What should a SEO specialist do in 2018?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Old-school methods have already completely outlived their usefulness, SEO has long gone beyond just the frequency of the appearance of a keyword in the text and the purchase of links and achieving results such as "1000 people a day visited the site" - this is the result (but not shit). Modern SEO has become very close with marketing in general, PR and other things. This is my humble vision, certainly not the full picture.
But here’s what haunts me (and my peace is disturbed by silence, to questions like “How to find out the effectiveness of Y if now A = X”), what tasks should a SEO specialist (a full-time SEO specialist) do in 2018 with a project entrusted to him (goods b2b, a bit b2c)?
As they tell me, a quite normal monthly rate in terms of the amount of work is as follows:
- Purchase of links
- Dragging on landing pages (title, meta, paragraph, h1, h2 etc)
- Drop current positions

Answer 1

Analyze site behavioral factors, reduce bounce rate, track problematic moments (for example, try to simplify the checkout process in the shopping cart so that fewer people leave). And to SEO, the plus is huge, and traffic will increase, and sales will grow.
From complex: use user experience, expand the site structure, use static filters - this way you will cover more semantics and get more traffic much faster

Answer 2

Yes, the same as in 2017, search engines have not created any radical problems over the past year on any project

Answer 3

Retrain as a directologist or targetologist. Exhaust immediately, and not after ~ six months, you do different projects not in parallel, but sequentially - it's easier, and as a result, you implement more projects in the same period.
And traffic from organics will come by itself later, if initially the content is unique and titles with h1, etc. are registered.