SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. It involves the process of improving your website’s quality, visibility, and traffic. As long as a company has a website and active projects, they need an SEO specialist. To secure jobs in SEO, you need to show to future employers or any prospective client that you have the skills to produce high-quality content.
Getting hands-on experience through SEO projects is one approach to enhance your abilities. Working on several daily tasks related to SEO will help you build a portfolio that demonstrates your skills and convinces potential employers that you’re the right person for the job. This article details the best SEO projects to help you build an impressive portfolio and land your dream job.
5 Skills That SEO Projects Can Help You Practice
There are certain skills that are essential if you want to excel as an SEO specialist. By showing your proficiency in SEO task management, you can demonstrate to a hiring manager that you are well equipped and can work efficiently to improve a company’s business, develop a content strategy, and enhance its website.
- Content marketing. Content marketers are involved in content creation and distribution. It focuses on producing high-quality content that will add value to a company’s website and social media on a daily basis. As an SEO manager, you need to create a comprehensive list of topics and determine what content is valuable to the company.
- Social media marketing. You should be proficient in your social media skills and be able to build a company’s social media (SM) profile, attract followers, promote the business, and turn those followers into customers. This is a skill that every SEO specialist should have as it is an important business aspect in the world today.
- Copywriting and editing. This skill is important for every SEO manager. You need to be able to create an effective SEO strategy, communicate with your customers/clients and convert their visits to your website.
- Programming skills. As an SEO professional having skills in workflow tools and programming languages such as hypertext markup language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS) will help you stand out. The ability to code, format, and add text on a website might help you land your next job.
- Link-building skills. It is essential for website content to have external and internal links. They help to increase the quality of your website and generate traffic that may lead to conversions. This practice involves attracting inbound links to your website from other sources.
Best SEO Project Ideas for Beginners
There are several project ideas to showcase your SEO skills in your portfolio. However, you have to know exactly which ones are best for you based on your skill level. This section will provide you with some useful project ideas for beginners.
Website Reports
- SEO Skills Practiced: Reports, editing, writing
This is an excellent project for beginners as it entails creating and evaluating analytical reports for a website in order to analyze its SEO health and determine its rank. This is a task that every SEO professional should be familiar with and would be ideal to have in your portfolio.
Website Audits
- SEO Skills Practiced: Analytics, website optimization
This project is a more complex version of the previous project we mentioned. Evaluating a website’s online presence exposes the weaknesses regarding its SEO strategy and how these affect its performance and traffic. This project will be great for your portfolio as it is one of the most important aspects of website optimization.
Blog Posts
- SEO Skills Practiced: Writing, copywriting, editing, link building
This is the ideal beginner project as you can demonstrate your ability to use keywords and help improve a website’s online presence. The use of specific keywords in a blog is essential as it makes a website visible to a larger audience. Working on this project will improve your SEO skills and introduce you to a deeper aspect of SEO.
Portfolio Websites
- SEO Skills Practiced: Writing, copywriting, programming skills, editing, content marketing
A portfolio website is common among professionals in tech, SEO, and freelancers in general. They can demonstrate your skills by including projects that you’ve worked on, clients’ testimonials, and even information about your professional life. It is recommended to include a keyword-rich blog on the website to reach a wider target audience which can potentially help you to stand out.
Competitive Website Analysis
- SEO Skills Practiced: Analytics, website optimization
Another excellent way to showcase your skills is by comparing two websites’ SEO strategies. To begin working on this project, choose a website from an industry that interests you and research their competitors’ SEO strategies. The information gained from this competitive analysis would then be used to determine how to outrank them.
Best Intermediate SEO Project Ideas
The projects you add to your portfolio as an intermediate skill level SEO specialist will have to show that you are skilled and experienced in the field. The following are some project ideas to showcase to employers to help you achieve your goal of advancing your career path.
SEO Website Strategy
- SEO Skills Practiced: Website optimization, content marketing
This is an intermediate-level project as it requires experience in SEO strategies which are employed to assist a business in establishing a foundation for its future projects. You will increase the visibility of a website’s search engine results pages (SERP) by optimizing its content by topic. This project will help you assist in the process of enhancing search engine traffic.
Search Engine Marketing
- SEO Skills Practiced: Content marketing, copywriting, editing
This project increases your website’s visibility through ads and is an excellent way to attract paying customers. With paid ads, your website may not be at the top of the list but will show on most search engine pages and will bring paid traffic to your website. This project will help you learn search engine marketing (SEM) skills and give you an added advantage in the job market.
Website Analytics Study
- SEO Skills Practiced: Analysis, research, optimization
A website analytics study can assist you in monitoring your competitors and increasing traffic with minimal effort. It entails identifying measures based on your company’s and users’ objectives, as well as analyzing data from your website to assess whether or not those objectives were met. It can assist you in developing a strategy to improve user experience.
Keyword Research
- SEO Skills Practiced: Research, content marketing, copywriting
Keyword research is what helps you find the keywords to use in your website to make it rank higher than others. It is one of the most important aspects of SEO as you can increase website traffic by using keywords that people search for and making the answer appear precisely when they search for it. This is one of the best ways to demonstrate your SEO skills.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
- SEO Skills Practiced: Social media marketing, content marketing, copywriting
A social media marketing strategy defines how a company’s social media will be run. Through this strategy, you can decide how to run a profile, the best way to engage with clients, and how to promote the company. It also includes selecting when this strategy should be implemented and how it will benefit a business.
Social media is currently one of the most extensively used tools for business promotion, and having knowledge of this technology will be beneficial to you as an SEO specialist. Your social media project should show your expertise in this field.
Advanced SEO Project Ideas
As an advanced-level professional, your projects should represent your abilities and show clients that you are highly experienced, skilled, and can deliver high-quality work. Your portfolio should include technical SEO projects that show your mastery. Below is a list of some projects that you can work on to develop advanced skills.
SWOT Analysis
- SEO Skills Practiced: Research, analysis
A business can identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) by evaluating its website’s present and future growth. A SWOT analysis can help you develop plans to improve a website, stay ahead of the competition, and stand out. A project on this will show potential employers that you have the skills necessary to grow their website.
Content Optimization
- SEO Skills Practiced: Content marketing, writing, copywriting, editing, link building
Content optimization helps to make a website more appealing to search engines and users. It involves keywords, content quality, relevant links, title tags, and meta tags. Content optimization makes it easy for the search engine to find and index the website and make it rank in SERPs. With content optimization, your website will also reach more Internet users.
On-Page Optimization
- SEO Skills Practiced: Research, writing, link building, copywriting, editing
On-page optimization refers to the measures that you take to improve a website’s ranking on search engines. It includes actions involving keyword placement, keyword density, meta descriptions, title tags, and user experience. Having a project on this topic will demonstrate to the hiring team that you have the skills to improve their website’s ranking in search engines.
Usability and Information Architecture
- SEO Skills Practiced: Research, analysis, content marketing, copywriting
Information architecture is an important aspect of SEO. It involves the arrangement or organization of content on your website and includes how folders are designed, arranged, and labeled. This can help to increase or decrease traffic on a website based on how appealing it is to users.
If the content on a website is useful, it will increase its conversion rate, and this is why it is important to maintain good usability and information architecture on a website. Demonstrating these skills to a prospective client may help you stand out among others.
Local SEO Strategy
- SEO Skills Practiced: Content marketing, link building, research, analysis
This is a strategy that will help a website rank on local search engine results. This means that the website will be more visible to users in the company’s vicinity. This ensures that your website is reaching people that need and can use your services.
A local SEO strategy is primarily suitable for service providers who need local clients. You can use this project to land a job with a regional company that focuses on providing services in a specific location.
SEO Starter Project Templates
SEO starter project templates are used as a guide to regulate the tasks you use for projects. They can be used as a framework for precisely what needs to be created in order to rank highly on search engines. The list below includes a few templates that can help you get started with your projects.
- SEO audit template. This template will help you see how optimized a website is, spot an issue or threat, and make adjustments in a short amount of time. It may also help you increase website traffic. It includes on-page and off-page features, content tweaks, and technical concerns.
- On-page SEO template. This template is designed to help you use keywords on a website and increase your Google rankings. It can be used to optimize blog posts, ecommerce product pages, and local services pages. It is available in Word, Google Docs, and PDF formats.
- Monthly SEO report. This template will help you streamline your reporting for internal and external clients and can be easily understood by anyone. It is available in Word, Google Docs, and PDF formats and can show the impact of your SEO efforts.
- Content creation template. This template will show you how to make outstanding titles and introductions, and provide you with other tips to help you develop and publish exceptional content that will attract online traffic.
- Blog post templates. These templates can be used for “how-to,” list-based, “what-is,” pillar pages, infographics, and newsjacking posts. While using this template, you won’t have to start a blog process from scratch and can help to prevent writer’s block.
Next Steps: Start Organizing Your SEO Portfolio
A portfolio is the best way of showcasing your skills to potential employers, so it is important to include impressive projects. One great thing about a portfolio is that you can showcase your demo work as a beginner without any job experience. All you have to do is find the best project ideas like the ones we have listed and work with templates to deliver your best work.
As an intermediate or advanced-level SEO expert, your portfolio can include testimonials from previous projects and clients. For beginners, you can work on several projects as practice to help you improve and select the best of them to show potential employers. Below are a few tips to help you build an impressive portfolio.
"Career Karma entered my life when I needed it most and quickly helped me match with a bootcamp. Two months after graduating, I found my dream job that aligned with my values and goals in life!"
Venus, Software Engineer at Rockbot
Professional Information
Your portfolio should start with your personal and professional information, such as your name, contact details, company name, website address, and SEO specialization. With this outline, the prospective client knows what to expect on your page and how to contact you if they choose to hire you.
Unique Content
The content in your portfolio should be unique and of high quality, and you should not include duplicate content or projects. You can choose to use any of the numerous SEO templates that are available on the Internet as a guide, but make sure to make your work unique as this will help your portfolio rank higher.
Website Domain and Hosting
Obtaining a domain name will make your portfolio website more search engine friendly, so your target audience may be able to find you more easily. Your domain name should be brief, without numbers, and must include relevant keywords. You may also want to host your website on a subfolder, subdomain, or separate domain, with the first two being preferred.
SEO Projects FAQ
Some SEO tools that you will want to familiarize yourself with to work in the field are Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Answer the Public, Moz, SEMRush, Keywords Everywhere, and Ahrefs.
There are three main types of SEO including, on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. On-page SEO refers to anything on your web page like blog posts, product copy, and web copy. Off-page SEO refers to anything that happens outside of your website that helps with your SEO strategy, and technical SEO is the technical action taken to improve your search rankings.
To start SEO at home, you can take advantage of the wide range of online courses available. Work on several projects for hands-on experience and choose your best projects to build your portfolio. You can then begin to apply for jobs utilizing one or more of the multiple online marketplaces available.
Some types of SEO content are blog posts, product pages, infographics, videos, trending content, “how-to” guides, lists, short-form content, articles, slideshows, directories, glossaries, and pillar and evergreen content.
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