Search engines have not only changed the world from a consumer perspective but from a job seeker’s as well. Working in search is not only a viable career option but one that is in high demand.
For anyone who has an interest in search engines, here are a couple of real world career-level positions in the modern workforce that should be considered:
Search Engineer
Main goal for a search engineer at a company is to structure the company’s data into useful information groups that can help for grow their customer base as well as improve internal processes overall.
If you are interested in a search engineer position then a background in computer science, engineering, mathematics or information technology is best to have accroding to many career information hubs online.
Learning programming is a must but which specific language is debatable. The ones that seem to be most desired by companies are the following:
- Java
- SQL
- C++
- Python
- Scala
Search Engineers’ work is quite technical to say the least. Much of the work involves developing and operating search software, including indexing, query parsing and algorithms
If you want to read up in more detail about becoming a Search Engineer, Hired.com has an incredibly detailed page on it.
According to ZipRecruiter, the average annual salary for an SEO Engineer as of December 2020 is $65,289 a year in the US.
SEO Manager
Although many SEO projects can be done by a single SEO expert there many others that are simply too large to tackle singlehandely. The amount of SEO work needed for a website with 20 pages is not the same as SEO for a site with over 100,000 pages. For large projects, a team of SEO professionals may be needed. A person with strong leadership ability and vast SEO knowledge would serve as the SEO manager and keep the team the focused.
An MBA in business management and a solid understanding of modern SEO practices would be a good canidate for this role however a “taskmaster” with years of experience in both SEO and group leadership (instead of an MBA) woud be suitable as well. Once you get past keyword research, certain parts of SEO work can be reduced to data entry since they tend to be monatonous and detailed tasks (meta descriptions, header tags, etc.).
As for the pay, expect to make somewhere between 50K-100K (depending on company and experience) a year according to PayScale.