The main challenge with SEO work is to identify and correctly assess an SEO task's difficulty level and scope. SEO tasks from clients can be anything and everything, and their difficulty level varies greatly. Even though the project is usually agreed on and quoted for by the time you start working on it, you might be asked sometimes to help identify and estimate an SEO task from a linguist's perspective. Doing this is not an easy task, but it's definitely something that you can learn with some background knowledge of SEO and some experience. For this reason, we highly recommend that our translators complete the Learning Units for our internal SEO training.

Have you been given enough instructions on what you need to do? Are the instructions understandable - is it clear to you what the client wants to achieve with this task? Do the instructions specify the target audience and target countries and do you know where the keywords will be used? If the keywords will be used as the main terms for localizing the end-client's website, they will be visible content and should be grammatically correct, and probably frequently used, popular keywords. If the keywords will be used in non-visible copy, for example, for an Ads campaign to drive traffic to the end-client's website, the best keywords may actually be colloquial, ungrammatical keywords - the keywords users will actually type in the search engine.

The final output or deliverables depend heavily on the scope of the project. When our job is done, what does the client expect to get back? Is it just a list of translated or localised keywords? Is it search volume or price information for each of the suggested keywords? Is it additional notes and explanations about how we came to suggest these specific keywords? Did the client provide an existing file or template where we should record all this information?

What are the speed/throughput expectations for the task? What is this expectation based on, is it based on the number of keywords or something else? Is the expectation realistic considering the deliverables the client wants back? Localising a list of existing keywords will take a lot less time than researching search volume, providing alternatives, and including commentary on the keyword choices.

If the client has asked us to help them estimate the time for their project, we usually start by estimating one hour for every 5-10 keywords. The simpler the scope of the project, the more keywords you can get through in an hour. You should always flag it with your PM as soon as possible if you think that the time allocated for the project is not sufficient.

Does the client specify which tools to use? Is it their own proprietary tool or something that is generally available (such as Keyword Planner) and that you have used before? Is the client asking us to use their own account or are they expecting us to set up our accounts for any tools we need? If the client doesn't specify anything, we usually suggest to them that we use Google's Keyword Planner. The wiki page on Google's Keyword Planner has more information on how the tool actually works and what sort of data we can get using it.

• SEO - Search Engine Optimization
• iSEO/ISEO - International Search Engine Optimization
• MSEO - Multilingual Search Engine Optimization
• SEM - Search Engine Marketing
• SMO - Social Media Optimization
• SMM - Social Media Marketing