March 22, 2020 | 4 min read
Do you want a career in SEO? Then you need some skills to succeed and get the job you want. Here are eight of the skill managers needed to hire an SEO professional. SEO professionals come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some of them were programmers, others were traditional marketers, entrepreneurs, journalists and others were once rappers.
In my company, our SEO team gets a lot of work and has recently grown, so I spend a lot of time interviewing open job candidates. SEO professionals have different expertise and skills, but there are some essential things I look for in every candidate.
This is not an long list, and I’m quite sure there are a many people who have succeeded without these expertise and skills.
Find out the Eight best skills when hiring SEO professional.
It's very difficult to measure, but it's important for Digital marketing expert or SEO professionals to relate to the analytical mind and be able to distinguish between jobs.
You need SEO professional that can answer the following questions.
Ask these questions to SEO professional and get the best answer that satisfied your need.
SEO professionals who can research their keywords and the content of the authors involved are incredibly valuable. We are not just talking about writing such articles or speaking at conferences. I want SEO that convinces internal teams and clients to do the right thing, and they have speaking and writing skills in meetings, group writing, case studies, POV, and so on. SEO requires not only confidence, but also the ability to be sensitive to complex ideas and ideas that non-SEO professionals can understand and make decisions.
As SEO experts, we recommend page speed, rendering, slow loading, server-side redirection, microdata tags, and basic HTML tags. All of these conversations are useful if you can talk to the developer and provide insight, not just ask.
Understanding where a developer comes from is extremely helpful in resolving disagreements when they are deterred. It is also important to assess the level of effort compared to the impact of SEO. I'm not saying that SEO professionals need to be able to write code, but they need to understand the coding implications of the changes they require and what developers insist on are common mistakes and objections, and even how to overcome them. There are hundreds of crazy technical things that are easy to find even with basic programming knowledge.
During my career, I have built many wonderful relationships and learned a lot by going to a conference bar. However, to do this, you cannot be creepy and you must be able to communicate with others. You must remember a conference bar is not a place to find a new girlfriend / boyfriend, but it is a great place to talk about SEO theory and strategy. No one wants to hear about this particular problem, which only applies to your site and takes 10 minutes to explain (unless you always buy drinks). However, they would love to hear about new and exciting things
If they can log in to Adobe or Google Analytics and get their data, SEO professionals can save a lot of time. A proper SEO strategy also requires basic information about business KPIs. I give my team the opportunity to get Adobe and Google Analytics certification, because even though they don't use data, understanding helps - but now we get the data. If you can't get and segment your data, you may lose insight.
Just to exclude the data is not a demanding job, sometime we need some special ideas from the SEO expert. I met many SEO professional who cloud not perform the simplest tasks in Excel. Vlookups, concatenates, and IF statements (473 others - seriously 476 included in Excel) should be part of every SEO toolkit.
What I love and hate about working in SEO is that it doesn't just stop at 5pm. Marketing is one of the jobs you leave in the office every night. It stays with you. To have truly great SEO nowadays, you have an inward engine that makes you learn. Whether it's a new programming language, a new framework (WordPress, React, Angular, etc.), new search engines like Schema or AMP, or an understanding of machine learning, there's always something to learn.
The candidates at the top of my recruitment list are those who have their own project sites nearby or who create their own tools to solve their problems. For example: Using the Webmaster Tools API to get data for reporting and automated formatting. You just hired this person.
SEO also requires adaptability and skin thickness. Our industry is changing, and sometimes we have to admit to our customers that submitting to directories, cutting pages, destroying links, or other things we once suggested are now the best ideas.
We deal with a lot of ups and downs in the SEO industry – and often at a fast pace. It’s important to sometimes take a step back and remember that we aren’t saving lives, we’re just doing marketing. As stressful as the job can be, most of it can wait till tomorrow. A sense of humor goes a long way toward making our jobs a lot more enjoyable and productive.
Who is your target? How will you get traffic? What will the traffic do once they are there? Is your site mobile friendly? All of these play a part in the success of a website.
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