Aleyda Solis started her career as a frontend developer… but after being continuously asked by clients how to get more traffic to their sites, she stumbled into the world of SEO, and the rest is history.
These days, Aleyda is focused on running her highly specialized SEO agency Orainti, giving out free tips in one of many SEO resources she maintains, presenting in Spanish and English at industry events, and more.
Keep reading to see Aleya’s 5 top tips for SEO strategy & running a successful business…
1. Do what you love
If you truly enjoy your job, you will probably niche down and become a specialist in the field you are interested in. In her career, Aleyda has grown in a way that fits her preferences and life choices, so she enjoys her job.
“All of us who have started consulting, at some point, we reached the level of demand and realization of how we can scale — the different ways to scale or, at least, to grow. And in my case, it was focused on the more sophisticated, high-level type of clients and, of course, charging lower too. Then, there are things that I can delegate and work with people who support my day-to-day, who do a little bit of the legwork, who are gathering analysis, etc.
The unique selling proposition is that my clients know that I will answer messages. It is me who they will be meeting and talking with on a day-to-day basis, and it’s because I enjoy it.”
2. To run a successful website, besides good SEO, you also need excellent communication and coordination skills
“You need to understand the product to identify the opportunities to blend initiatives that the product already has — to make it easier to develop the initiative that you know will also have a greater impact. A website will almost never be completely optimized. So you really need to go beyond our typical checklist of nice to haves, and you really need to identify and assess what are those top things that will move the needle in your particular context.”
3. If you think it’s too good to be true, it probably is
When Aleyda started her SEO career, it was a challenge to get the information she needed. Today, she cautions anyone working in SEO to be wary of misinformation, and to seek out sources you can trust.
“I put together a website that is called learningseo.io, which is pretty much a website that creates a roadmap for someone who wants to learn SEO. […] Look at the website. I think it can open your eyes and allow you to dig a little bit more. Then I will also recommend you to subscribe to #SEOFOMO, which is my newsletter. It’s free. I send it every week, and I highlight the best resources, not only news and happenings, but also resources and guides published across the SEO community. I also highlight free SEO tools and SEO folks to follow on Twitter, which is going to be my next recommendation — there is an amazing SEO Twitter community.”
4. SEO is a requirement, not an add-on
“I highly dislike the thought that SEO is like a burden or extra thing that you need to do because of a demand or requirement. No, you’re doing it because, whether you are a developer or a content person, one of your goals is connected with the fact that the product you’re working with will be used by actual customers. They will pay or consume what you build or create in different ways.”
5. Focus on fixing and optimizing your content quickly, then get to building
“We always start in SEO by trying to optimize as much as possible, to make the content accessible by search engines in the first place, right?... So, I’ll do this base of fixing and optimizing what you already have to align it to already existing initiatives, based on the goals of the business. But then also there’s this layer of building.
Unfortunately, many companies are stuck in the fixing and optimizing stage rather than moving to the build stage. The build stage is what is based on the research and the benchmarks that we do from organic search behavior versus your competitors and in your industry.
We identify new opportunities that you haven’t yet targeted and can help you inform your content team or your product team of a new functionality, of a new content section, or something that you can actually create and build from scratch that your competitors still do not have.
So, here’s where you actually see the major progress. Unfortunately, a lot of companies still are still stuck at the, “Oh, SEO is to fix what is broken,” and at this layer of, “Oh, it’s crawlable, it’s indexable, it’s rankable,” but they don’t have a natural strategy behind it."
Hear more from Aleyda on this episode of Reverse Engineered.
Top comments (2)
These are really great tips.
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