Jade Symons says: “By hands-on, I mean getting hands-on with a website. So, if you can, get into the CMS, make changes yourself, or at least have a look in there and see what the platform is like, not just relying on the output of Screaming Frog crawls and looking at the source code and understanding what you're looking at potentially even taking some like free online coding courses. So, you know, your way a little bit around basic JavaScript, HTML, that sort of thing.”

Do you advise every single type of SEO to do this?

“Yeah, I think I would. I work for an agency at the minute and we’ll bring on people who are inexperienced in SEO completely and we'll train them up. You'll often get people to say, Okay, I've loved the technical side of things, the content side of things, or the digital PR side and I want to focus on that. But my advice to them is generally always like, yes, great for you to focus on that in the future. But it would be best if you were an effective SEO to have that full-rounded awareness of how it works as an ecosystem. I don't know if you've heard of the T-shaped model? It helps you get a broad understanding of everything in the SEO universe, and then you have your specialism, ie, technical or content. So I think it's good for everybody, any SEO no matter what your specialism, to have an understanding of the whole lot.”

In terms of getting hands-on, do you advise allowing your team to get hands-on with your client websites? Or is it something that they should practice themselves with their own websites and dive into experimenting by doing that?

“In case any of my clients listen to this, do not worry, we do not do this, but I think it mainly depends on if you’re with an agency or if you're in-house. I've had roles before, both agency and in-house, where the SEOs have been required to be hands-on in the CMS, and if you have a role like that, or if that's an agreement with your clients and you have more junior team members, then I think doing it within part of your day job is great, but if you can't, then setting up your own website is something everybody should try at least once if they're working in digital. I know you've might not have much experience of that and it may sound very scary, but I'm just here to say that if I can do it, anybody can do it. You could have a look on YouTube and find some really easy guides there. All you have to do is buy a domain name and install it on WordPress. There are step-by-step guides to follow, and then that's it. You've got a website, and you can play around with it. It’s something I highly recommend”

Is WordPress still the way to go for experimenting, or is there a case for platforms like Wix instead? Or would you, as an up-and-coming SEO, learn more from WordPress?

“I don't think it matters too much because they've all got different ways of making changes. My advice would be for somebody to set the website up and crawl it. You’ll think you've done it perfectly, but you’ll inevitably find all the different mistakes in the crawl, and then you've got a set about trying to fix them, even something as simple as this canonical tag isn't right. In my experience, I went down the rabbit hole, but I was trying to figure out how to do that, and I don't think it matters which CMS you're using. They will all have different ways. If you don't want to invest too much money in it, WordPress is just the one that I have the most experience with, and I know that you can either the benefit it has if you do want to get involved with the code, you can see the back end of it. Otherwise, if you want that visual editor mode and the code is too much for you, you can do that too. But I'm sure the other CMS also has that facility.”

So should SEOs do this to get to a certain level of comfort with how a CMS operates, and then as their careers progress it's not so necessary anymore? Or is this something you recommend forever?

“I think it’s a great way to grow that confidence when you're starting, and I'm sure most people will recognize that feeling of when they were starting or if they're new to their careers, where you're joining a call with internal stakeholders, or if you're an agency with a client and that sick feeling in your stomach worrying that they might ask you a question that you don’t know the answer to. I think having your own site and playing around with things like that helps you to build that. So it's can be very valuable for people at the beginning of their careers. But also saying that when you do get into it and you start progressing for your career, you do find that you spend less time doing hands-on recommendations, and it is more about reviewing other people's work or setting that strategy piece. Actually, I think it is quite easy for you to get outdated with your knowledge or potentially forget things, because there's only so much information we can retain. So I think even a more senior person within the field looking at the code behind a website and getting hands-on from time to time is a good way to refresh your own skills and even remind yourself that you can do this and almost fall in love with SEO again.”

Do you try incorporating lessons from these individual projects into internal training sessions and agencies?

“Absolutely. I think it is always quite nice if you're training somebody and you can come up with these because you can teach best practices. But best practice isn't always what realistically happens when working with a website. There are always special cases and different things. So, it's really valuable to talk about those edge cases. Also, it's something that we haven't done recently, but something we used to do, and I definitely would like us to set up again, is we had a website that we'd set up just for our inexperienced hires to play around on and we'd give them a subfolder each and get them to optimize it for a particular keyword. That would allow them to come back, train each other on what they'd found and the difficulties, and work together to fix things. So yeah, I think it could be really valuable in that sense, as well.”

I think you mentioned that, in conversations with clients and the SEO or whoever's doing this themselves, making lessons from that and being more confident at speaking with clients as a result of practically going through this themselves.

“I think 80% of your success as an SEO in your career lies in your ability to be confident in what you're saying and selling. Most of what we do is selling. It's either you've got the practical things of selling if you're pitching in as an agency to clients, but we also have to sell into internal stakeholders or to our clients to get them to implement things, we have to sell ideas to developers and persuade them that they should be added to the backlog and prioritized in the dev queue. You may get some people who are naturally good at selling, and you could give them anything, and they could have a go at selling it, and they do a great job. But I think, for the most part, it's much easier to be authentic and do a good job of selling your cause if you understand it and you feel confident about what you're talking about.”

Over the next couple of years, we might see AI actively develop best practices within a CMS to ensure that everything's optimized and maybe even surpass a lot of what a junior SEO may be doing. Is there anything a newer SEO can do to try and grow their career without fear that the AI software or whatever AI platform being used will take over from what they're doing daily?

“I'm seriously, really excited about AI. And we've had conversations about it taking our jobs, and it was all over the industry six months ago or so. My advice to anybody starting, but also anybody already in the industry, is not to be afraid of AI and to start playing around with it and learning how to use it. At the end of the day, there will still be human input into the AI. I'd almost treat it as a new toolset that we need to pick up and learn. As much as you know how to use crawling software or keyword research tools, I think being able to use AI, generative AI, and other forms of that is a really strong thing to have in your toolset. If you have this newer generation of SEOs coming up that are doing this, I think that's going to start setting some people apart from people that have maybe been in the industry a while and aren't investigating the new technologies and learning how to use them.”

So you're essentially saying that SEOs need to get hands-on with AI. So, as well as CMSs, that's another technology to master, and in the case of, perhaps you could do that in their own time and figure out how it works and that will probably assist them with their careers.

“I'd say as much as doing it in their own time might be ok, I think trying to weave it into your day-to-day work is a great way of doing that and figuring out how to work smarter, not harder. Like if you can use AI, depending on your company's regulations, within the framework of your job and your role, then I'd highly recommend trying to bake it into what you're doing. I think any decent company would welcome their employees exploring these tools to try and make themselves more efficient when they're working.”

So, is there a certain amount of time that companies and agencies you think should allocate their SEOs to self-learn, improve what they’re doing, and experiment a little bit more?

“Ideally, and this sounds like I'm doing a job advert for my company, but it is something that we offer, and it's quite a generous amount of time for self-development and learning. Other places where I've worked have done it as well, and they have typically been agencies, but I think some in-house companies do it as well. They’ll set aside that time to allow you to explore new technologies, get better at your job, and lay on the training themselves. If you are new to your career and looking for somewhere to start working, asking what their training, learning, and development programs are like is a great way to do an interview. And they should be saying, we have these training courses, and it's a continuous learning thing. It shouldn’t be you join, have onboarding training, and that's it. It should be this lifelong or career-long process of learning within SEO in your company that should enable you to do that.”

So, you shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“So in terms of time, I think it can be quite tempting to stop researching and learning once you start to get to grips with things and feel like you know what you're doing because you lose that fear factor when joining calls and the answers to the questions people are asking you, so it can be tempting to get that time back by stopping learning. But actually, I think that's one of the worst things in SEO you can do. The industry is changing constantly. You could be one or two months down the road, and your knowledge could be outdated. I think you'll waste more time in the long run if you don't keep up to date with changes because you'll have to relearn things and research before you answer clients where you answer your stakeholders or provide best practices, so I'd advise anybody, no matter your career level, to keep learning. I read things like Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable each morning. You could subscribe to a podcast like this or follow people on X or LinkedIn, whatever works for you. Just make sure that you are learning and reading the most recent information.”

Is that a case of understanding your preferred learning style, whether as a podcast, reading, watching videos, being more interactive, or being consistent with that learning style?

“I think everybody learns in different ways. What works for me isn't necessarily going to work for somebody else, but consistency is key. When I have new joiners on my team, I always advise them to spend 20 minutes, half an hour every morning, first thing when they come in, learning and reading. I think if you can get yourself into that habit, whether it's on your commute, you're listening to a podcast, or you're taking 20 minutes at your desk with a coffee when you're setting yourself up for the day reading the stories that are online, about SEO like whatever works for you as long as it's a consistent pattern. It's going to benefit you in the long run.”

Jade Symons is the SEO director at Dentsu, and you can find her over on LinkedIn.