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though SEO knowledge areas may not be an object of awe they were, they are
still a very important element in the digital marketing mix. The frequent
updates to the search engine algorithms and the dynamic online marketing
environment make it imperative for SEO professionals to learn and master key
knowledge areas. Some vital knowledge areas that SEO practitioners should focus
on becoming proficient:
Audience
Research
Keyword research has come a long way from the time it was used to pick out words that matched user queries and led to increased traffic generation. Keyword research still exists but now it has to take into account, personas, the stage of the customer journey, and relevance to the context.
Being able to understand both the demographics and the psychographics of your target audience and knowing the sort of content they will appreciate is important because then you can come to grips on the entire process starting from customer engagement to making a sale.
According to https://www.searchenginejournal.com, the more you know and understand your audiences, the more powerful will be the impact of your marketing campaigns. Regardless of whether you have a single client or many clients, you need to be proficient in finding out the goals of the business and then work backward to comprehend the target audiences so that you know how to make users transit from the search query to the ultimate conversion.
Competitor
Research
Finding out what your competitors are doing is important throughout all the SEO phases says an SEO expert Adelaide. But only sticking to the best practices and focusing on your website, the SEO is unlikely to produce any worthwhile results. It is important to develop a skill in profiling the high-ranking websites who are capturing most of the audience that you are targeting.
The process of researching competitors ranges from manual external auditing or using tools to find out the factors that drive the rankings of the competitor websites. These analyses include both on-page and off-page factors of the sites of competitors as well as that of individual pages from topics and queries that are more granular.
Indexing
With search engine technology progressing very fast, indexing websites has become a lesser concern than it was in the past when the process was very slow. Due to this, it was not considered to be a ranking factor, however, even today it is vital for SEO practitioners to understand how indexing works and what is its impact can be on content discovery and page rankings.
Large sites, especially e-commerce platforms and others with a large volume of duplicate content need specific strategies that can work around being penalized by search engines.
International
SEO
Because the majority of businesses don’t have customers outside their home countries, most SEO pros don’t bother about the implication of international SEO.
However, if you to need optimization of websites with an international focus, you need to have command over issues like top-level domains, web hosting, Hreflang tags, and the use of different languages for the different versions of the search engines.
Local
Search
The
role of SEO practitioners can differ quite a lot regarding local search
optimization depending on the organizational structure. However, in general,
those responsible for implementing SEO should be familiar with the ecosystem of
local search, the various ranking factors, the importance of NAP data, and how
the process of listing, managing it even claiming businesses works.
On-Page
Factors
With the focus of SEO shifting to content quality, relevance, originality, authority and context, on-page factors have been relegated to the background from its once-preeminent status.
However, even now it is important to ensure that the tags are distinctive and present on every webpage and the content addresses the topics that page is supposed to even though there is no need to focus too much on the density or frequency of keywords.
Link
Building
It is the dream of every content manager to be able to develop original and authoritative contents that users’ delight in and which attract inbound links naturally from websites with good authority. However, in real life that does not happen as frequently as it is wished for, which is why those involved in SEO should be able to appreciate how links can impact page rankings and how to implement an effective link building strategy.
It is also important to understand the relative importance of quality and quantity of links and how optimization efforts can be hindered by either too much or too less focus on authority and links.
Conclusion
SEO knowledge areas keep on shifting depending on what the search engine algorithms are giving importance to. One quality that all SEO professionals will need in abundance is adaptability because both the industry and the environment continue to evolve very fast bringing into the fore new areas that require new skills and domain knowledge.
Even as SEO becomes increasing complex by the day, the existing SEO techniques will continue to play important roles so SEO practitioners will need to master more and more knowledge areas to stay on top of the curve.
