Despite the recession, I’m in a fortunate place where we still hire talented SEOs fairly regularly. No hiring freeze, no reduced demand for services, although sometimes the traffic we’re after is in decline.
And as I talk to those who would label themselves SEOs, I really have to disagree with their self-assessments. Here are a few things that I see as failure points in their claims:
- If you claim to be an SEO, you need to have a web site. Your own web site. maybe even 3 or 10. It can be a blog. It can be pictures of your dog. But no web site, and I will doubt you. Claiming to be an SEO and not having a personal site is just suspicious for me. (Exception: You work on sites outside of your work for other groups, like a non-profit.)
- You’d better have a Gmail account. Seriously. You’re an SEO without a Google account? What?! I may wear a tinfoil hat as far as Google services are concerned, but I do, in fact, have something like 5 Gmail or Gmail-powered e-mail accounts. (I’m using it as the back-end for e-mail on one of my domains.)
- You know what ‘Vince’ is. I’m willing to be flexible about knowledge of ‘Florida.’ But know the big recent stuff. Read. every dynamite SEO I know reads the industry news – at work, at home, on the bus via mobile device.
- You come in to tell me about your good ranking for a term like ‘plastic patio furniture.’ I don’t give a rip for rank. Did you make phat profit on traffic from the term? No? Then what’s the use? I have a site that ranks great for the term ‘boldly.’ Woo hee hoo. It’s a completely useless referral term. Rank is stank.
- You have never submitted a site to a directory or requested a link from another web site. Don’t tell me you’re an SEO if you’ve never done either of these. They’re basic. If you haven’t done them, I’m supposed to buy that you understand the nuances of domain strategy?
- You aren’t using FireFox. The things you can do quickly and without thought in FireFox are so significant that failure to do so tells me you overvalue manual processes. Efficiency:We likes it.
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Sure, recession = employer’s market. But even during the boomtime of ‘everyone needs SEOs! Everyone can be an SEO!’ much of the above could be seen as an engagement factor. Want to transition from dead trees to web marketing? Go build yourself a site and doink with it. Talk about how you did it, what you did, what you learned. That goes far with a lot of legit web marketers, because you know what? They didn’t teach me black-hat in business school. I learned it over double-shot mochas farting around with a domain I didn’t care if I blew up.