Can I Make Money With SEO?

There are so many ways to earn money online. You can make your own blog and sell ads, build an e-commerce store, sell services and affiliate products, make e-books, teach online courses, and optimize websites with SEO. But what is all the fuss about search engine optimization? Is it a good career path for someone who loves the internet? And more importantly, can you make money with SEO?

The simple answer to whether there’s money in SEO is yes. All money-making methods online will not be possible if there is no traffic to your site. The best possible way to get quality, organic traffic is through SEO.

A Lucrative Way of Making Money Online

As you may already know, SEO is the process of ranking higher than most competitors in search engines. The goal is for your site to show up on the first page of search results. It is the first step in making money online.  If your site shows up on the first page of search results, you’ll have a higher chance of getting a consistent flow of traffic. And gaining traffic enables you to build an audience so you can start selling ads, create an online store, selling services, and many more.

In short, SEO is the foundational skill you need to learn to help you jumpstart your lucrative online business. To make money with SEO – you need to learn its concepts and principles, follow the best practices of SEO experts, and understand how a search engine works.

Benefits of Learning SEO

SEO is not rocket science. It’s not so difficult to learn SEO, but you need time and effort to learn the ins and outs of it, and while the learning curve may be sharp at the onset due to the various concepts and principles that you need to learn, once you get the hang of it, it will become easier. Here are some of the benefits that you can gain by learning SEO:

• You don’t need third-party SEO agencies to grow your own online business.
• Increase search engine traffic to your site or your client’s site by yourself.
• Improve your website’s ranking.
• You can work for an SEO agency and further hone your skills and knowledge of SEO

In your journey to learning SEO, here’s a path that you can follow to have a thorough knowledge and a better understanding of SEO concepts. 

• Study how search engines work and understand how they index websites.
• Gain knowledge in search engine marketing concepts.
• Master the art of optimizing content the right way.
• Uncover what search engines are really looking for to get a high ranking.
• Learn the tricks of off-page SEO and how to achieve important SEO metrics.
• Utilize the ideal SEO tools to make educated data-based decisions.

Is SEO a Good Career Choice?

Many people wishing to make their mark in the online industry are wondering if SEO is a good career path to take. They wonder if they can really make money with SEO. This industry can be considered relatively young, but the potential is limitless. Forbes predicted that the industry would be worth $80 billion by 2020. The current pandemic may have caused the projection to fall short but it is still undeniable that the future of SEO is bright. And it will keep on getting better as time goes by. 

Experts agree that SEO is a good career choice, especially if you’re into digital marketing and have a knack for all things Internet. It is a career with high financial reward potential, but it can also be challenging due to its continual learning and development processes.

Promising SEO Career Paths

The potential of having a successful and lucrative career in SEO is quite promising. Experts agree that the SEO industry will grow and expand further in the years to come, making it one of the best career paths you can take. Here are a few of the promising career paths for those interested in SEO:

Analyst level

There are people who get their satisfaction by increasing a website’s ranking within search engine results pages (SERP), improving landing page conversion rate optimization (CRO), or enhancing the click-through rate (CTR). These people want to be in the thick of the action, quenching their thirst of beating the rest of the competition.

Management level

These are individuals who excel at SEO and honed their knowledge extensively that they are tasked to handle people who do the SEO jobs. Management level SEO presents some great opportunities, including a large increase in earnings. For those who love the technical side of SEO, this job will not suit you since there will be less SEO and more board planning, HR meetings, and more.

Transition to other channels

SEO is a broad system that covers other things like keyword research, schema mark-up, social media marketing, and many more. According to SEO experts, the key to succeeding in SEO in 2021 and the future is to use an omnichannel approach. You can transition and specialize in other areas such as YouTube/video marketing, or mobile phone marketing, even data-driven analytics.

Industry niche roles

The career opportunities that SEO presents are varied and can be industry-dependent. Many niche roles are waiting to be filled, like industry analyst positions, freelance SEO roles, recruitment, and search engine marketing programs. 

Vendor/engine jobs

Imagine working with Google, Ask, Yahoo, Bing, and other engine or vendor companies. There is great upside for vendors if they hire SEO’s in their ranks since search engines cater to search marketers. 

Ways to Make Money with SEO

A lot of people know that SEO can be a lucrative online activity, but what they don’t understand is how to actually earn real cash with it. Most people think that all it takes to be successful at SEO is to target a lucrative keyword, get good rankings, attract visitors, and sell them what they’re searching for. 

But SEO is not as simple as that. First, your competitors are also targeting the same lucrative keywords and there is only one spot on the SERP. Furthermore, not all people who use search engines have an immediate intent to buy. Those who focus on instant buying keywords will miss out on the other searches and lose revenue.

Here are some ways you can do to earn money with SEO:

Become an SEO specialist

If creating a business is too overwhelming for you, you can also make money with SEO by being an SEO freelancer or what others call a digital marketing freelancer. What’s good about being a freelancer is that it can be done part-time, and you can offer your skills for a specific part of SEO that you enjoy doing. 

For instance, if you like the backlinking part of SEO, you can offer your services to SEO agencies and webmasters. You can also use freelancer platforms like Upwork to advertise your SEO skills and find clients.

Build an e-commerce store and sell directly

If you have ample knowledge of SEO, you can build an online store and use organic search engine traffic to drive visitors to your store so you can earn money. This is the most apparent way of making money with SEO. You rank a keyword that people will use to find your product, and if you’re good enough to achieve this, then the people clicking through your website might spend their money buying your product. 

The problem with this approach is that it is considered the low-hanging fruit of SEO, so everyone wants a piece of it. Many of your competitors will probably use the same SEO technique, there will be much competition for the keywords, and it will be quite difficult to rank.

Create a blog and earn through Ads

One great way to make money with SEO is through paid advertising. You can create a blog. Use your SEO skills to find a niche that generates a high volume of traffic and doesn’t have a high level of competition. Once you’ve found the right niche, you can create your website. Write meaningful content, set it up so that the search engines like it, and have it monetized.

You can have your blog monetized either by Ad programs like Google Adsense or Media.net. You can also use custom banner ads and sponsored content to earn money from your blog. Remember that monetizing your blog through paid ads is one of the passive ways to earn since you’re paid through clicks and traffic volume.

Affiliate marketing

With exceptional skills, you can also make money with SEO online by making a blog and earning from affiliate sales. The concept is similar to that of Ad revenues, but this one has a higher profit margin. You can build a site as big as that of popular affiliate sites like The Wirecutter, or as simple as a one-person blog. The goal is to build a loyal readership through meaningful optimized content so that your readers will buy through your affiliate links. 

The ideal content for affiliate posts is product reviews and ‘best of’ posts since searchers who use these keywords are mostly in the buying phase. So they are most likely to buy from your link if they go to your site.

Start an SEO business

Many website owners want to increase website traffic, and they are clueless on how to achieve it other than adding a few blog posts. They usually employ the help of SEO professionals to do the job for them. This is where your SEO skills will be put to good use by offering SEO services to clients who wish to optimize their sites and their online business. 

You have to know that starting your own SEO business can be very taxing. It requires tons of hard work, and you have to manage your client’s expectations. It’s important to maintain a good working relationship with them. The SEO industry will continue to grow, so the potential to succeed is high. But client management can be stressful at times, and you need to hire other skilled people to help you with the business.

Sell online SEO courses

Selling your online SEO courses is one of the best ways to make money with SEO. If you have been practicing SEO for a time, and feel like you have enough knowledge to share with other interested individuals, you can try sharing your skills through a course. Package your knowledge and skills, and share your experience with other people. Most of the SEO courses available on the internet are low-quality courses, so it’s your opportunity to make a positive change and create a unique and useful course that would benefit people interested in learning the trade.

Before selling your course, you need to ensure first that you have an audience or followers who are willing to take your online course. You can build an audience by sharing your SEO know-how for free in your blog, YouTube channel, and Facebook Live events. It’s a great way of building up your credibility and authority in SEO so that more people will trust you and be more inclined to enroll in your courses.

Building an email list

Build an authority site, cover every possible keyword in your field. This will result in a higher rank and a high volume of visitors for thousands of keywords. But refrain from selling to them outright, as they are just searching for information. Instead, you will invite them to subscribe to your email list using pop-ups. 

The next step is to enable an email sequence and send them regularly to those who subscribed to your email list. You can now finally sell from those emails. The key is to learn how to reach more people, and when you’ve learned to reach a big crowd, it would be a lot easier to make money. 

Build online credibility

Many online businesses think that it is incredibly essential to building a good reputation and credibility to succeed. SEO is one of the best ways to promote your credibility online. Search engines serve as the gauge of credibility for online reputation, as people think that being on the first page of search results means that the site can be trusted and is somehow an expert on the field.

Just the mere sight of your business or website on the first page of Google search will improve your brand awareness, making it easier to sell later. Having strong SEO skills to make your website rank in Google will translate to better credibility and increased sales later on.

Offer SEO copywriting services

You can also make money with SEO by offering copywriting services. SEO writers are those who write optimized content to rank higher on search engines. Some generalists don’t have a specific niche, which unfortunately cannot charge higher rates and get classified with the rest of the generalist writers offering the same services.

What you need to be is someone who writes authoritative content geared towards a specific niche. But more than that, you have excellent SEO knowledge, including how to optimize the content for search engines by adding relevant keywords, backlinks, metadata, and more.

SEO writers can work from the comfort of their homes, work for agencies and write content for their clients, or work directly for website owners.

Help other entrepreneurs

Having a strong SEO background will allow you to help other struggling entrepreneurs and earn money in the process. If you have learned how to get better search results and your website is ranking high in search engines, there will be a lot of website owners who will ask for your help and are willing to pay just to learn from you.

You can make money with SEO by charging fellow entrepreneurs for your time and effort in helping them achieve what your website has achieved. You can do this as a side hustle or another form of income.

Build and sell SEO software

If you have reached and attained the SEO knowledge required, you can build or develop SEO software and sell it in the market. Many SEO agencies end up crossing over to the SEO software business. The earning potential is high, and it is less stressful than client management. 

Being an SEO professional is ideal as SEO software builders because you have the proper experience and awareness of what the market needs. You will try to solve the problems that you have personally encountered and try to incorporate solutions into your software.

Sell micro-SEO services

To effectively accomplish an SEO campaign, there are various tasks that need to be done. Sometimes, it takes more than one person or team to do the tasks. There is content writing, backlink building, keyword research, outreach for social media, and a lot more. 

If you have mastered any of these common micro-SEO tasks, you can offer your services to SEO agencies or any company that needs the service.

Takeaway

As you may now realize, there is a vast range of opportunities to earn and make money with SEO. By investing time to learn the basics of the trade, you’ll possess a foundational skill needed for you to bring value to your online projects,  and you can even start your own online business. 

What’s great about SEO is that you don’t have to be an expert to make money with it. Once you’ve mastered the basics, applied the learnings and results to show, you’ll be able to make serious money from it. 

Hope this helps! You can also read our article that talks further about how to become a freelance SEO specialist, which is also a good career that will help you earn lots of dollars.