How To Become An SEO Expert in 2023

How To Become An SEO Expert In 2023

Welcome to How To Become An SEO Expert In 2023 by Pete ‘The SEO Guy’ from Plymouth SEO Services.

In this post, I’m going to reveal 4 steps on how to become an SEO expert in 2023.

In fact, the strategies and approaches that I’m about to share with you has helped hundreds of local businesses just like yours go from nowhere on Google to the top of page 1 and doubling their business within 12 months.

So read on if you would like to do that for your business as well and I’ll reveal how you can become an SEO expert fast.

I created my first website over 20 years ago and initially used paid advertising to promote it, but I quickly realised that the secret to long-term success online was search engine optimisation.

There’s nothing wrong with paid ads, but it just doesn’t demand the same respect from online searchers and therefore convert as well as using SEO.

I knew I needed to become an expert in SEO and fast!

So I set out to learn as much as I could about SEO, SEM and digital marketing in general. I was lucky enough to find several mentors who were some of the best SEO experts in the World and they showed me the ropes.

And I have never looked back. I’ve created and ranked thousands of my own websites to page 1 of Google and have helped hundreds of businesses do exactly the same.

But enough about me, let’s get started showing YOU how to become an SEO expert in 2023.

STEP #1: You need patience for SEO and the first step is mastering the fundamentals.

Most people skip this stage and go straight for the sexy stuff, but they miss it at their cost, because if you don’t have the fundamentals under your belt, then you are doomed to fail before you’ve even started.

They think they understand backlinks, meta tags, internal linking, content etc. but they don’t understand the order and importance of how they must be created.

They don’t know how to should all fit together to get the results they’re looking for. That’s why most people fail at SEO and then tell everyone that SEO doesn’t work, where the truth is they were just doing it wrong.

It’s like a builder trying to build a house by constructing the roof first. If you don’t first have a strong solid foundation, your house will always fall down.

I get dozens of calls or emails every week from desperate business owners asking me why their website isn’t on page 1 of Google.

They’ll tell me how they’ve added a bunch of keywords to their web page and bought 1000 backlinks from some guy on Fiverr, but their website has now moved down from page 5 to page 8!

Why they think SEO is different to their own business always amazes me. I always ask them the same thing: If someone called you saying they had tried to rewire their house/repair their roof/replumb their bathroom/lay a driveway etc. by watching a YouTube video and it has all gone terribly wrong. What would you say to them?

The answers are always the same: You should leave it to the experts – You have to walk before you can run – You need years of practise and experience to do it right…and so on.

So why is SEO any different? I ask them. The lightbulb normally goes on at this point and we start talking about how to become an SEO expert and getting to work building a strong foundation to do it right (If they haven’t done too much damage in the meantime of course, as coming back from a Google penalty for using spammy backlinks is almost impossible to be honest and the damage can be irreversible).

Go to #1 of my free SEO tutorial series: SEO For Beginners to start learning the basics and build your own strong foundation.

STEP #2: Perfect practice makes perfect. Listen, you can watch videos on YouTube until you are blue in the face, but NOTHING beats actually just getting on and doing it.

Learn the SEO basics from a reputable source and start implementing them on your own website, but remember not to try and run before you can walk.

How do you eat an elephant? One small bite at a time.

Take it slow and master each element before moving on. Sometimes, just doing the foundation On-Page SEO can be enough to get you to page 1 of Google, especially if you’re a local business in a small town with little competition. You don’t need to use a sledgehammer to break an egg.

When you work on your own website you’ll discover and learn all the different elements and aspects of SEO that gets you results.

But like I said earlier and make sure you understand this before you learn how to become an SEO expert in 2023, it’s a LOT of work so make sure you have the time, dedication and perseverance to see it through.

STEP #3: Experiment and test like a crazy person. Remember I said you need patience when learning how to become an SEO expert in 2023? Well, step 3 will certainly test that, because one of the main things that separate an SEO beginner from an SEO expert is the latter is always testing SEO processes to see what results they get.

Now, to be clear here, I am not suggesting you try any crazy theory on your main website as that would be very risky indeed, but you can test out different headlines on your home page to see if they convert better. You can do the same thing with call-to-actions, images etc. Test them out and see if they improve your conversion rates. If they do, keep them.

I wouldn’t recommend making huge changes to the core SEO practices that we teach as they are proven, tried-and-trusted to get results, but feel free to test elements of your home page to see if it results in a higher conversion rate and more customers for your business.

Just make sure you only make one change at a time or you will never know which one is responsible for the improvement.

STEP #4: Learn how to scale your SEO processes. At some point, you will not have the time to do it all yourself, so you need to learn how to scale up.

The most effective way is to get someone else to do it all for you so you can focus on running and growing your business, but if you have the time and you’re determined to do it all yourself, you have to start creating processes that either automate or reduce the time you do things, or you will simply run out of time.

If learning how to become an SEO expert in 2023 is what you really want to do, and all respect to you as it’s no easy task, I strongly recommend focusing on learning and mastering On-Page SEO and leaving Off-Page SEO (Link building) to the professionals, because even if you make a few mistakes with On-Page SEO, you can change them and Google will be happy to index you again and reward you for your efforts.

This is not the case when it comes to backlinks. Just to be clear, I am not saying this to scare anyone, I am just telling it like it is. I have had so many businesses come to me over the years because their website has disappeared from Google search results. The story is always the same. They were buying cheap backlinks from a guy in India/Fiverr/etc., their website seemed to be moving up the Google search results, and suddenly it was gone.

The person who created the links has also disappeared leaving them high and dry without a website for their business. This is particularly painful when it is an established business whose website is 10+ years old. It is devastating for the business.

And the really sad thing is sometimes even we can’t help them, as the damage is irreversible.

So go ahead and master On-Page SEO, as that may be all you need to get on page 1 of Google, but leave link building to respected and reputable SEO experts and professionals that know what they’re doing as you do not want to get on the wrong side of Google.

If you need any help getting more traffic for your website, want more leads or would like a free SEO audit of your website to check if it’s sending all the right signals to Google, then CONTACT US now to see how we can help you out 🙂

I hope you found this How To Become An SEO Expert In 2023 post helpful. Look out for our next one, which will be out soon.

If you liked this free SEO tip, you should also check out our last post: 8 Easy Tips: How to Optimise Your Website for Google.

Do you want more website traffic, enquiries, leads, calls and customers for your business? Contact me and I’ll show you how we can help you grow your business.

We guarantee to get you on page 1 of Google or we’ll work for free until we do. We’re SEO professionals with 25 years of experience offering guaranteed results, great ROI and no contracts.

Our only goal is your success, so get in touch with me if you want us on your team.