How I Got Into SEO/PPC | Guest Post by Caroline Revell

I am happy to be able to share a guest post with you today by Caroline Revell – enjoy! I love sharing a little about how people got into their careers – if you’ve got an interesting career and think my readers would love to read about it, let me know!

My name’s Caroline and I wanted to share my career path in a little-known industry and some learnings I found along the way. If you want a career which is flexible, well paid and that does not require a zillion years of training and exams, then the world of SEO and PPC is perfect.

Not least that since the Covid-19 pandemic, ecommerce and online growth is said to have advanced as many as 20 years in the space of a few months. There was already a shortage of skilled professionals working in digital advertising before Covid-19. It is unlikely this will change and you can work from the comfort of your home! 

My background

I was working in a niche travel company, when my boss asked me if I would like to have a go at managing their online advertising and organic presence online. He wanted to bring everything in house and give up on the 7K a month agency fee he was paying, tired he wasn’t getting the results he had previously. 

PPC

I needed some quality training and fast. I found a start-up PPC agency in London headed up by energetic Oxbridge graduates who bewilderingly accepted my passionate request for bespoke training, something they didn’t ordinarily offer. The deal was, I would have to accept whichever graduate was free and interested in helping a complete novice old enough to be their parent (just about).

Although my employer paid for every session, the PPC agency managers would still ask me every week as I made the 6 hour round trip to their London office, ‘are you sure you don’t mind sitting in with one of our juniors? It’s not like a proper course or anything.’ 

But it was exactly what I needed, the ability to throw all my questions about my firm’s advertising account at them was invaluable. 

SEO

Then came SEO, but I didn’t want a super-fast fly-by classroom experience and I’d read enough to know what the basic terminology and jist of SEO was. I just wanted to know what I needed to do and I needed results fast. This was serious. I had to get the rankings up and fast. 

I ordered a book on Backlinking and contacted the American author Eric Ward to see if he might be able to offer one to one guidance. He agreed and was happy to help anyone who wasn’t frightened about getting their hands dirty (ie lots of work). I had five sessions before I realised who had been training me – he was the number one SEO expert in the USA, probably the first in the industry and had helped Amazon to get online when everyone else had said you can’t sell books online. As a founding father of SEO, he was referred to as LinkMoses.

Reflecting on my PPC learnings that if I was starting out now. There are ways to still cut corners to gain the best practical experience:

• Find someone you know with a website, any type will do. Or use your own blog!
• Set up a Google Adwords account  – it’s free!
• Have fun creating your own ads following guidance in any How to You Tube videos.
• Cap your budget so you don’t spend unnecessarily however keep in mind that as you spend you learn! Ads can run for as little as £1 or less or day which is a tiny monthly expense for such a potentially huge reward of experience and for your CV.
• If you need help along the way, the PPC/SEO community is a generous one and Reddit is a great platform I regularly use but these days there is very little which hasn’t already been answered clearly in a You Tube video somewhere.

And for SEO, all you need is a blog or a friend’s blog, some patience, a reliable book to follow (see resources below) and you’re off!

I believe anyone who is considering a career in SEO or PPC should know that: 

• The return on investment for the time you put in is HUGE! It is far greater than many other industries. Salaries typically exceed £30K early on. I was offered a specialist SEO job for £45K (in a disreputable industry unfortunately). 
• When you start out, it seems everyone around you is so much smarter than you. But you will quickly catch up. 
• From my experience and what I’ve read, there seems to be a reasonable amount of gender equality in the industry. Okay, so you may have to speak to some male web developers at some point who aren’t the most communicative, but there’s nothing so far that’s made me feel uncomfortable. I have never been sworn at or spoken to inappropriately and that is something I cannot say for other jobs I’ve had over my thirty-year working life.

Essential Resources

Books:

The Art of SEO by Eric Enge & Stephan Spencer 

The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads by Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes et al (6th Edition)

Ultimate Guide to Link Building: How to Build Backlinks by Eric Ward & Garrett French

Courses:

Udemy offer courses on offer can start £10 – check the reviews before you commit

Diginius offer google adwords training for complete beginners with opportunity to ask questions about accounts you are running.