445 | Continued SEO Education and Personal Value with Kristina Azarenko

Finding the Experience 

It’s important to know the industry and gain a good level of experience. For example, Google Search Console sends out alerts, which, if you don’t have the right amount of experience, could cause significant overreactions. Clients will freak out, and SEOs can sometimes find themselves freaking out. This is where experience and good communication skills come into play. You need to be able to take these alerts, communicate the important ones, and put them into a strategy that can be flexible. 

While shielding the client from these alerts may be appealing, part of the industry is trying to solicit business. Sometimes clients will come back to SEOs with these alerts without realizing that they’ve already been resolved. Part of the client’s responsibility is to want to be guided. There also needs to be a maturity to the company not to be led astray, like when you receive a scam call and know it’s a scam but still have a reaction. 

Strong Communication

Communication is a huge part of this. Just as John’s tweet points out: there is always a soft spot to be picked out of a report to make a client uneasy. It’s your job as the technical SEO to know the soft spots and recognize that there’s never going to be a fully fortified website because things are constantly changing, and Google is always changing what it’s looking at. 

The game shifts over time, so we must be aware of the shifting and need to arm the client with information that doesn’t create additional worry—the ability to explain the issues and outlay what’s important and what’s not comes with experience. Our role as technical SEOs is to discipline ourselves and communicate to our clients to show that we know what the priority is.        

Lack of Structure and Establishing Priorities 

You can establish priorities by continuously learning and gaining the practical experience you need to understand. You’ll know there’s always something new if you’re paying attention to the information, stories, and news. If you don’t know how to process all of the information with your strategies, it can be challenging. The SEO industry is noisy.  

The main reason it is so challenging is because of the lack of structure in knowledge. If you don’t structure all your knowledge and can’t talk through processes, you can easily fall victim to imposter syndrome. If you don’t have the structure of how things work, you don’t realize what you don’t know, and you also aren’t confident in what you do know. You begin to question your knowledge when you don’t have a structure set in your mind.    

Sense of Truth

In the SEO industry, we are challenged with so much information, even more subtopics and nuances, and so on. You must avail yourself to those who do the deep dives of analysis so you can know how to speak, how to process what’s going on, and give yourself the foundation to push back. You should have the ability to push back and challenge what is being said, which requires a level of confidence in your knowledge. There is a natural fear of not having all the right data, but you can learn to defend yourself and proactively share your data.  

Imagine a structure of knowledge as shelves. These shelves are being filled with books containing your understanding. At the same time, you can switch out certain books with other ones that contain new knowledge. This structure and confident mindset don’t mean you need to know everything, but it enables you to understand why something is not working. It’s a necessary discipline of continued learning. 

Prioritizing Your Education 

For an SEO new to the industry, it’s easy to lessen the priority of learning more. You could be working inside your organization or company, and keeping yourself regularly educated in the space can be marginalized. To counter this, always try to keep yourself educated to a certain point. You’ll go crazy if you try to stay on top of everything, and it’s so easy to have FOMO when you aren’t staying on top of it all. 

Whether you work for an agency or are part of an in-house marketing team, your job is to maximize efforts to benefit the client. You must know that the investment of time going into educating yourself is going to pay off. Getting specialized in talents and expanding your working experience will turn into better value for the client base. 

Education in the SEO industry is important because search engine rules change, search habits change, markets change, and competition changes. You need to be able to watch everything that’s happening and understand it. Client goals are important, and you need to meet those goals.    

Value Yourself

While you need to bring value to clients and the company you work for, you, more importantly, need to find the value within yourself. You need to keep the value of your knowledge and skills for yourself. Doing something for somebody doesn’t help in the long run; you need to have a personal interest. As an SEO, your value stays with you. 

When you start with the right mindset and can educate yourself, and have a continual learning process, discipline, and regimen, you must keep yourself fed in the SEO space. Your skills and knowledge are not your employer’s intellectual property; your learning and gaining experience will bring more to your career overall and in the future.  

The SEO Challenging Course 

Kristina Azarenko’s course trains people to arm themselves with the ability to discern small priorities from large ones. Technical SEO is the biggest part of the course, which helps people understand how things work. The course goes from the beginning, from the content to the intent, and gives the exact processes for each. It can be challenging to get over-the-shoulder training, so the SEO course is very hands-on.