An SEO asked about how to learn SEO so they can improve in their career.
Their main question to John Mueller was – what is his advice? And where should someone begin learning if they want to pursue a career in SEO?
John explained that he doesn’t exactly have a perfect answer lined up.
But, what he likes about SEO is that there are many different angles and ways of doing things. There is seldom an exact way to do one thing that will lead to exactly the same result.
There are also a variety of interests when it comes to SEO topics. Some people might be interested in building things with JavaScript. Or, they might be more interested in learning how to craft great content.
They may be more interested in the finer technical aspects of the website, whatever it may be.
These are all important to SEO, John says. And it’s not a case where any single one of these topics are going away.
John also explains that you want to figure out exactly which one of these things you enjoy doing. Then, determine how to expand on it and do more of that.
He believes a great path to pursue, as well, is to participate in the Google Webmaster Help forums and assist other webmasters.
The great thing about these forums is that they tend to cover many different topics and types of scenarios, so you can get a breadth and depth of information that you wouldn’t get elsewhere.
This happens at approximately the 36:34 mark in the video.
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John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 36:34
And then I have, not a technical question, but a career question. What is your advice? For someone interested in pursuing a career in SEO? What should they focus on if they already started learning and are familiar with the basics? How to go from there to become great at SEO?
John (Answer) 36:48
I don’t know. I don’t get these kinds of questions often so I don’t have a perfect answer lined up. From my point of view, what I kind of like about SEO is that there’s so many different angles, where people can kind of dive in and understand a little bit more. And oftentimes, people have interests in, I don’t know, figuring out what to do with regards to content or figuring out trying to understand the audiences that are involved, trying to understand the technical details of a website, maybe even going into the direction of JavaScript and developing things. And all of these are, I think, really neat angles.
And they’re all important for SEO, it’s not that one of these is going to go away, and suddenly, you’ll be stuck. So my recommendation there would kind of be to figure out which of these angles you really enjoy doing, and try to figure out ways to do a little bit more of that. One of the things I’ve recommended in the past, which might also be appropriate here, is to take part in the different webmaster and SEO forums.
So Google has, I think, a help community as well. And there are definitely others out there as well. And the good part there with all of these forums is that you see a lot of different scenarios and you run into situations where you see, you can kind of like dive in and try to understand well, what is the problem here? And how could I solve this? And whether or not you actively take part in the forum and kind of post your suggestions there, at least the opportunity to look at individual situations where you see, well, there’s a problem here.
How can I try to figure this out myself? I think that is really valuable. And that’s really important in the long run, because a lot of times you will see the same kind of problem come back over and over again. And if you understand kind of the patterns there, it’s a lot easier for you to jump in and say, Well, this is the same pattern, as I’ve seen before. And that means I need to double check these three, or these five things first.
So those I think that’s that’s always really valuable to kind of see and practice a little bit more. But again, there’s so many different options and so many different directions that you could take, it’s hard to just say like you need to do this one thing to become better at SEO.