Job Descriptions: SEO Executive

SEO Executives are responsible for ensuring that businesses are optimised for the search engines and have an established presence online.

A specialism in a wider digital marketing sphere, SEO Executives have grown to play an absolutely vital part for most companies looking to utilise the internet for business and awareness purposes. SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, Executives main focus is to ensure that their company or client is appearing at the top of Google or similar search engine rankings. They use a variety of tools, approaches, techniques, data and analytics to ensure that their client is benefiting from Google.

The role is highly analytical and requires an in depth knowledge of the internet operates and how companies like Google and its algorithms can have a real impact on day to day business. Graduates looking to pursue a career in this field don't necessarily have to be the next generation of innovative coders or web designers but do need to understand the importance of things like ranking, key words, links and link building, search data, user journey/experience and content.

In terms of employers for SEO Executives, there are two routes that SEO Executives tend to find work. Firstly, many SEO Executives are employed as part of an agency who offer SEO services to clients outside the business. Others might fall into marketing departments in larger companies who operate in competitive markets. Here, SEO Executives can fall under a more generic Digital Marketing title.

Day to day life as an SEO Executive can be varied and graduates in this position can find themselves working away to achieve certain aims with little success or reacting to Google algorithm changes quickly to ensure they are maintaining their rank. Graduates looking for a career in this field need to ensure they are comfortable with large amounts of data and able to understand how figures and data impact on their SEO strategy aims.

SEO executive salaries

The average starting salary of a graduate SEO Executive is £20,020. This is a fantastic starting salary for graduates looking to pursue a career in SEO or in a wider digital marketing position. The responsibility of a graduate SEO Executive may be limited initially, but as their experience grows and they begin to show their worth to their employers they will see their increased responsibility reflected in their pay packet.

The daily duties of an SEO executive

The main aim of an SEO Executive is for their company or client to rank well on Google for a range of specific or broad searches. This can be so important for certain companies depending on the field they operate in. SEO Executives daily duties all aim to achieve the number one spot on Google for whatever is most relevant to their company. While only a handful of people know Google's secret recipe for this, SEO Executives have a numerous ways to help their client's achieve this.

Here are a few of the daily duties that graduate SEO Executives may use to reach the top:

• Content creation - There is an old mantra in SEO and digital marketing fields that "Content is King" and this remains true. When Google crawls websites it is looking for new and relevant content and SEO Executives can often be required to muck in and create pages that will help them work their way to the top of rankings. Content creation is a very part of day to day duties and some companies even have their own Content Writers to help achieve this.
• Keyword research - Keyword research allows SEO Executives to make informed decisions on what they are going to do when they are putting together strategy aims. Keyword research is usually aided by Google AdWords Tools, this allows SEO Executives to understand what people are targeting and what they can look to achieve when running against competitors in the field.
• Link building - Link building, having links from other sites towards the SEO Executive's, is a key tool and daily duty of SEO Executives. Having quality content or a quality service and being suggested to it by other websites is really important for rankings, especially when looking to bring up the ranking of the whole site or targeting specific keyword searches. This kind of work requires a lot of outreach work and suggestions by the SEO Executive for respected websites to highlight their specific site as a prominent resource for one reason or another.
• Onsite optimisation - Onsite optimisation is ensuring that SEO Executive's site is prepared for when Google crawls through their pages. Graduate SEO Executives need to ensure that specific features on the site are well maintained, no dead links for example, as well as ensuring that things like meta information is useful, specific and in line with the overall SEO strategy.
• Monitoring metrics - Using Metrics, or measurements, to ensure that the work that the SEO Executive is doing is vitally important to track progress and areas for improvement. Traditionally using things like Google Analytics, SEO Executives are able to monitor things like Hits, Unique Visits, Bounce Rates, Exit Rates, how the users got to that page and where they went after and the time spent on the page users have visited. This feeds into a larger picture of what is working for users and how the site can improve as well as seeing the impact new content or Google rankings are having.

While it might seem like the success of an SEO Executive's efforts can be undone by changes at Google, and this is true to a certain extent, there are plenty of tried and tested practices that SEO Executives can use to ensure good rankings.

The role of an SEO Executive is a growing field and will only become more important as businesses and organisations move more towards the internet and competition grows. While already a fiercely competitive field, graduates can find SEO a rewarding career path. A career in this field offers rewarding results and the opportunity to be at the cutting edge of the digital world.