First and Second Week at Second Eclipse/ FCDC Tech SEO Internship

“I’m depressed.”

That was the WhatsApp message I sent to my wife.

We had just completed a call with Chima. The message was to work extra hard, practice, and continuously build in public.

My wife called back. She didn’t reply to the message.

Her response was: “Babe, please don’t be depressed. I know you always find your way around anything you want to achieve. But if this tech SEO thing will bring you depression, please leave it. We’ll be fine.”

I smiled. 4eva was scared. But a bit relieved. I was shit scared feeling I was doing enough.

But I pushed through. As the internship barrier became stiffer, I became stronger.

I built it in public. I got featured on podcasts. I became friends with experts in the SEO place. I found a new, exciting, and always ready-to-help community. I ranked my website for several relevant keywords. I scored 100% in the tech SEO assessment. And I landed an internship position.

First, all these wouldn’t have been possible if not for the extremely brilliant Chima. Thank you for everything you’re doing with the FCDC. You worked day and night to ensure the success of this cohort. I’m very grateful for the help you’re offering folks in the developing world.

The only way to thank you better is to give back to the community. And that, I won’t stop doing.

And secondly, Aleyda. 

Wow! You’re simply amazing. You gave everything to us; your time, expertise, and resources. Worth millions of dollars, which we can’t possibly afford at this level. But you have to use, completely gratis. Thank you.

I want you to know that you’ve literally multiplied yourself by 10 amazing folks. And I’m sure that we will all follow in your footsteps; to be great SEOs, supporting and giving back to the community.

Thank you, Aleyda.

Last but never least, special thanks to brands that supported us with tools to make the learning practical. 

Thank you, the team at Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Semrush, Wix, Neural Text, and Tomek Rudzki. Everyone who supported us with a like, retweet, and quote retweet. Thank you.

Internship at Second Eclipse

1st of August, I got Chima’s email. That was the best email I got that day. I’ve been paired with Second Eclipse, an end-to-end content marketing, SEO, and B2B digital strategy services firm in the US.

We work with our clients to flawlessly advance their leads through each step of the buyer’s journey to becoming loyal customers. We serve customers in the legal, healthcare, financial services, and SaaS sector.

From email to Slack, to Google Workspace, the fun began. My day 1 was pretty onboarding and I started solving problems while learning, almost immediately.

After the team welcome. I was asked to share what I learned from Aleyda and to talk about the FCDC program. 

I thought to myself: I would have loved this question if it were on a call. Writing would do justice to me here. But I wrote:

Then later in the week, I had a call with Jon, and the 15 minutes call, up to almost 1 hour. It had interesting conversations talking about Second Eclipse and the journey so far.

Apparently, Jon wanted me to grow and he’s all ready to support me. We talked about my mission, vision, and values- and he immediately connected me to those working on projects that aligned with my interest. So, I’m all in for Schema, GA4, data science, and automation.

Week 1 at Second Eclipse 

My task was to update the URL structure of a website. We needed to nest 99 URLs into their relevant parent pages. It was an ongoing website migration project.

I did this by heading to the page attribute section of each URL, then I selected the relevant parent pages. Easy right? Yeah, it’s a WordPress thing.

Then, I updated the URLs of the main pages. 

After this, I checked to make sure all the URLs were redirected properly and also updated all the top navigation links, and internal links, so they don’t point to the old URL that you just updated.

With the Redirection plugin, some of the URLs are redirected automatically.  And this brought about redirecting chains; which is bad for the user experience and the bots.

I told Evan, my guide and he requested I delete the redirection and do it manually.

With the redirection plugin, I reset the URLs. Noting that Source URL is the old URL while Target URL is the new URL.

It didn’t work when I tested it, but Evan asked that I clear the cache. I did use WP Rocket, and URLs began to redirect perfectly.

Truth is: my first week was all cruise. Aleyda has taught me all that I did in the first week. Just some agency-based difference, but I’ve been taught the big picture.

Thank you, Aleyda.

Week 2 at Second Eclipse 

My second week started with research. 

Evan wanted me to find quick-win keywords that two of our clients can leverage to at least, appear on page 1 of Google SERPs.

In the task, I was expected to document everything from our top competitors’ title tags, schema, metadata, content, backlinks, and anything I think our clients’ page is lacking that competitors ranking #1-#5 are doing better than us. 

I got to work and every point of the research was pretty interesting. This task took 3 days, but it was worth it.

The highlights of the tasks for me were when I provided actionable recommendations on how our clients can rank better than their competitors on Page 1.

I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again. The SemRush Keyword Gap Analysis feature is underestimated. That tool is magical.

Some of the pointers I raised were:

• Update meta description to xyz
• Add image about xyz
• Add video about xyz
• Update schema to xyz
• Add xyz H2 tags, etc.

The last two days of last week were schema.

I generated persons’ schemas for some clients and implemented them on their websites. Also, I generated local business schemas for almost 25 locations.

Again. Aleyda taught us all of these.

I sense challenges

It’s just two weeks of internship, and I’m just super proud that Aleyda left no stone unturned. She covered everything. There’s hardly a term mentioned that I’ve not heard about or don’t know what to do.

From keyword cannibalization to canonical, inlinks, schema, etc. Everything.

But I’m scared. Kinda.

I sense challenges. I sense solving hard problems. I sense staying up all night looking for those tiny little bits holding back the client’s website on the #1 of SERPs.

But I’ll crush it. Any day, any time.

The journey through learning has prepared me enough to face any technical SEO challenges. So, bring it on.

I’ll crush it.