Professional SEO 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 tagging and monitoring Google Analytics were part of my daily tasks.

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, so I spent a lot of my childhood on computers. I wrote stories and kept an online journal, I played games, learned HTML and how to build websites, and literally grew up alongside the burgeoning “world wide web” and its brand new search engines.

This background made me fall instantly in love with SEO – it just always made intuitive sense to me. I had experience in creative writing and journalism, a general love of the internet, as well as the technical chops to edit websites and modify HTML/CSS. SEO requires marketing skills, writing skills, and technical skills, so I was thrilled to discover that this job was simply the perfect fit for me.

Between a couple of brief stints in start-up and in-house environments, I was doing SEO all day long, and I couldn’t get enough! 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, I decided to move onto a new agency, Path Interactive. I currently serve as the SEO Director at Path Interactive managing a team of 8-10 SEO and social media professionals.

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 that requires immediate attention from our team. Maybe a website went down or got hacked, maybe Google updated its algorithm (as it does, ~500 times a year), maybe an important backlink was lost, maybe a client decided to migrate their website. Whatever the case may be, I help my SEO team at Path Interactive to efficiently 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 SEO technology to monitor our clients’ day-to-day performance across various search engines and staying one step ahead to achieve consistent SEO success.

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, 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. For example, one year of investing in SEO could result in a few years of free organic traffic as a result! On the flipside,  if you 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.