He does repairs for other SEOs (or whatever they broke).
park ranger, IT wonk, interpreter, airline ground crew, truck driver, receptionist, construction billing, tour guide… #SEOChat
Pam Parkland
A1. I started as a farm hand at a U-pick apple farm -> Bank Teller -> Hosting support rep -> support manager -> marketing dept manager -> Product manager ->SEo for
@RavenTools ->Agency SEO ->Freelance SEO ->Product manager->Freelance SEO ->Agency SEO ->SaaS founder
Jeremy Rivera – SEO Arcade
Movie theater staffer and assistant store manager at Target
Andrew Prince
Sales and customer handling experience is very useful. Mechanical engineering – to a degree, with respect to having to think more logically.
Peter Mindenhall
Cabinet making – eye for detail Cake decorating – blending the needs of customers and company Ag research – How to do research and project management Most things have transferable skills. Also, a varied background makes it easy to start conversations
Angie Nikoleychuk
I draw on experiences from outside SEO all the time including those from former roles pre any marketing involvement. And that’s the great thing about SEO – no-one has the same backstory – makes everyones input interesting!
Simon Cox
Every day and more so with GOOG’s advancement in application of AI to the ranking landscape. System-thinking information architecture is a key component to organizing and labeling datasets for context
Marianne Sweeny
Spent 1.5+ decades working for the Mouse. Learned a LOT of lessons about the business world, customer service, and how to undercut the person at the next desk. So, not all good lessons
Pam Portland
Pedagogy and content creation and therefore SEO are verrrrrrrrrrrrry connected (I also create SEO edu materials)
Mordy Oberstein
Communication skills have been critical in maybe all of my previous jobs. It’s also interesting to see how SEOs are all using HARO – that’s something that PR folks have been using for a longggg time.
Christina LeVasseur (Brodzky)
From the coffee shop experience: *Managing customer/client expectations *Always try to keep the standards at their best with my deliverables (e.g.I wasn’t serving my Latte if the milk foam wasn’t good enough & making customers wait instead to deliver the best i can)
Yagmur Simsek
I participate in online discussions such as this, follow thoughtful experts in the field, go to SEO and DM conferences and never trust implicitly what the search engines choose to reveal.
Marianne Sweeny
I tried some semrush training, but all their training is on how to use semrush, not on SEO. I moved on to some Coursera classes, which are more helpful.
Pam Portland
Initially as hosting support for realtor websites, I answered the “how do I rank better on Google” question with grade a Bullsheit our manager had printed out. I read Aron Wall’s SEO book (in 2007), and had hundreds of realtors TRY OUT my stupid ideas, till the sucked less.
Jeremy Rivera – SEO Arcade
As time went on, I just kept at the “have people try my stupid ideas until they don’t suck”, and definitely started my OWN stupid sites with stupid ideas until they didn’t suck as much. Did a couple conferences, and learned alot from Teaching an apprentice.
Sharing my honest reply here: In the early days of my SEO career, I used to pretend that I knew the answers if I had no idea. Then went back to research and learn them. This gave me the habit to research things immediately + I made amazing SEO friends too!
Yagmur Simsek
Reading blogs, videos on official channels, engaging in Twitter community chat, keeping an eye on forums.
Amal Ghosh
Meetups outside of work (living in Raleigh at the beginning of my SEO career helped), webinars, conferences, newsletters, SEO Twitter – all of it to improve knowledge. Ability – actually doing. Testing things out and learning on my own.
Andrew Prince
Working with best SEO experts in the industry.
Moshe Ma-yafit
➡️ Reading Google docs almost on a daily basis.
➡️ Constantly reminding myself I ‘don’t know’ SEO to keep learning.
➡️ Working on my soft skills to push and motivate others to take action
seobythesea.com/about-bill-slawski/… and https://research.google/research-areas/natural-language-processing/…
Marianne Sweeny
Aside from the various SE documentations around, https://ericward.com, https://seobythesea.com, https://blindfiveyearold.com
Peter Mindenhall
Man, Great questions! I know this is going to disappoint the industry sites, but frankly Twitter has been the most impactful. From SEO Chats to musings from my industry peers, I’ve learned a lot here and/or been directed to other sites for learning from here.
Keith Goode
Probably my own sites over the years – it’s where I can try stuff that i wouldn’t on a clients! That aside it has to be people sharing stuff on Twitter that sends me off down the deepest rabbit holes! But no one site where I learnt it all, one site to rule them all
Simon Cox
Through experimentation, Google documentation and Twitter. In the past, I’d ask niggling questions to my ex-colleagues who have expertise in specific areas where researching myself was inconclusive. Now, I field questions to fellow
@techseowomen members
Luce Rawlings
I’d say doubting yourself. I put myself back YEARS in going freelance and trying to spread my wings building my own SEO saas. You gotta get out there, make mistakes, own them and ITERATE. SEO is a black-box, you have to INPUT change to see OUTPUT of change.
Jeremy Rivera – SEO Arcade
Assume nothing. Question everything.
Don’t rely on DA.
or volumes.
Or ranking positions
Or the SERPS
Simon Cox
Not asking questions when you don’t understand something
Peter Mindenhall
Even if you’re doing SEO for gazillion years, never assume yiu know it all. Learning never ends
Moshe Ma-yafit
Don’t walk backwards towards the future. Much of what worked in the past is not working now because the search engines have changed how they decide who goes where. Look into language models, neural information retrieval and learning-to-rank.
Marianne Sweeny
Just because someone says something works, don’t just accept it as fact. Every site, audience, and strategy is different and has different needs.
And sometimes, the loudest voices are just straight up full of crap.
Angie Nikoleychuk
If you ask someone in the arena for SEO insight and they provide none, don’t ask again. Search, ask, discover elsewhere.
Pam Portland
When i have helped steer someone or something in the right direction and it all goes brilliantly for them. Right now I am quietly pleased with the work I did with
@MordyOberstein for Wix. That has literally helped millions.
Simon Cox
Bringing UX/SEO to the SMX Advanced 2014 Periodic Table session #seochat
Marianne Sweeny
My proudest moments are when I can give back through mentorship or free 1-hour consults with small businesses. I’m also proud of the recent article I put out on SEL on SEO and accessibility where I co-wrote it with new friends.
Christina LeVasseur (Brodzky)
Getting buy-in at a law firm to have the content writers spend almost a year rewriting or combining content rather than writing anything new. 6x traffic in a year (and lead bump) by focusing on the opps that already existed.
Andrew Prince
My proudest moments are those in which I find the root problem for indexation issues (for example) that seems obvious to me, but everyone else overlooks. It immediately results in a huge wave of new traffic and it legitimizes the need for SEOs in organizations.
Keith Goode
I love strategy board games, and analyzing problems. This leads to this. It’s apparently something I do really well in the “technical site audit” process, and I’ve learned that not everyone’s brain works like mine. And that’s okay!
Jeremy Rivera
A7 I like to think I have a knack for simplifying complex concepts. I also like to make deliverables visually appealing with good storytelling and interpreting data into actionable next steps. #SEOChat
Christina LeVasseur (Brodzky)
A7: Also, I’m going to say, based on the “Just give it a try and see what works” approach we all take to SEO, it’s a damn good thing none of us went into medicine. #SEOChat
Pam Portland
a7. Integrated approach, ranking landscape, technical SEO, content strategy (core content model), information architecture (harder than you think), and user experience (so much more than page download speed). #seochat
Marianne Sweeny
I’m insatiably curious when it comes to this stuff so I will spend however long it takes to find answers and understand what I’m looking at. I’ve grown very quickly in a short amount of time.
Alicia Marshall SEO
A7: Being an extroverted analyst. I can read numbers and then communicate what they mean and what we should do to relevant stakeholders. A big thank you to sports for developing these qualities. #SEOChat
Andrew Prince
#SEOChat A7: This will probably sound bad to some people, but I have an uncanny ability to not give a flying #$%&. Stress, emotions, panic all keep the mind from being able to generate the best results. Being able to emotionally disconnect from a problem is my super power.
Keith Goode
A7 Percentages. i have screwed up so much in my life that I’m due to be really good at something soon. SEO had better be it. #SEOChat
Simon Cox
A7. Despite not being a developer, the ability to communicate what I need, why and often how something needs to work in a way they (usually) understand (without annoying them), and subsequently learn from them too
Peter Mindenhall
I spent a few years as a web developer, so I can identify and fix code issues myself, lowering costs and speeding up the process. Most recently, we fixed a code/URL issue that stopped pagination pages from being crawled, which increased traffic to older blog posts by around 7%.
Ross Stevens
A7 – Understanding the user and what they do. It makes everything from ads to keyword research much easier to understand and get right. #seochat
Angie Nikoleychuk
A7. A track record of strong relationship building. I’ve established these lasting connections through being honest, transparent, caring (on a personal & professional level) and making time to educate clients. The client & I are united in our goal to achieve SEO success. #SEOChat
Luce Rawlings
I sincerely hope this overview was useful. If you missed last week’s #SEOchat, you could find it here.