BroxtenDigital
How to become an SEO specialist usually has nothing to do with a marketing degree, and Dipa Gandhi is proof. She has a master's in animal physiology and biochemistry, and she learned everything she knows about SEO on the job, starting as a data entry hire.
I asked Dipa Gandhi, Director of SEO at 99 Calls and a Platinum Google Business Profile Product Expert, to walk through the path because it looks nothing like a straight line from biology to search.
How do you become an SEO specialist?
Dipa ended up in SEO, but that wasn't the goal. She left research and a few years doing mutual fund accounting, stepped back to start a family, and got back into work through a work-from-home data entry role at 99 Calls.
"That data entry actually turned into being organic SEO and lead generation," she told me. Fifteen years later, she runs the entire SEO operation for the company, and she was one of its first employees.
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Is it too late to change careers into SEO?
Dipa came up the hard way: animal physiology research, HIV research, mutual fund accounting at State Street, and then SEO. None of it was wasted, all of it eventually left behind, because loving a subject in school and loving the day-to-day work of it turned out to be two different things.
Her advice to her 20-something self: "if you have a set major in your mind, you want to finish off that major, you think, okay, this is what my life is going to revolve in for the rest of my life. It may not." Her read on timing: "it's never too late, but you definitely want to be happy."
How do you spot an entry-level task that's really a career?
When Dipa started, she didn't know what SEO was. Her day-to-day was updating client hours and fixing website stuff, nothing that felt like a real career track.
She learned the work had a name, and that changed everything. She'd been doing SEO work as data entry the whole time, and once she had the right label for it, she started digging into the field, learning what SEO actually stood for, and figuring out who the major players were.
What skill matters more than technical SEO?
I asked Dipa for the one soft skill young professionals should build for 2026, and she skipped anything technical.
"Being able to communicate well is going to get you so much further than any other technical skill that you might have," she said. Her hard-skill pick was learning to use AI, from ChatGPT to more advanced tools, as the thing that can answer a question when you don't yet know how to do something yourself.
Watch the full conversation
Watch the full episode with Dipa Gandhi on YouTube for the full story of her research-to-fund-accounting-to-SEO path and the LinkedIn habits she wishes she had started sooner.
Watch next: The BroxtenDigital Show - Episode 1: Andrew Prince
Trying to land your first role in advertising or marketing? Every episode is someone who built a career in this industry sharing what works. Subscribe on YouTube.