they pay for:
- Keywords they already rank for like “free crm”. Probably to secure even more SERP real estate. Classic.
- Branded keywords like “hubspot pricing”. Possibly to stop competitors from eating their lunch. Classic.
- Other people’s branded keywords like “less annoying crm”. Just as competitors bid on their keywords, they bid on theirs. Classic, c’est la vie.
- Keywords hard to catch otherwise like “website maker free”. And this is the most interesting category.
So let’s take this page for example: 7 Best Free Website Builders to Check Out in 2024 [+Pros & Cons].
Initially, they created the page before offering a CMS. When they introduced the CMS later in 2022, they had find a way to drive more traffic to pages that mentioned that feature.
Unfortunately for them, as you can see on the organic traffic chart below, since they added that feature (arrows) the traffic has been quite volatile.
The volatility is caused by keyword rankings they keep gaining and losing. The more established website builder tools get them, probably because of their authority in that area.
Here’s an example: “website maker free” with 2.5K volume and 98 KD. Below you can find their ranking history.
And here you can see their ads position history chart, showing the point where HubSpot probably realized buying those keywords would be a better idea.
And it worked. Looks like they’re squeezing some traffic out of that keyword after all.
I think it’s a smart move. Some keywords are just too hard to catch. When your SEO tricks don’t work, but the keyword is still worth it, bidding on it becomes more reasonable than wasting time devising clever tactics to rank.
Final thoughts
A small bonus for Ahrefs users: if you want to earn a link from HubSpot, help them remove some of those 3080 broken external links. Head over to Site Explorer > Outgoing > Broken Links (and read our guide on broken link building).
Want to share an interesting finding about HubSpot SEO strategy? Have comments? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.
SEO
I Analyzed 52 SEO Specialist Job Listings. Here’s What They Do and How You Can Become One
SEO specialists are responsible for improving a website’s visibility in organic search results. But what exactly do they do? What skills and qualifications do they need? And how can you become one?
To find out, I looked through 52 SEO specialist job listings on Indeed and SEOJobs.
Sidenote.
I only focused on job descriptions that asked for “SEO specialist.” That means no “SEO content specialist,” “technical SEO specialist,” and the like. (Though job listings for Senior SEO specialists were included.)
The most common responsibilities I found are:
- Keyword research (90.4%)
- SEO performance monitoring and analysis (75%)
- On-page and content optimization (69.2%)
- Reporting (67.3%)
- Technical SEO (61.6%)
- Collaborating with other teams (61.5%)
- Staying up-to-date with SEO trends and Google updates (61.5%)
- Develop an SEO strategy (55.8%)
- Link building (53.9%)
Sidenote.
Given that it would have been impossible to check each listing for hundreds of potential responsibilities, I got ChatGPT to help. I gave it ten job posts from the list and asked it to identify the most common responsibilities. I then went through all 52 listings and checked how common each responsibility was.
It seems like SEO specialists are expected to do everything. Some listings even expect SEOs to run conversion optimization, and there were even listings where SEOs were in charge of PPC.
A lot to ask for, in my opinion, since there are people who actually specialize in each facet of SEO.
That being said, it could also be the case that most of these job listings are in-house. According to my colleague Despina, who has been an SEO specialist herself, it’s more common for an in-house SEO specialist to be an all-rounder since they’re often either the only person doing SEO or part of a very small team where versatility is rewarded.
Despina reminds us:
The way I see it, being an SEO specialist isn’t about what you do. It’s about the results you’re accountable for, i.e., growing organic visibility and, ideally, organic revenue. Today, you might plan technical, content, and link-building tasks to help you get there. Tomorrow, it might be brand building, UX, or even CRO tasks.
Here are the common skills I saw:
- Experience with SEO tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs (75%)
- Communication skills (61.5%)
- Knowledge of SEO best practices, SEO trends, and how Google works (57.7%)
- Analytical skills (48%)
Sidenote.
I also enlisted ChatGPT’s help to answer this question, using the same methodology as before.
Interesting note
Of those who asked for experience with SEO tools, 38% asked for experience with Ahrefs. So if you want to be prepared for the SEO specialist role, you’ll need to get familiar with our toolset.
There’s no better way to do this than to actually play with the tool, so I highly recommend signing up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account and, later on, one of our paid plans. If you want to dive even deeper into our toolset, I also recommend taking our free certification course.
Again, this corroborates Despina’s experience. Here’s what she said:
It’s a mix of soft and hard skills that most employers tend to look for in my experience. These soft skills are increasingly valuable: communication, initiative, the ability to learn and adapt quickly, time and project management, and the ability to handle and make sense of lots of data. For hard skills: ability to put a strategy together and the ability to recommend SEO actions.
One thing I found interesting was that there were two job listings that specifically requested experience with AI tools.
Although it was only a teeny tiny sample (for now), I see it as a sign. AI skills—specifically related to using AI for SEO—will become more important in the future.
Good news: You likely don’t need one since 61.5% of the job listings did not ask for a college degree.
For the rest, they typically ask for a bachelor’s in SEO (does that exist?), marketing, business, or something related. This jives with what Despina has seen, too.
Even so, I don’t think you have to disqualify yourself from a particular listing just because you don’t have a degree. After all, Despina has a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Sociology and Education. No doubt it’s a degree, but it’s as far as you can imagine from being related to SEO.
You’d be better off worrying about how to gain actual SEO experience.
What about SEO certifications? Disregard. They’re not important at all. Only three job listings asked for them.
Both agencies and companies hire SEO specialists.
However, according to our sample, there is currently more demand for in-house SEO specialists (63.5%) than at agencies (36.5%).
One reason might be that the term “SEO specialist” is used interchangeably with “SEO consultant” or “SEO expert” in the agency world, at least according to my colleague Chris Haines, who has ten years of SEO agency experience.
He also noted that agency roles are typically more hierarchical and have this common progression (in UK agencies):
As you can see, there’s no “SEO specialist” role in a standard agency career ladder.
The most common annual salary range we saw was $50,000 – $54,999. This was followed by $45,000 – $49,999 and then $40,000 – $44,999.
This is in line with Despina’s experience, who said a junior SEO specialist makes around AU$60,000 – $70,000 (~US$40,000 – $46,000). It also corresponds to our SEO salary survey, where the median salary was $49,211.
The one outlier number (>$100,000) was a senior in-house SEO specialist role at a tech company. They required a minimum of five years of SEO experience.
Among the job listings I looked at, barely any were entry-level. Most of them required at least a year or more of SEO experience.
This creates a catch-22: You need work to get experience, but you can’t get experience without work.
How, then, can you become an SEO specialist? I turned to Despina and Chris for answers.
1. Learn the basics of SEO
You don’t need to be an expert to get an internship (or even a job), but you do need to know a bit about SEO. So, kickstart your education by learning the basics of SEO.
There are so many free SEO courses these days, so you won’t even have to worry about your wallet. I recommend starting with our free SEO course for beginners, which covers everything you need to know, from keyword research to technical SEO. If you prefer reading, then you can read our free beginner’s guide to SEO.
That should give you a good grounding of the important SEO fundamentals and principles.
2. Build your own website
There’s no better way to gain immediate practical experience than by building your own website.
In the end, SEO is a practical skill. There’s no amount of reading and watching that will prepare you for reality than actually doing the thing.
Building a website and optimizing it for search will teach you how to navigate content management systems like WordPress, gain experience with SEO tools (you can always start with free ones), and practice each aspect of SEO. All important things you need to know in your future as an SEO specialist.
3. Get an internship at an SEO agency
Despite most job listings being for in-house positions, both Despina and Chris recommend that you get an internship at an agency.
Why? Three reasons:
- Agencies typically have a coaching process for interns. That’s a great way to be trained from scratch in everything SEO.
- Agencies allow you to be exposed to a variety of SEO experiences across different clients, whereas you’ll be more “specialized” in an in-house role.
- There is a chance you’ll be the only SEO person in an in-house role, especially if you’re working for a small business or startup. You’ll still have to figure out everything yourself without any mentor’s guidance. I had this experience myself in my first job—I joined a startup as a marketing intern, and I was the only marketer.
To find internship opportunities, go to LinkedIn or Indeed and search for “SEO intern” or “SEO graduate.”
You can set up alerts for these positions so you’ll be notified of new ones in your inbox.
Work hard, gain experience, and you may find yourself converted into a full-time role. Or use the work experience to apply for future jobs as an SEO specialist.
What happens next after you’ve successfully become an SEO specialist? It depends on your goals and how you see your career panning out.
Nevertheless, I asked Despina and Chris, and these are the common progressions most SEO specialists take:
Become an SEO lead
You can aim to get promoted within the agency or become an SEO lead/head of SEO in an organization with larger SEO teams.
In a sense, this is the most straightforward, as you’re simply climbing the SEO career ladder.
If this is the path you’re interested in, the good news is that Chris himself was an SEO lead in an SEO agency. He wrote an article sharing ten tips that advanced his career and helped him become an SEO lead. I highly recommend reading it to learn what made a difference in his career.
Become an SEO consultant
Being a consultant will likely earn you more money and give you more control over your time. But it’s not for everyone. As Despina says:
Consulting takes more entrepreneurial skills than working for someone else. You’ll need to sell yourself or focus on building your personal brand.
You’ll have to get used to putting yourself out there, selling, facing rejection, handling all sorts of administrative work (e.g., accounting, taxes, etc.), and more. If knowing this doesn’t faze you, then it could be a path you consider.
Read the guide below to learn how Nick LeRoy transitioned from an SEO employee to a full-time SEO consultant.
Start your own agency
If you have entrepreneurial ideals or dream of being your own boss, this could be a potential progression.
However, I’ll quote Despina again here:
This is not an immediate next step. You progress into this after consulting for a while, and you get so busy that you need to hire more people.
You also have to know that starting an agency likely means no longer doing SEO. Plenty of agency owners I’ve talked to spend most of their time managing people, handling admin, and selling. If your love is SEO and not running a business, then reconsider this path.
One final note: No matter how many inspiring stories you’ve read, know that being an entrepreneur is no easy task. Every story you’ve read is a victim of survivorship bias, and the world is littered with agencies that did not work out. However, if hearing this makes your passion burn brighter, then hey, this could be for you.
Final thoughts
Whether you’re an SEO specialist, SEO consultant, or run your own agency, three things are true:
- SEO changes fast — Stay updated with what’s happening with Google, its competitors, and the industry itself. Follow smart SEOs on X and LinkedIn, participate in SEO communities, and attend SEO conferences.
- Never stop learning — You can always improve your SEO skills or soft skills like managing a team, being an effective leader, and more.
- Always be networking — Humans are ultimately social creatures. We want to work with people whom we trust and can vouch for. Making friends in the industry can alert you to the latest SEO tactics, find valuable people to hire and partner with, commiserate when things aren’t going well, and celebrate when things are.
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