El SEO in United States – Daniel Pérez

How did an English teacher become interested in the SEO world?

I think I’ve always had the vocation to teach everything I’ve learned and I’m still learning. I think it comes from my mother who is a primary school teacher. I used to teach English every Saturday at the university where I studied because I thought that experience would be good for my professional career. Although I always knew that being a teacher was not going to be my profession for the rest of my life. I was an English teacher and also an advertising student, my true passion.

First I worked for different advertising agencies in my country, Venezuela, as a community manager. Then, for a marketing agency, there I entered the world of SEO and my life changed.

What does SEO mean to you?

If we talk about SEO as a concept, I define it as the practice to increase the quality and quantity of traffic of a website through a set of tools and optimization techniques.

Personally, SEO for me means a digital universe full of challenges and continuous learning. Due to the changing rules of the Google algorithm and the modernization of techniques to optimize a website.

It seems that for all those who are out of this world SEO is something strange, what do your family and friends say when you explain what your work is?

I consider that it is the biggest challenge that every SEO specialist has today. Many of my friends think that the only thing I do is call Google, tell them that I have a very interesting website and at 2 am I am already on the first page of results. I try to talk to my parents about this topic on a regular basis, but sometimes I feel that I confuse them more and more. My brothers, even if they use a lot of internet and their search engines, prefer not to go into details.

Other times what has happened to me is that I tell people that I am an SEO specialist and they think I mean that I am the CEO of an important company. So you’ll see how I have to manage to explain myself.

You have also worked for companies in very different sectors, which one do you enjoy the most? Do you have any anecdote?

I have been fortunate to work with different types of clients. As an anecdote I tell you that I once had a client who was a Miami attorney in favor of the legalization of medical marijuana in the state of Florida. A very controversial issue because of the diversity of opinions that exist about it. At that time I was a newbie and I did not know how to write content for a client of that type.

There were 3 types of readers on the blog: young people interested in the approval of the law because they thought it would be a matter of time before they would also pass a law on recreational marijuana, others with relatives or friends who really needed approval, and a third group would not. I agreed. Every publication I made, whether it was on social networks or on the blog of the website was a pitched battle, but from the negative we can get the positive, we were attracting a lot of traffic to the web!

In your opinion, what qualities do you need to be a good SEO specialist?

1. Creativity when developing strategies, plans and content.
2. Analytical and technical capacity.
3. Continuous learning and being self-taught.
4. Understand the search engines and be aware of your changes and updates.
5. Adaptability.
6. Curiosity.
7. Passion. Because if you see it from outside it’s a very boring world.

Is the vision we have in the Spanish-speaking countries of SEO different from the one we have in the United States?

Yes, in the United States there is a more open perception about SEO. Not everyone knows it and they talk about it on the street, but there is some knowledge on the subject. Although lately I have seen growth on SEO among Spanish speakers, there are more and more bloggers and marketing agencies that dare to talk about SEO.

You have worked for both Spanish-speaking agencies and American companies, how does language affect the design of a strategy?

Language is a very important tool for an SEO strategy. Personally, I have had a lot of experience with companies that handle both the American and Hispanic markets. It is essential that the translation of a website be completely natural and human and not mechanized. An automatic software will always have some failure, either due to a context or orthographic error.

Doing the SEO of a company in two different languages ​​involves twice as much work. The keywords you choose to use and the way in which you will create the content for users will always be different. It is also important to create your content with a neutral Spanish for the diversity of Spanish-speakers there is. There are always terms that have different meanings or contexts, for example: a Venezuelan speaks differently than a Spanish and vice versa.

The world of SEO is very extensive and has a lot of field to cover. There are more and more multilingual sites and I do not speak only Spanish or English. I have many friends who are translators and a new trend is that field is the localization of web pages, which not only involves the translation of the content of the file, but also to the modification of the functionalities or elements of the page taking into account the language and the country of destination of the product.

Are Texas companies interested in SEO experts?

Yes, it is a career with many opportunities and if you have talent and knowledge you can receive a great opportunity.

How does contracting work there, is it more by word of mouth or do they contact you through the internet?

I will speak according to my experience. I used several apps to search for a job like, Indeed, Zip Recruiter and LinkedIn, I went to different interviews and in the end I decided on the one I got on LinkedIn.