Only learning is not enough to keep update your SEO skills. You should hone your craft with a practice website. This might be your own blog or an affiliate site. The necessary skills of a successful SEO are wider than just the ability to make a webpage rank. We need to be able to communicate, think strategically, and understand the wider marketing landscape. Here I am going to include some tips and tools which will help you in keeping update your SEO Skills.
1. Use Reddit: If you are within the digital marketing industry you are likely already familiar with Reddit. it is a great educational tool to keep update your SEO skills. One of the most enjoyable aspects of Reddit is that there are communities for just about everything, including digital marketing. Here you can ask your questions about SEO or the impact of a recent Google announcement. After that you can get answers from SEOs around the world.
2. Write SEO Guides: Another way to sense-check your SEO methodology is to write guides for other people. It will help you to organize your thoughts and identify where you may be lacking detail in some areas. You could create material for others in your team, or to publish online, and ask for feedback. This will strengthen your processes as well as expose you to new ways of working. It may lead you to discover more effective ways of carrying out your regular SEO tasks.
3. Study a Related Material: This is a great way to update your skill, you need to study other materials. Studying psychology, sociology and political science could help you identify the driving forces that impact search behavior. With SEO being such a vast discipline, it is understandable that you would want to dedicate the limited time you have to studying specific SEO skills and industry developments.
4. Audit Other Websites: When you have been working on a website for a long time it can be hard to see mistakes. Sometimes you need to step away from the projects you are close to and have a look at what other people are working on. If you are aware of a website within your industry that is dominating the SERPs take a look at it in detail. Go through an audit of the website. Look to see how they have configured the site for SEO. Through assessing someone else’s work you may discover they have handled aspects differently to how you would.
5. Attend SEO seminars and workshops: Attending to the seminars and workshops at SEO conferences that you would normally avoid. If you have had little exposure to other areas of SEO this could be highly valuable in expanding your knowledge. If your SEO career has been very specialist so far, you may well have been missing out on the fundamentals of other areas without realizing it. This might be the case in particular where your agency or team has a particular focus, like outreach or technical SEO. Attending talks about subjects you are less familiar with will have the added benefit of showing you what enthuses other people about that specialism.