Hello fellow humans!
First, allow me to introduce myself. For now, I will be known as the Grumpy Robot. I was going to name this blog “Search Engine Student” but when I thought about designing a logo using an acronym, it was “S… E…” Oh. Okay. Best not use that use that.
Outside of the Grumpy Robosphere, I am an artist and webcomic creator. And, let’s face it, in this day and age, it doesn’t matter what you are: artists, entrepreneurs, bloggers, basket weavers need to have a booming online presence to get clients, clicks, and coffee. Sorry, it’s still morning for me.
You’re not going to clients quickly if people can’t find you online.
You’re not to get clients quickly if people can’t find you online
If you’re an entrepreneur wanting to get your business off the ground, you’ll need a good web presence. So many people spend most of their day on the internet that not working building to good online presence is quite foolish indeed.
You foolish human.
This means you’ll need to learn how to make your website and social media (yes, you’ll need that too) favorable in search results. You’ll need to be easy to search, look up, and find.
It’s always changing, so you’ll never stagnate or get bored
This might be a con for some people, as it might feel safer to have a job where the rules are set and you’ll only need to follow those rules in order to do a good job, but with such jobs increasingly being replaced by automation, sadly such jobs are disappearing.
SEO, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. Because there’s so much data, automation using bots and the like, you can’t keep doing the same thing you’ve been (remember how you were able to put a million keywords and a million people would view your site? Yeah, that hasn’t been a thing for decades now). Humans need to keep up with robots now.
But hey, that’s exciting!
This is a career move for people who are always hungry to learn. It’s like art. It’s never something truly “mastered,” there’s always so much to learn. This is for people who view themselves as perpetual students. Always hungry for more information, always striving to be better. If you’re the kind of person who wants to know everything so that you can lord it over people who don’t… then… I don’t know what to say to you, I’m sorry.
It’s a very in-demand job
Turns out there’s a lot of older people who don’t understand how the internet works, so more than ever, people who have knowledge of SEO. These people make the wise decision to hire someone to do that for them in order to fill the gaps in the business and get more customers.
Even if you don’t have your own business (though I highly recommend you do, even if it’s a blog, comic, or anything really that you do for fun- because it’s a great way to get your portfolio started and to experiment until you get a paying job), hundreds of people on Indeed alone are looking for SEO experts, social media coordinators, copywriters who write in a way that gets more traffic).
And the best part? It’s a job that you can easily do from home! No one in your hometown hiring? Who cares? Someone two cities over can hire you!
The more you get better at SEO, the higher paying jobs are available to you. At this point, it’s also a job that’s relatively easy to enter on a entry-level position because, let’s face it, SEO changes so quickly a four-year degree would be useless.
Okay, so it might be a bit competitive, but let’s face it. A fry cook at MacDonald’s is competitive when the economy’s bad.
It Can Help You Understand What it Means to be… Human.
One consequence of learning SEO and social media marketing that I found is that it helps me understand human psychology.
Despite what people would have you believe “The Algorithm” doesn’t change on its own accord like some robot dictator. It changes based on human behavior.
Humans click on a website, then immediately click out? Okay, The Algorithm will stop promoting that site because human behavior dictates this website isn’t useful.
On Instagram, I found that two types of artwork I create do really well: 1) digital portraits of pretty girls and 2) art of my somewhat attractive male hero with his baby dragon. The first bit of data was obvious, humans like portraits of pretty girls, but the second one was a bit surprising- then I remembered that our current pop-culture goes nuts over heroic “dads” with adorable baby companions or daughters: Mando and Baby Yoda, Geralt and Ciri, Logan, The Last of Us, the list goes on.
Bonus
Bonus: I Enjoy it… and so might you!
So, like I said, I’m an artist. So you’d think that numbers, data and analytics, wouldn’t interest me in the slightest, but I came to find that couldn’t be further from the truth.
SEO is for people who are willing to embrace the changing internet, who are hungry for new knowledge, who enjoy learning what humans enjoy, and for entrepreneurs who want to get a leg up in the world.
SEO is a field that requires both the left brain and right brain. If you enjoy numbers, data, and making decisions based on such things, but also enjoy being able to creatively think about your next move, then this will be perfect for you.