I Switched To SEO After 20 Years As a Journalist: Here's What I've Learned

Technology and all digital marketing tools available today have changed my entire professional career. 

To have started working with SEO was the best decision I could ever make, because now I am a valuable professional even though I don’t work in my first career as a journalist anymore.

And if you feel you are being left behind by our peers, or are not motivated to work in the same thing anymore, make sure you read this article and get inspired to pursue new opportunities in your professional life.

As a journalist, I have always had the pleasure to write and read. To tell real stories to real people. This was (and still is) something that makes me feel energetic and working hard to share the best stories.

However, when I saw myself in the middle of a fast-pacing world in my area of expertise, I realized it was time to move forward.

This was when, after 20 years in journalism, I decided to update my skills and be a different professional.

Why is SEO important?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Making it short, it works to transform the content available online into something more interesting to read, and easier to be found on search engines.

This way, companies don’t need journalists to write their stories and publish them in magazines or newspaper anymore. On the contrary, people now search for products and companies directly on google.

And because of that, SEO became the new press office, and this is how companies reach their clients. When I understood that, I immediately started studying and specializing on it. 

And this is something important if you wish to work with SEO: you will have to study, test, evaluate and repeat your strategies a lot of times.

Considering that there are millions of websites, blogs and people writing relevant and interesting content all the time around the world, SEO presents itself as an important strategy to help users find what companies and service providers are offering online.

So, the main reason why SEO is so important nowadays, is that companies must optimize their websites so that their target audience finds them when making basic searches.

The opportunities I had because of SEO

When you acquire technical knowledge such as being an expert in SEO, people start asking how it works, what must be done to have better results, and all sorts of inquiries like that.

And after some time, I realized I had a business there. At this moment, it was when my professional career started to change.

Unfortunately, to structure a SEO business is not an easy task, after all people who hire SEO experts are looking for results (and usually they want it very fast).

However, optimizing a website to be found in the search results require some important aspects.

One of the main differences between being a journalist and an SEO expert is that in journalism I didn’t need to worry too much about the digital world. On the other hand, when working with SEO, the focus is completely for the digital world.

Whether in journalism there are only people involved, in SEO the professionals must consider people plus all the robots and factors they use to rank the most interesting content on the search engines.

Among these, it’s possible to name some:

• Key words
• Synonyms
• Searched terms
• Transition words
• Length of sentences
• And many other.

How did I start working with SEO?

At Upsites Agência de Criação de Sites I work with the most important aspects in SEO, and I name three here (which I am going to approach in depth further in the text):

• Website optimization;
• Constant and quality content production;
• Weekly/monthly analysis of results.

Even though this area completely meets my goals today, I can’t say it’s going to be my career forever (can you say it about yours?), but I’m sure there is no way back to my old offline-writing journalist life.

How does SEO work?

Search Engines are ruled by robots, which are trained to recognize and rank websites considering a series of algorithms’ requirements.

Even though it would be interesting, it’s impossible to have all those requirements on a list. Firstly because there are so many of them, and secondly because the search engines are always working on improvements to continuously offer good results to its users.

Now let’s understand better each of the important aspects about SEO (and how I used each of them to develop my SEO career).

1. Website optimization

Because online competition is everyday higher for businesses, all of them must use SEO optimization for their websites.

It’s usual that the website optimization starts from a good and clean organization of all pages, where the user can easily interact. However, there are many other more technical issues to be addressed.

So it’s important to hire qualified professionals to make this optimization work and reach results.

• This is one of the biggest opportunities in the SEO world. Even though it can be very technical and require skills, it’s a real and constant need of all companies.

2. Constant and quality content production

More than pay someone to write fifty 1000-word articles and publish it at once with no quality control, it’s essential to regularly add content to companies’ blog/website.

As everything in SEO, there is no fixed rule for it. What companies must to is to set the pace they are able to follow in the long term. Be it once every two weeks, once a week or even two to three times a week.

And even more important, is to guarantee that the content that is being produced is well written and follows some basic SEO requirements to result in good positions in search results.

You may be thinking this is such an easy task. However, what I realized by working with SEO is that people have problems with that as well. There are some reasons:

1. There is no one in the company dedicated to content production;
2. The leaders don’t understand its importance and consider it a waste of time or money;
3. People don’t understand the search engine requirements.

Because of all that, it’s also a great opportunity to specialize and provide good quality services for businesses of all kinds.

3. Results analysis

Last but not least, the great thing about digital marketing is that it’s possible to track and analyze everything.

But besides looking at data and graphs, it’s necessary to learn how to read all of it and get insights to improve the actions for the next week or month.

• In order to improve the business with analysis that really say something, the correct questions have to be done. And this is where one of the biggest career developments in SEO happened for me. After all, the efforts need to be measured, and to be the person who does it is a very valuable thing.

My career is completely changed, and it’s a good thing

I believe that professional development is very important for everyone. After all, to achieve better results and work with different people is something that moves human beings.

Even though the first step for career change is difficult, when it comes to my experience, I will always recommend it.

Find your passion, understand what you are good at, and use the technology to boost your results.