What Is A Search Engine Strategist?
What Is A Search Engine Strategist?
You probably clicked through expecting a lofty answer that attempts to fully encapsulate the entire field of Search Engine marketing into an easily digestible snippet. Sorry. That isn’t how I operate, and the answer wouldn’t make sense anyway. The true answer is much more simple than that. Are you ready?
A search engine strategist is anyone that applies strategy to their efforts to market through search engines.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, “thanks for that revelation genius…”, but take a second and really think about the concept. Do you have to be an accomplished chef to cook a meal? Do you have to be a certified mechanic to change a tire? In the same regard, you don’t have to be a digital marketing expert with years of experience to employ search engine strategies.
You could log in to your Shopify store today and update metadata on untended pages. You could log in to your WordPress site right now and improve content in your previously published articles. Every person at every skill level has a plethora of SEM improving options available to them.
If you are skilled enough to navigate to this article on the internet and read it, you are skilled enough to implement at least some search engine marketing strategy. All you need to do to get started is find an aspect of your search engine marketing you can work on!
As an example to highlight the fact that anyone can implement search engine strategy, let’s envision the creator of a new Shopify store that is just beginning their SEM journey and has yet to discover concepts such as SEO, landing pages, or content marketing.
Our Shopify store owner’s friend lets him know that he tried to check out his store on mobile, but he gave up because it took too long for pages to load. No reason to panic. The store owner can work on fixing the issue without any coding or technical proficiency.
It is possible the owner used high quality uncompressed images where smaller file size images would suffice. A simple resizing in Photoshop or a similar program to match the image resolution to the size the image is being displayed at online and a quick Google search for help compressing images can solve that issue.
Maybe the owner set up a number of click to install Shopify apps like language translators, shipping calculators, or currency converters when setting up the site that are contributing to slow page load times. The store owner can simply log in to Shopify, navigate to the apps section, and uninstall the offending apps.
These are just a few simple illustrations of optimizations that an be achieved by the average person. There are a plethora of other options available to improve SEM if you are a novice such as:
- Adding a blog to your website
- Adding rich media to your website
- Improving the quality of written website content
- Adding headers to your website pages
- Adding reviews to your website
And as you progress on your SEM journey you will learn new concepts you can utilize when formulating your strategy. You can begin implementing alt attributes and optimizing meta data on your web pages, you can craft landing pages tailored to high quality audiences, and you can set up paid search campaigns with targeted keywords and copy that converts.
If some or all of those next steps don’t make sense to you now, that’s OK. They will eventually. You don’t have to understand everything at the beginning. Remember, you don’t have to be a Michelin star chef to make a meal. You just need to have the desire to cook and the ability to follow simple recipe instructions.
So don’t give up on search engine marketing after realizing you need to implement strategy. Don’t quit when you start researching the topic and are overloaded with the shear amount of information and the fact that credible sources can provide conflicting instruction. Don’t back out when you log in to Google AdWords or WordPress and realize that initially utilizing the systems is more difficult than reading guides and watching walkthroughs may have implied.
As long as you apply strategy to your search engine marketing, you are a search engine strategist.