What Does an SEO Specialist Do?

In today’s article, we’re going to learn about the hallowed role of SEO specialist—y’know, the person who handles your search engine optimization.

Already backing away from the computer? Relax—we’ll explain.

SEO, when done right, improves your website’s visibility to search engines. It makes your shop easier to find. When someone searches for “diesel repair near Mos Eisley,” you want your Mos Eisley-based diesel repair shop to be one of the first results. Why? Because 75% of people don’t go beyond the first page of Google. 

Oh, and the top five results on a page get almost 68% of all clicks.

My dudes, you want to be in those results.

The easier you are to find, the more potential customers you get, and…well…you can draw your own conclusions.

‍A BRIEF DISCUSSION OF SEARCH ENGINES

We’re not going to go too deep down the rabbit hole of search, but here’s what you should know about how it works:

1. Spiders crawl existing websites, searching for updated or new pages. These are not creepy-crawly spiders, by the way—they’re an unfortunate nickname for teeny little programs or bots.
2. Search engines index the sites. The engine determines what each website is about, then keeps that information in a database. Yes, folks, it does this for every website out there. 
3. Look sir, websites! A fleet manager searches for “diesel repair near Mos Eisley.” Google has already indexed your website and determined it’s authoritative and high-quality. And since you’re near Mos Eisley, it serves your shop website as a result to that fleet manager.

Okay. Got a good idea of search engines? Let’s move on to why good SEO makes you more palatable (and thus easier to serve up to eager visitors), and how an SEO specialist can make that happen.

WHAT DOES AN SEO SPECIALIST DO, ANYWAY?

A good SEO specialist will offer suitable sacrifices to the Gods of Google by way of volcano, ensuring the spiders find your site first.

OK, no, that’s not how it works at all. Your SEO specialist follows various protocols that make your website attractive to the spiders and therefore to search engines. These protocols (or standards, if you want) have coalesced into some expected duties:

• Keyword research: Yes, keywords are still important. The specialist will see what kind of search terms people are using and make sure they appear on your site.
• Content creation and optimization: No, your SEO specialist doesn’t have to be a writer, but it’s a role many of them end up sliding into. Even if you have a content writer to help you manage the verbiage, your specialist will make sure they’re using proper terms and that the copy is readable and easily digestible for the hungry search spiders.
• Technical website optimization: Is your website easy to read? Does it function on mobile and desktop? Does it function, period? Your SEO specialist makes sure everything is in good operating order.
• Analytics: The cool thing about the modern internet is that you can see how all your stuff is performing. 
• Coordinating with other teams: If you have more than one person handling your marketing work, your SEO specialist will need to work closely with them. They’re great at operating as a team. 
• Linkbuilding: Search engines get very excited when other websites link to yours, because it means your website is probably pretty tasty. That makes them more likely to recommend your site to people looking for what you’ve got cooking (honestly, there’s a lot of food references in this purported diesel blog). Some sites will link to you on their own, but your SEO specialist will always be looking for additional connections.

All of the above leads to that delicious thing we call brand visibility. 

We’ll be the first to admit that the internet can change—the rise in AI signals new things on the horizon. An SEO specialist will be watching out for new trends and be poised to get ahead of them.

With that said, well-executed SEO has an additional benefit: you’ll see long-term results, as good SEO does compound and lead organic traffic to you. It’s also cost-effective compared to other digital marketing efforts; paid advertising, for example, needs to be kept up (if you stop running ads, you stop getting the results the ads were delivering). A strong SEO foundation, on the other hand, will keep your website in the upper echelons of search results for a long time.

WHAT’S THE PAY LIKE?‍

So, what do you pay the person who makes sure search engines see your website as a tasty snack? Salary.com suggests an average of $55,091 per year, although that can go up or down depending on who’s doing the hiring and what levels of experience they’re looking at. Check out Indeed’s results—specialists are being offered roles that pay $70-$80K.

If the thought of adding that kind of significant chunk to your payroll made you queasy, you can relax. You don’t have to hire someone full-time. You may be able to work with a part-timer, or even a contractor who will knock out the bulk of the work within, say, a few months and then handle maintenance and updates as necessary.

It may still add up to a significant chunk of change, especially if you end up working with a whole bunch of contractors (or hiring several people).

OR JUST…Y’KNOW…HIRE DIESELMATIC‍

If you’ve followed the other articles in this series, you know we’re about to pitch ourselves. We won’t take up too much more of your time here; you already know all about the Dieselmatic difference, and how when you hire us, you’re getting a team that understands the heavy-duty industry and will be ready to go right out of the gate. And probably for way less than you’d spend on a highly experienced SEO specialist or (brace yourself) hiring a similar team of marketers for your own shop.

‍We get results, and we want to help your shop stand out in the wild world of the interwebs. Get in touch—we’ve got so much we can show you!