Amber Ritchie

I attribute a lot of my success to really understanding the user journey and understanding what makes a company different. A lot of times, people want to throw out generic content, but I don't like to utilize content that doesn't make sense for the site. You might have a keyword that brings in a lot of volume, but if it's not going to be directly correlated to your actual services, then it's not beneficial. If you're going to create a blog, it needs to directly tie to something that you offer. Site architecture is another huge thing. I had a huge win with a law client recently where I helped them with a website migration, and they saw a 50% increase in total keyword rankings instantly. All I did was update the URL structure and adjust the keyword targeting and the title tags, meta descriptions, and the H1s, only for the main navigation pages. It's not necessarily that you have to do a lot, you just have to do the right thing. You need to look at what your competitors are doing. You need to look at if you are targeting AI visibility, what is AI showing for these different keywords, what type of content are they summarizing, and making sure that you have that content on your page and summarizing it in an effective way. I like to focus a lot on a proper keyword strategy, internal linking, and site architecture.

The best professional advice I've probably received is to, one, be confident and what you're saying. Because confidence can go a long way, even if you're really smart, and you're strategic, and you have all the right answers without displaying that confidence and being able to communicate it effectively, it won't necessarily look the same way as you're hoping to. So I would say confidence. And then also, just never stopping learning. You know, never think that you know everything about everything. Always keep learning and trying new things, and just continuing to evolve, because in all of marketing, not even just SEO, it's all an evolution, so you should always keep doing that.

If you're looking to break into the SEO industry, start understanding content. Being a content marketer is a crucial part of being in SEO. That's something that I've learned throughout my career and over time, is you really have to understand content marketing. I'd also say, start understanding technical SEO. A lot of people think, okay, I've done all this content work, I understand keyword research, I can write an article. But you also want to make sure your stuff is discoverable by search engines. So, you have to understand sitemaps, you have to understand robot files, you have to understand how your host platform can hinder your progress or help accelerate it. Understanding site architecture really is a technical SEO principle. Really understanding technical SEO will be a huge differentiator for you. Especially for people who might want a full-time role and not just contracting, more technical SEO roles are popping up in the industry because so few people have put a lot of emphasis in understanding it and prioritizing that as a strategy. So, just really understanding technical will make a huge difference for your career.

I think the biggest challenge is just helping people understand the true value of SEO. A lot of times, people go in really wanting to do it, they're really excited about it, but SEO has some runtime. I usually like to target a lot of low-hanging fruit opportunities at the beginning, so you can see a lot of those initial improvements in rankings and impressions and then even leading into traffic. But at the same time, I think people sometimes are like, maybe it would just be faster if I went to paid media, or maybe I need to try something like email, or just anything different. It's such a challenge to get people to understand SEO is about consistency. You can't always just turn it on and off, where you start working on it for a couple months, and never mind, I'll come back to it in 6 months, because at that point, you haven't been doing anything. Another huge challenge that's come about for many SEOs, especially in recent years, is AI. Everyone is so concerned about AI. Yes, it's good to get that visibility, you want your name to be featured in these responses and show up as a citation. However, a lot of the searches related to AI visibility are not driving that bottom line traffic, or driving quality traffic. It's typically for upper funnel searches, people just seeking information. When you start looking at those keywords and the searches that really are driving your leads that are going to be local, that are gonna be near me, or are just going to be very bottom funnel related to a service line that you offer, those typically aren't going to have an AI overview, especially when working in healthcare spaces or niche financial spaces where Google doesn't want the liability of showing the wrong answer.

I would definitely say transparency is huge. Working for just so many different companies and everything, something that I always felt set me apart is I am very transparent. I'm not afraid to tell you if something is not working. I'm not afraid to tell you that performance might be down for a month or two. I just truly believe that transparency is critical for improvement. So, not beating around a bush, and don't lie and omit information in order to make things look better. It's better to just face that head-on. Collaboration is another thing. I love working with other people to achieve something. That's probably one of the parts I miss the most about working on a full-time job and having a team of people. I just love to collaborate, so that's a huge value of mine. And then I would also say just communication. That goes for your personal life, your professional life. You always just want to continue to improve upon your communication, working with so many different types of people, and working across different industries, where there are different expectations, just making sure that you have open and honest communication all the time, and people just setting the right expectations, and if you need to have a hard conversation, just being able to communicate in a way that gets your point across while also still being empathetic and compassionate when you're delivering it.