Essential Habits & Skills of Successful SEO Experts

Even if you're new to SEO or working in the field for several months or years, there's always something new to learn. Also, track your actions and results and don't fall into the knowledge acquisition trap. In order to progress, you have to take action.

In the video below, Nathan Gotch from Gotch SEO highlights 7 habits of highly successful SEO experts.

Here are the 7 habits of highly successful SEOs:

1. They have an action-first mindset

• Don’t fall into the knowledge acquisition trap
• You have to take action to see results
• If you are a beginner:
• Spend 80% of your time understanding the fundamentals
• 20% of your time taking action

2. They took action before they “knew” what they were doing

• You do not need to be an expert to get more traffic from Google
• You need to know more than the average person
• Take action and focus on getting results with the knowledge you already have

3. They’ve mastered the fundamentals

• If you are an absolute beginner, you need to get base SEO knowledge
• If you have experience, study and practice the fundamentals → knowledge reinforcement
• SEO fundamentals you need to learn:
• KPIs, Analytics, and Data Analytics
• Know what data matters
• How to use data to improve your campaigns
• Tools to use: Google Analytics, Google Search Console,
• Keyword research - identifying the right keywords is one of the most critical SEO skills
• Competitor Analysis
• Technical Optimization
• Page-Level Optimization
• Site Architecture - a well-developed site architecture:
• Helps search engine spiders crawl your website more efficiently
• Improve user experience
• Reduce how many backlinks you need to rank
• Develop content assets - one of the biggest elements of a successful SEO campaign
• Create keywords targeted content assets
• Relationship building and outreach
• Link acquisition
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Audits
• Run an audit at least every quarter

4. They test

• Start a niche website
• How to conduct SEO tests for traffic increases/decreases?
• Ask “why”?
• Did we acquire any new backlinks?
• Did we modify on-page SEO?
• Did we change the site architecture?
• Did we add or subtract any internal links?
• Are we having crawl issues?
• Have there been any algorithm updates?
• Is our rank traffic software accurate?
• Develop a hypothesis
• Wait - don’t take action on your hypothesis right away. Wait at least 1 week
• Test your hypothesis
• Take one action at a time
• Always annotate in Google Analytics
• Run quarterly audits
• Don’t be afraid to pivot
• What 20% of actions are driving 80% of your results?

5. They build systems

• Create your system, test it, and refine it over time
• Scale your SEO:
• Create processes, procedures, and policies for everything
• Test your processes, procedures, and policies
• Hire someone to fulfill your systemized tasks
• Create back up systems
• Focus on actions that have the highest impact

6. They never stop learning

• Read top SEO blogs

7. They’re patient

• Patience, perseverance, and extreme willingness to learn
• Take action every day

Your current results are the product of the action you took yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, and even years ago. ~ Nathan Gotch