Growing as an SEO (3/4) – Training & Personal Development for SEOs

By Martijn Scheijbeler Published November 13, 2018
SEO

The previous two blog posts in this series talked about writing better job descriptions for SEO roles and levels and seniority for SEOs. In this blog post, I want to mostly talk about how to grow as an SEO: the fundamental part of this series, how do you get better, what do you grow in, but mostly what tools and resources do you have available.

“It’s not about resources, it’s about resourcefulness” – I’ll leave it up to you to Google who this quote is from. It’s not that hard, it’s a quote that hit me a few years ago. I felt I was stalling in a role and needed to move forward. There is so much that you can do yourself to advance your career and learn. That’s why I wanted to focus in this blog post on the things that I’ve used, and in most cases are still using to learn more about SEO.

I’ve tried to list as many different learning options as possible, in the end, everybody learns in a different way. It’s one of my favorite questions to ask in interviews what the best way is for people to learn. If they’re aware of what it is, it for sure adds a bonus point to the candidate.

Conferences & Meetups

While I was still living in Amsterdam, at some point I felt like that I didn’t miss any meetup related to online marketing in a while. I went to a ton of them, and they were great. There is so much to learn at an event: soft skills: networking, talking, socializing, small talk. All skills that are just as important (I’d argue even more important) than the on the job skills (crawling, technical, content, etc.).

Blogs

So let’s give you a selection of the blogs that I’ve been following over the years that helped me build my SEO knowledge. These are some of the ones on the list (read: it’s far from complete, I’ll keep updating the list with specific SEO blogs).

Mentors/Coffee/Twitter/Hero(ins)

Follow people, follow experts. You can learn so much from the approach from that other people are taking. Just to get a different insight or to learn a new tool. SEO is a rich field where everybody has their own tactics and I feel strongly that every week I pick up on some new tactics in SEO that I’ve never thought of (mostly around research or authority building). We can’t know everything but it’s a good tactic.

Talk to people, they can tell & learn you more. I’ve asked people at companies that I admire for years if I could have coffee with them. If you’re reading this and one of them, I thank you again!
Don’t ask for trade secrets, but if you do your research it will strengthen the conversation. So let’s expand a little bit on that …

Research

After I’ve just mentioned that having coffee is great to learn more, but make sure you come prepared. As we’re talking about SEO, run an audit. Ask them why they’ve done certain things this way. I’ve learned a great deal just analyzing and researching the best sites trying to figure out what their SEO strategies are after which I got that confirmed by their teams while having coffee with them. I’m not telling this to brag about it, but to give you an insight into what you can do to get more out of the meeting too. It will strengthen the conversation. You’re using somebody’s time and she or he will likely appreciate it if you know what they’re talking about in more detail.

Creating Playbooks / Keeping track

Recently I shared for the first time the idea behind building a playbook in a presentation that I gave at a conference. It’s something that I’ve actually been doing for a few years now. For about a five years now I’ve been saving job descriptions, not of jobs that I wanted to be hired for (at least mostly not). But Marketing roles that I thought I was going to hire one day or grow into. They’re a great archive (I have close to 200!) these days for whenever I need to fill a specific role.

But the same methodology applies to most parts of somebodies work, most content teams have a style guide, when you’re working in CRO you have templates to document and hypothesize your experiments. But I felt that most of these ‘standards’ were missing across functions within Marketing and specifically (in-house) SEO teams.

What’s missing?

What other tools are out there for others to use as well? What learning options have I missed and should I add to the post? Leave a comment here or on Twitter: @MartijnSch and I’ll make sure to keep this post updated, just like the others.

Growing as an SEO – This series

In this series I’ve also blogged about: