How Long Does It Take To Learn SEO?

SEO isn't just a skill set. It is a gut instinct. You learn the basics of SEO when you start writing content, like this article. But over time, you start to get a sense of the website you are working on, what keywords it can take, and how to react to changes in positioning. But the most important thing to realize when you learn SEO is that you can't control everything that happens. Let's take a look at how long it takes to learn SEO. As a career, it takes about three to five years to master it.

How Do Most SEOs Get Their Foot In the Door?

Right now, there is a shift in the SEO space. It has largely been dominated by males, in the State of California, and they maintain a strong presence on LinkedIn. The SEO space is dominated by men for a wide variety of reasons:

• First and foremost, they got the early start on owning websites when the Internet took off.
• They tend to dabble in SEO and have learned it because it was required of their primary skill set. 
• They leaned into it because they needed to change up their career.

Here is something to think about. The most insightful SEO advice often comes from women. There are several different podcasts of women who have shared their insights on SEO. Moreover, there are several career SEOs out there who are women who have learned their skills through sheer hard work. Some have come into their own in SEO because of a project manager role. There is also a strong presence of women out there who own big ecommerce stores and blogs and are closing the gender gap. Note: All of this is my opinion from years in the industry.

A lot of people got their start in SEO as a content writer. They started their job as a content writer after college and then moved into more senior SEO positions. 

Do You Need to Get a Degree To Do SEO?

No. In the last twenty years, many colleges and universities have started offering SEO majors. There are also strong data and analytics majors out there that are available. But you do not need a degree in SEO or a degree at all for that matter to do SEO.

Many people who have learned SEO have no degree at all and learned it so that they could focus on their businesses a little bit better.

How Long Does It Take To Learn SEO?

You never fully finish learning SEO. But if you want to take a guess at how long it takes, my experience with SEO was that I learned the important stuff within three to five years. Here are the things that I learned over that timeframe:

• Basic SEO: Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Site Structure, Internal Linking. I learned those things as a content writer.
• Off-Page SEO: This is the hardest component of SEO. It takes a lot of time and blood, sweat, and tears to learn how to get backlinks to your website. 
• Technical SEO: This includes how to diagnose a website's errors. Things like canonicalization. I'm still learning these things and sometimes, if I don't know the answer, I have to go find it out.

What Skills Do You Need For SEO?

If there were one skill set that you need to master SEO, it's the power of an analytical mind. You have to think deeply about things. When you offer SEO to clients, you have to become an expert in their business to understand how people will find things on the Internet. Here is a rough breakdown of the skills you need for SEO:

• You have to know Google Analytics and Search Console.
• You have to know at least one SEO tool.
• You have to know how to access a CMS.
• You have to install codes and snippets on websites.
• You need to know the very basics of HTML.
• You should know how to use ChatGPT so you can write some content and automate things yourselves. 

What Breadth of Skills Do You Need to Know?

If you have a gut feeling of how much you know about SEO, you can probably assign a percentage to it. The average business owner at least knows 15% of all the necessary skill sets. To work with bigger clients, you should know about 75% of the SEO skill sets. Breadth of knowledge means that you can look at a website and the numbers and get.a sense of what's wrong. 

Should You Learn SEO? 

If you run a business with a website, you should at least know about on-page optimization. You should know how to promote your brand and do certain things, like run a Facebook page. You should have at least tried to do some Google Ads or have gotten some help. 

Should you learn how to sell SEO? Yes. It's a value add for your clients in whatever space you work. And it helps you grow your business, too. 

Will SEO Become Obsolete? 

No. As long as there are websites, people will use some sort of search platform to find them. These websites need to have content crated for humans by humans. And SEO will always be a good skill set to have. You will spend your whole career learning and mastering SEO if you choose to make it your field.