Professional SEO & Google Discover Services by Lily Ray

I started doing SEO while I was a junior at NYU studying Politics and Spanish. I was lucky enough to find a social media marketing internship at a startup called Examville, where SEO ‘meta tagging’ and monitoring Google Analytics were part of my daily tasks. Ah, the good old days when SEO was simple!

Growing up, my father was a leading software engineer at Sun Microsystems (later Oracle), my mother was a technical writer, and my brother was an incredibly talented web developer since the age of 9. As a result, I spent a lot of my childhood on computers. I wrote stories, kept an online journal, played online games, chatted in virtual chatrooms, learned HTML and how to build websites, and basically grew up inside the burgeoning “world wide web” and its brand new baby search engines.

Having this background made me fall instantly in love with SEO – it just always made intuitive sense to me. Connecting the dots between understanding searchers’ needs and how they search, and providing relevant, targeted content to answer their questions felt natural to me from day one. I also had experience in creative writing and journalism, as well as the technical chops to edit websites and modify HTML/CSS. SEO is a unique field, in that it requires creativity, marketing skills, people skills, writing skills, and technical skills, so I was thrilled to discover that there was a career that miraculously tied all of my strengths together.

Between a couple of brief stints in start-up and in-house environments, I found myself doing SEO all day long, even after work, and I couldn’t get enough! I was building websites for friends and family and learning so many new things about what it took to make SEO work. It was thrilling to see my websites on the front page of Google, ranking in top positions for keywords thousands of people searched for every month. I obsessively monitored my websites’ traffic in real time, constantly learning new skills to drive more and better visitors.

I eventually joined the digital marketing agency Flying Point Digital. After 6 awesome years building, and eventually leading, Flying Point’s SEO department  (including helping the company to be acquired by Women’s Marketing – later Stella Rising), I decided to move onto a new agency, Amsive (formerly Path Interactive). I currently serve as the VP, SEO Strategy & Research, managing a spectacular, award-winning team of about 30+ SEO professionals. (Our team quadrupled in size in 4 years!)

The majority of my career experience in SEO has been in an agency environment. This means every day I go to work not knowing what to expect; there is almost always a big development with one or more of my many clients, which requires immediate attention from our team. Maybe a website went down or got hacked; maybe Google updated its algorithm (as it does, thousands of times per year); maybe an important backlink was lost that impacted performance; maybe a client decided to migrate their website to a new domain without telling us!

Whatever the case may be, I help my SEO team at Amsive to efficiently anticipate and address these issues while implementing smart, strategic SEO programs for dozens of clients. We make sure every client’s website is as SEO-compliant as possible at all times, and stay in tune with new SEO developments as they roll out. Since Google’s algorithms constantly change and websites are also constantly updated, the work never ends! But our team does an amazing job using a variety of cutting-edge SEO technology to monitor our clients’ day-to-day performance across various search engines and staying one step ahead to achieve consistent SEO success.

I take pride in the creativity and passion that fuels the work that we do as a team at Amsive . We wake up every morning ready to come up with creative ideas to solve problems and always stay one step ahead of the competition.

To put it simply, SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of building or editing your website so it is as easy as possible for search engines to understand your content, allowing it to appear up top in the organic search results for the keywords and queries you care about. As SEO’s we advise on hundreds of different search engine ranking factors and how to make your website as technically compliant, easy to use, and well-optimized as possible. This includes structural, topical, and editorial content recommendations, site architecture recommendations, improving E-E-A-T, fixing technical problems, reducing page load times, adding required tags to your source code, building high-quality links to your site, and incorporating targeted keywords in places where search engines look for them. And this barely scratches the surface!

SEO is an exciting long-term marketing strategy that requires patience and persistence; it won’t work overnight. But a long-term investment in SEO means your business can potentially benefit from free, high-quality traffic to your website for years to come. One year of investing in SEO could result in a few years of free organic traffic as a result. On the flipside,  if you only leverage paid search (PPC) or Facebook advertising for your business, your advertisement will disappear the minute you stop putting dollars behind it.

There are dozens of online resources that explain SEO in more detail – the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart is the Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz, as this one gave me the official kick-start into my SEO career.

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