What is an expert?
Just what defines an ‘expert’ and is your SEO consultant one?
What exactly defines an SEO expert? In fact, what is it that makes someone an expert in anything? It certainly is not the ability to stand atop the tallest website and scream out ‘Hey world, I am an SEO expert’. But, more importantly, how do you as a business owner make a choice about who to use for such an important task as the marketing of your website or business?
In search of expertise
This week I have been reading ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’ by Joshua Foer which has given me some better insight into just what it is to be an expert.
This is the author’s story of going from being a standard journalist to a memory master and competing at the USA Memory Championships in a single year. The backdrop is a world of memory masters and experts on experts who study just what it is to become and be an expert and I thought it would be fun to apply this thinking to what it takes to be an SEO expert.
So, what makes an Expert?
The book details studies of many different types of experts including memory masters, chess grandmasters and surprisingly the highly esteemed chicken sexers (I kid you not). It then looks at exactly what gives them their expert status and how that is attained and what kind of special traits (if any) these people have that allows them to become masters of their field.
What is surprising is that in a range of intelligence tests these people rank very average – they don’t have an exceptional IQ or any other intellectual benefit that would make them more likely to achieve expert status in their field. Sure, there are some smart people but on the whole, these specialists seem to be average folks just like you and I.
Good, old fashioned hard work
The conclusion reached is that rather than any pre-existing aptitude to becoming an expert in chess, memory or anything else, it is hard work, diligence and a single-minded approach to whatever it may be that they are trying to master over an extended time period.
For the chess grandmasters, they may have been playing daily for 20 years before becoming truly skilled and there is a quoted time of around 10,000 hours of study in one chosen field before anything close to expert status can be expected.
10,000 hours. 20 Years. Jesus. It seems that most folks selling SEO are kids. This at least makes me feel a little better about being 46 and my 22 years or so in the SEO and digital marketing game!
Memory, experience and expertise
So just what makes an expert and how can we ‘norms’ ever hope to become an expert in our chosen discipline? Well, the book details a study of chess grandmasters versus skilled but non-expert players. One would almost assume that the expert played a different kind of game and would look several moves ahead and play out the best move based on the possible outcomes but the reality was actually very different and the experts seemed to give the move less consideration than the standard players. In fact, the experts intuitively knew what to do.
How can this be, though? How can the ‘expert’ give it less thought and make the better move? Well, this brings us back to the memory and experience angle. The grandmasters had played thousands upon thousands of games. Every move, every situation, every outcome has been played out before many, many times with the results logged in the memory banks. The experts could then call upon this knowledge, without really considering any specific example and this allowed them to make the correct move based on that hard-earned experience.
The experts did not even always know why they would make such a choice, but burnt into their memory banks is the lessons learned from the past and the expert status is seemingly nothing more than the experience built over tens of thousands of games. It is this experience, this almost subconscious knowledge of the outcomes that allowed them to swiftly and accurately make the winning move and it is this recall of hard learnt lessons that is seemingly the very essence of what it is to be ‘an expert’.
Experts go with the gut
So, if the lesson to learn here is that anyone can become an expert in their chosen field given enough time, effort and consistency then just what the heck constitutes an SEO expert and when we really break it down, what skills does an SEO expert need?
Well, there is a bunch and obviously, having experience in the optimisation of websites along with the myriad problems they may have ranking is one big part of this but in my mind, that is only part of a broader skillset required.
If you are an SEO then part of your job is to match up search queries with (your clients) relevant content. So, to do this, the first step is always going to be to understand the way that people search and the language they use to do so. Language is a great and interesting topic and anyone who has done vast chunks of keyword research and fed back to clients will tell you that the terms the business may want to rank for and the language that people search with can be two entirely different animals. And then there is any number of factors that may modify this: colloquialisms, synonyms and slang can all add up to create a rich tapestry of search terms that we may have to consider for any given project.
Then, of course, there is the content itself and being an SEO often includes the editing or creation of content that can help our clients achieve their business goals (and us achieve our own) so you also need to have some chops when it comes to putting pen to paper (finger to keyboard did not sound quite as good).
The industry changes often and despite being a bunch of flighty characters that want their information in 140 characters or less there is no end of great books and online reading on SEO, analytics, strategy and website marketing that needs to be kept up with.
In many cases, you also may need a working knowledge of how websites are put together and experience with content management systems, web markup languages, scripting and databases will never hurt you in your effort to implement, test and refine our approach.
And all of this optimisation is nothing without measurement and polish so being a bit of a whiz with data, spreadsheets and analytical tools like Google Analytics are mandatory for any SEO who is serious about making changes that generate real business results & ROI for their clients.
On top of all of that, many jobs require you to be a keen detective with almost Sherlock Holmes powers of observation to solve the often perplexing mysteries relating to why a certain site or page is not performing as it should. The detective aspect is interesting in that a well-versed detective will know how to read a crime scene, and it is the experience that builds that skill and intuition and much like the SEO who has examined thousands of websites there is a skill for knowing just what the problem is from having seen it before and knowing what to look for or eliminate first.
So there you ha