Every newbie and student must be aware of this. SEO, copywriting, and digital marketing are some of the most sought-after skills.

As per LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report: analytics reasoning, affiliate marketing, and video production were among the top 10 most in-demand hard skills. And SEO – well, it remained one of the top professional skills employers sought after.

Undoubtedly, SEO is one of the hottest, most alluring, and trending industries, and it´s a true opportunity for the creative guy and research buddy who adores continuously increasing his knowledge and keeping himself updated. Some SEO consultants like mine didn’t plan to commit their careers to SEO but started completely by accident.

So today, I’m going to share with you some tips and strategies that will support an awesome SEO career and add lots of value to growing your SEO career in the industry.

A Successful SEO Freelancing Journey Requires Consistency

We get to a remarkable discovery that had significant impacts and influences on many gurus who started their SEO freelancer or consulting business. You´ve probably heard about it or read about it many times before – it is the notion of consistency.

Every business is adapting to a digital transformation, and their owners want to strengthen their SEO, social media marketing, and branding efforts. Indeed, they want a digital marketing freelancer or consultant to drive the campaign in the right direction. 

As a freelance SEO, you simply need to show the right approach and skills on how to market your clients’ businesses.

Every profession demands the fullest commitment, passion, and heart to get success.

Right?

What’s more exciting about SEO is that it never gets boring, and there are always new things to test and more to discover.

At times, it can be a slow success in some client cases, taking months, if not years, to fluctuate (upwards) the traffic and rankings. Without passion and consistency, the freelancing journey can’t be that fun and game you thought it was.

Don’t be a freelancer who commits a misstep – neglects this critical aspect and starts to lose that passion pretty soon.

Skills are important, but passion will make you stand in front of competitors.

Read more: Freelancing for Beginners – The Ultimate Guide to Freelancing

Think of SEO Career Route

When pursuing a career in SEO, you need to keep in mind that there are different career options for you to choose from.

While you’re thinking of building a career in SEO, do you want to act like a freelancer? Do you want to join an SEO agency for industry experience? What’s your mindset? 

  • Working as a freelancer simply means you’re deciding to work for yourself from the luxury and comfort of your home. You’ve a complete choice of how you want to shape your career and what kind of clients you would want to work for.
  • Another option is to work at an SEO agency and gain live SEO experience under the guidance of an SEO project manager. You’ll likely be assisting your project manager in building and managing SEO projects, link building, analytics reporting, and various other tasks for their numerous clients.
  • The last option is – you can join in-house for an organization in the industry you are passionate about.

Gain Enough Knowledge and Live Experience

To refine your SEO knowledge and expertise, read wide.

If you are really interested to build your specialties in technical SEO, look for blog posts, white papers, and research about website UI/UX, architecture, navigation, measuring website speed, SEO checklist, and everything else related to that, including structured data mark-up.

MOZ, HubSpot, SEO by the Sea, and Search Engine Land are all great resources to learn all things SEO.

Luckily, there are tons of materials available everywhere on the net, and there are places you can take free training.

  • Google Search Central Blog is the place where you can read official Google core algorithm updates, upcoming news about the latest Google search features, and the best recommendations for SEO.
  • Search Engine Journal covers a wide range of news, insights, and guides for the SEOs and search marketers related to SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media marketing.
  • Backlinko – Brian Dean is the guy, and Backlinko is the blog to look for next-level SEO training and link-building strategies for beginners, marketers, and business owners.
  • Yoast SEO Blog – Yoast SEO experts share the useful and actionable insights you need to know about WordPress and technical SEO.
  • The SEMrush blog covers a bunch of topics related to keyword analysis, On-Page SEO, content marketing, and content audit.

What you should avoid doing is becoming a textbook case. Don’t just read. Practice what you read and learn from your mistakes or success. 

Apart from Technical SEO, learn:

  • HTML and CSS
  • Copywriting and blogging skills
  • Design skills (at least, you should be PRO with design applications like Canva or Visme)
  • Hands-on knowledge of Search Algorithms
  • Must be PRO with using SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Majestic SEO.
  • Data analysis
  • Google penalties and recovery
  • Keyword research
  • Advanced methods of link building, and
  • Reporting segment.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to acquire knowledge:

  1. The first one is by paying how to learn it, by investing time and money in courses, training, programs, book, and systems. 
  2. The second one is to learn everything by yourself through research, but I doubt that you´ll be able to figure out everything by yourself.

The latter option will cost you multiple times more time than the former one, more nerves, and more headaches, and I don´t think you´ll be able to learn everything through free content on the web.

Be Goal Focused

Always have a plan for performing SEO, and do not fall into the rut of having a common strategy for everything. You will need to plan according to what works best for a particular website. At the same time, do not divulge all your secrets to your potential employers, even if they really end up hiring you. Some tricks should not be let out into the open if you want to keep your significance.

While many business owners and brands would be willing to hire you to handle their SEO, many are still lacking knowledge of how SEO and search engines work. They don’t know about the priorities, and they just want results. Being able to prove ROI to companies or your clients is essential to an ongoing business relationship.

Therefore, your SEO strategy should cover visibility, traffic, and ROI as the essential goals of the campaign.

Include critical SEO KPIs into your SEO reports and help your manager/Client understand their impact on the overall growth and success of marketing. It can be difficult to make them understand the data, but using Google Analytics and Data Studio would allow you to visually represent the data so that they can monitor it easily.

Timely Execution

The website’s complexity of what’s doable should not degrade the focus of an SEO marketing program. A big part of an SEO consultant’s job is to analyze crawling and SEO issues, research competitors, extract insights, and present recommendations in a way that balances options with priorities. 

Prioritization is the key factor in the overall success of any marketing campaign. The development team should take this as a positive note that SEO recommendations can have the most consequence (short and long term), and of course, are good guidelines to go by.

Keep Working on Your Strength

Even though it looks like there is a single discipline, there are tons of areas you can specialize if you are in the industry.

For example, let’s say you want to be a link builder, you may want to be an outreach specialist, or you may want to be a specialist in prospecting. 

Once you know what you love doing, spend more time getting better at it. This does not mean you should not spend time improving your weaknesses. Hardly have I seen an SEO who doesn’t know how to do almost all the moving parts of the SEO process, but as you grow and probably join a bigger team, your strength will set you apart.

Keep Testing and Experimenting with Your SEO Knowledge

So you think you know ins-and-outs of SEO? Let’s go ahead and put that knowledge to the test. 

SEO is no longer a traditional keyword-oriented model, and it takes so much to cover a full-blown SEO campaign as Google keeps altering its ranking algorithm.

If you have innovative approaches for SEO, you can do so by testing your ideas on a testing website before you execute them on your clients’ websites. SEO has always been about small experiments and taking the resulting data to better strategizes the next experiments.

Be your own first client. Run a blog and grow it using all the techniques you are learning.

Work on Your Personal Branding

Personal branding for freelancers is all about finding out who you are and crafting your career around the true you. It’s also about constantly improving your online reputation.

As I discussed above, run a blog or a portfolio website.

When applying to SEO jobs on Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer, it is a standard practice to add in your primary website if you have one, as well as include previous websites you have worked on or even current blogs and affiliates sites you might run at present.

Your experience is, of course, the key selling point so take your time over it. You want to clearly state your experience in each area of SEO in separate paragraphs. Be brief but include all relevant information such as “SEO campaign manager for two years.”

A portfolio is perhaps the single most important item to have in place when trying to apply for an SEO job. Your portfolio should show all your professional qualifications and all the sites you have done previous SEO work for, and the successes you have had. Given the nature of the SEO market, having this online is incredibly beneficial.

Your social media personal profiles should be a snapshot of your expertise. If you’re looking for the attention of top-notch SEO agencies and SAAS brands for new SEO collaboration and no one is contacting you, start editing your profile regularly until you’ve got success. 

Final Thoughts – How to Build a Career as an SEO Freelancer in 2024

SEO as a freelancing career is one of the skills that are not likely to evaporate anytime soon. As long as search engines exist and people use them to find information online, their job role will continue to exist. Provided you produce a good ROI, communicate effectively, and meet timely delivery, you’ll find more freedom, better work-life balance, and no more 9-to-5.

Now It’s Your Turn!

Hey, I hope you enjoyed reading this post about becoming an SEO freelancer.

Now I’d like to hear from you:

In your opinion, is an SEO career a good career choice?

Let me know in the comment section below right now.

Also, share this post with your friends, struggling freelancers, and SEO enthusiasts who are looking for some ways to build a career as an SEO freelancer in 2024.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. I’m always available to help young hustlers like you.

Keep hustling!