I’m an SEO Strategist for a travel marketing agency called Travel Tractions. We are a remote company, so most days I work from home, or from a nearby coffee shop.

Working at a nearby coffee shop

On a day-to-day basis, I spend time auditing travel websites (generally for travel bloggers), finding new ways for their most valuable pages to rank in Google search results. I also spend time writing content for their websites, this often involves creating travel itineraries or guides for their readers.

As an SEO Strategist, I complete audits of travel websites, assessing where the website is weak and could do with improvements. I suggest pages that should be deleted from the website as they don’t have strong enough content to ever rank in Google search results.

I then look for pages that have a great potential to rank but aren’t yet doing so. These pages can be optimized by adding content as well as keywords to increase the relevancy of the page in Google’s ‘eyes’. This is incredibly important for travel blogs as many travel bloggers make money primarily through ranking on search engine results pages. A page that ranks well, offers the potential to make money through paid advertising or affiliate sales.

Using Ahrefs for keyword research

If a client wants ongoing strategy and support, I monitor their site using Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. These tools track the site’s performance, and I can see any increases and decreases in traffic, and investigate where that traffic is coming
from.

I create a report every month to showcase the website’s monthly performance and let the client know what our game plan is for the month ahead. This could include creating SEO-focused content, building links to their website, enhancing their social media strategy, or completing technical fixes on their site.

Monitoring client’s website with Google Search Console

If their site is undergoing web development, I work closely with the developer to make sure that all changes are going to positively affect the website rather than hurt its rankings.

Liaising with the client is a big part of my job. It’s important that the client is kept up to date with any changes being made on their site. This way, we prevent any surprises along the way.

When I’m not working on technical SEO fixes, I get involved in writing content for our clients’ websites. We have a team of writers that focus solely on content creation, but having a knowledge of SEO certainly helps to structure posts as I know what Google does and doesn’t like to rank. Having a background in copywriting has helped immensely with this aspect of the job.

The best parts of my job:

I really enjoy seeing tangible results on our client’s websites. When SEO is applied correctly, it can increase the traffic to a website quite substantially, which means a hefty increase in revenue for our clients.

Working remotely means that I get to work from anywhere in the world, so being a full-time digital nomad is a real option. Our company is a performance-based company, so as long as I get my work done, the hours I work are completely up to me.

Year to year, the strategies that we implement have to change to stay up to date with the latest and most effective SEO practices. Although our company has ranking websites down to a fine art, with Google’s ever-changing algorithm, our strategies need to be continually modified to stay ahead of the game. I enjoy the fast-paced world of SEO as it never stagnates. Continuous learning is not just encouraged, it’s necessary.

Working from home

The harder parts:

Working remotely with no compulsory office hours requires a great deal of discipline in order to get your work done. If I feel unmotivated during the day, I have a lot of catching up to do in the evening, often working night owl shifts.

If a site is undergoing development, there’s a lot that can go wrong. I need to monitor the site closely during these stages to make sure that there are no changes made that affect the website’s rankings, as this could be a huge loss of revenue for our client. This often means working over weekends, although always worth it, it can take a toll on my personal life. Of course, loving what I do goes a long way in making this all worthwhile.”

Tyla Oliver
Travel Tractions

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) at Picked involves overseeing a number of different websites. A typical day involves some combination of keyword research, performing technical audits, link-building, and lastly, performance analysis, where I analyze the traffic coming to our sites to see if our efforts have been successful or not and if we are working towards our plan. On a typical day, I am also collaborating with other teams such as those for development and client retention.

My day starts with monitoring: have any sites made significant gains or losses when it comes to organic traffic, ranking or links? Have any elements broken? Depending on what I find, various fixes might need to be made.

Next, I’ll check in with my team: are they clear on what the priorities are for the day and week? Any issues I can help with?

Then I might look at our content calendars: whether we have enough articles in the pipeline, does anything need to be published today, do we have an idea of what we will be commissioning over the next few weeks.

Finally, I might review any outreach campaigns, or check in with our dev team’s SEO tasks to see if anything needs following up or actioning.

My key responsibilities boil down to this: is revenue attributable to organic search moving in the right direction, and is my team effective and happy. Everything else (including organic traffic) I consider secondary.

Pros: Plenty of autonomy, lots of investigative work, collaboration with other teams, seeing the fruit of your hard work, always more things to test and learn from. SEO is not a ‘one and done’ project. It is something that needs to be constantly monitored, and there is always something that needs to be improved. I must stay up-to-date with the latest trends, and because of this, it is both fun and challenging. Adopting a fully remote work culture, I am spared the daily commute to an office; however, at the same time, it can be more challenging to engage in professional interaction with my colleagues.

Cons: Some parts of the job are necessary but tedious, and sometimes you can feel at the mercy of algorithmic changes (or see competitors benefitting from some darker SEO practices).

James Rice
Picked