What is the best way to transition from a Social Media Manager role into a Technical SEO specialist?

All answers to this question.

Start by learning the basics of HTML, CSS, and specifically how JavaScript impacts crawling. In 2024, "Headless SEO" is a massive trend, so understanding how React or Vue sites render is a huge advantage. I suggest taking a specialized Technical SEO course and then building your own site from scratch. Try to break things—see what happens to your rankings when you mess up a robots.txt file or a canonical tag. Experience with tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb is non-negotiable for enterprise roles. Showing a recruiter a "Crawl Report" you've analyzed is worth more than any cert.

   Answered 2024-02-05 by Kimberly Walsh

Have you looked into the "Search Console" training offered by Google? It’s free and covers a lot of the technical reporting you'll need to master for any SEO role.

   Answered 2024-02-08 by David Smith

• David, I've started the GSC training, but I'm finding the "Index Coverage" reports a bit confusing. There are so many errors that seem to fix themselves and then reappear. I'm trying to find a mentor who can walk me through a real-world site migration so I can see how these technical issues are handled in real-time. It’s one thing to read about "301 redirects," but another thing entirely to map out 10,000 URLs during a domain change without losing all the existing "Link Equity."

     Commented 2024-02-10 by James Wilson

Learn how to use SQL and BigQuery. As you move into Enterprise SEO, you'll be dealing with millions of rows of data that Excel just can't handle. It’s a major "power skill."

   Answered 2024-02-13 by Thomas Moore

• Thomas is right. Data science is becoming a huge part of SEO. Being able to query your own data makes you much more independent and valuable to a technical marketing team.

     Commented 2024-02-15 by Rachel Green