SEO Career? Nick LeRoy States “Start by ranking your name”
Aspiring professionals have an uphill battle joining the elite in the world of Search Engine Optimization. Ten years ago, the search results (SERPS) we’re pretty standard with ten blue links and the name of the game was optimizing your website for particular keywords through mainly on-page optimization tactics.
Fast forward to 2016 and your dealing with the knowledge graph, local results, various carousels, mobile specific SERPS and even personalized results. We won’t even begin to contrast ranking algorithms as the penguins and pandas of the search world have turned the ranking game on top of its head.
How Can Someone Start a SEO career?
In my short 7 year SEO career I've had the privilege of teaching many individuals the art of SEO. I’m a purist that believes in starting with a near perfect technical foundation before worrying about which keywords you rank for or how many checks you start to cash.
When working with new people to the industry I always ask them if they know what ranks for their name in Google? This is a great starting point in my experience assuming your name isn’t Michael Johnson or Jennifer Lopez. Not only do people have a relatively low competition keyword to target but they also get the benefits of getting a head start on owning their “brand”.
Why Your Name?
As previously stated, SEOs need to learn by doing. Setting them off to rank for “auto insurance quotes” or “I phone” is going to lead to failure. Being able to set up a small wordpress site, optimize it for a low competition keyword (such as their name) will allow them to understand what it takes to move a website up in the search results. One day you tweak the content on your site, the site might move up a position or two within a couple days. Follow that up with a better optimized title tag and you see the site continue to climb. What if you link some of your social accounts and a friend or two point a link to your newly built website — what impact does that have?
In the end, once again assuming you have a fairly unique name, you can own the SERP for your name. This is not only a good practice for brand reputation management but it can also show off some of your SEO knowledge and executables to people interested in hiring young SEOs within the field.
Where Should You Start?
Going back to the example of my interns and young SEO analysts, I always ask them if they own their name.com. For instance, I own NickLeRoy.com do they own BillyRayJohnson.com? This would be a great spot to start the optimization process for owning your name in the search results.
Another benefit to owning a domain outright (besides, once again reputation management) is that it goes back to fully understanding what it takes to build a website and implement SEO recommendations. In my opinion, no SEO should make a recommendation to a site that doesn’t have at least some idea of the effort that it takes to execute. As SEOs continue to advance in their careers, they will work on more and more complex websites. Knowing the resources they have at their disposal and prioritizing SEO recommendations by implementation difficulty and impact will go a long way.
…but it all starts with the basics. Today, aspiring SEOs should start by ranking their name. Heck, I'm eating my own crow right now. I hadn’t realized that over the years I’m no longer ranking #1 for my own name. That changes today. This post should help and I'm hoping it helps others as well!
