How to become an SEO specialist? How do you know what are the SEO skills for a professional search engine optimization? Important questions will be the focus of this detailed article. Grab your coffee and let's get started...
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The SEO skill is one of the most important and most important skills that the content owner or content creator must possess, because it has a very large role in search engines and leads the search results in the Google search engine and earns a lot of visits.
Although it has been around for two decades, SEO is not taught in many colleges or even mentioned in most marketing curricula.
Search engine optimization (SEO) professionals come from diverse backgrounds. Some are programmers, some are entrepreneurs, some are traditional marketers, journalists, and others.
Anyway, let's talk about the most important skills for success in SEO. We recommend reading What is SEO?
What are SEO skills?
There is not a consistent list of SEO skills that everyone needs, but there are a few things that SEO professionals will have depending on their level of experience and the job.
Mistakes you make when converting to your site
Critical thinking
This is difficult to measure, but it is important for SEO professionals to be able to have an analytical mind capable of distinguishing between correlation and causation.
An SEO professional should understand 3 basic things:
what happened.
Why "what happened" happened.
What should we do about it.
Some sample interview questions for SEO professionals include: “Suppose you and the client do not agree on what we should do. Take me through this meeting with them and your way of doing it? “
A good way to measure this is to ask them what their biggest problem was, how they identified it, how they solved it, and how they measured success.
There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but they help to get an idea of a person's thought process and how they handle problems.
It is best if they understand the problem from multiple angles and use data and logic in decision-making.
The ability to speak and write
Search engine optimization (SEO) professionals who can do a search for their keywords and the content they contain are incredibly valuable.
We're not just talking about writing articles like this or speaking at conferences.
A SEO that can convince internal teams and clients to do the right thing which comes from speaking in meetings, writing platforms, case studies, etc. All of these include speaking and writing skills.
It requires SEO not only confidence, but also the ability to turn complex ideas into concepts that non-SEO professionals can understand and make decisions with.
Strong writing skills are a must for anyone running an SEO campaign. Remember that SEO is a content-driven strategy, and SEO writing is an art form that not everyone is good at.
It is very difficult to weave keywords into your content without making it a little weird. There is nothing more painful than reading a blog or information page that is obviously full of keywords.
Readers see through it and so does Google. At the end of the day, bad writing can actually hamper your SEO progress.
Technical and programming skills
I'm sure there will be some controversy about this. I am equally sure that there are a large number of SEO professionals who are doing a great job right now without any programming knowledge whatsoever.
The truth is that they could do more work with some programming knowledge.
As SEO specialists, we make recommendations about page speed, rendering, slow loading, server-side redirects, microdata tags, and basic HTML tags.
All of these conversations are made easier if you can talk to the developer and provide insights instead of just demands.
Understanding where a programmer comes from when reviewing a problem is amazingly helpful in reconciling the differences.
This does not mean that SEO professionals need to be able to write code, but they do need to understand the coding implications of the changes they require and what this entails for developers, what common bugs and objections are, and even how to overcome them.
It is not enough for the SEO professional to copy the page speed report from Google and send it to the programmer, they need to understand what these changes are, what that means for the site, and the effort that goes into making them.
Technical knowledge also provides the ability to make your life easier, whether it's writing a quick Python script to automatically add an hreflang to an XML sitemap or organizing a quick data collection tool.
As search engines evolve to use more machine learning and natural language processing, there are a lot of cool things that SEO professionals can do with their existing data sets and some NLP libraries.
Today's SEO programmers are doing pretty amazing things with data and code that helps them gain an edge in insights and win business.
Technical knowledge enables programming to go deeper into how signals are crawled, how they are indexed, and how they are used to rank in search engines. It was clear which of them could not work and what could not realistically be done at the query level or at the site level.
Our knowledge of programming and our previous coursework in retrieval helps in understanding what was and was not possible. This is an invaluable feature.
Social skills
The SEO professional may have to participate in industry-related conferences or gatherings, and will certainly establish relationships with other people with similar interests even if virtually.
To do this you have to be able to get along socially with others. Some of the best conversations happen in the aisles of conferences, events, and get-togethers.
If you choose to attend these events, you'll need to keep them in check, we've all heard stories of one person being inappropriate. Don't be that person.
Lots of very savvy SEO professionals have sabotaged their careers with their behavior in gatherings or on social media. It's a great place to talk about SEO theory and tactics.
Convenient and private setup, without live blogging and tweeting, sometimes causes SEO professionals to share tips and tricks that they wouldn't share publicly.
Most people at an SEO event or conference aren't interested in arguing about politics or hearing that specific issue that only applies to your site, however, they'll love to hear about new and exciting things you've seen or done.
Do I have to be a SEO that deals with audiences and attends conferences or events to be good? no. But if you choose to do these things (or are assigned to participate in these events) you cannot be a fool while doing so.
Communication skill with clients
Having the people skills will help the SEO expert in communication with the client. Customers tend to get annoyed because they don't understand how SEO works.
This can lead to frustration and unfair expectations. It is important for an SEO expert to understand how to properly communicate and manage the expectations of their clients so that they do not support themselves in an unwinnable situation.
For example, SEO takes time. Most SEO campaigns will last a full six months before seeing any kind of ROI. If the customer is not properly informed, he may get bored after the first month or two.
You not only want to communicate your point effectively; You want to do it in a way that can reassure people that your SEO results will happen in a timely manner.
SEO Success Factors (Search Engine Optimization)
Data extraction and analysis
Analytics is the backbone of SEO. It's how SEO experts measure success, so it should be a regular part of their day. Every action taken during an SEO campaign can and should be measured.
SEO experts must understand how to pull in analytics as well as how to read and interpret the data they receive.
But they have to know much more than just reading the results. Any SEO expert worthy of the title will know how to take action and apply those analytics to the site they are working on in order to achieve continued success.
SEO professionals can save a lot of time if they can sign in to Adobe or Google Analytics and pull their own data.
A basic understanding of business KPIs is also required for a proper SEO strategy.
But it is not enough to pull the data. Sometimes you need to fiddle with it a bit to get the ideas you need. And there are a lot of SEO professionals who can't do the simplest tasks in Excel.
Whether it's transforming a Screaming Frog crawl into an XML sitemap, measuring algorithm changes and their impact with GA/Adobe data, creating custom CTRs based on placement curves, or quickly collecting keywords from the search console to branded or unbranded Business or by product groups in Excel is invaluable.
These days, it's not enough just to use Excel, you need to learn how to excel in Excel.
A great SEO specialist will be able to create dashboards in the data studio, use different APIs to pull in more data (Search Console, Google NLP, Lighthouse, Adwords, and various tools), and understand enough about databases To do cool things with that data.
A basic understanding of statistical concepts can go a long way in helping SEO professionals determine not just what to measure, but “how” to measure it.
SEO is a report-based process, so no SEO professional without strong analytical skills will be able to monitor their successes and failures.
How to become a seo professional
Motivation, motivation and adaptability
The thing I love and hate at the same time about working in SEO is that it doesn't just stop at 5pm.
Marketing is not one of those jobs you leave in the office every night. It stays with you in your mind.
To be really great at SEO these days, you need to have the intrinsic motivation that forces you to keep learning.
Whether it's a new programming language, a new framework (WordPress, React, Angular, etc.), a new search engine standard like Schema, or an understanding of machine learning, there's always something to learn.
The candidates that jump to the top of the hiring list are those who have their own side project sites or who create their own tools to solve their problems. For example: Using the Webmaster Tools API to automate the pull and format of data for reports.
SEO also requires adaptability. The field is in constant change, and sometimes we have to admit to clients that directory submissions, pagerank adjustments, disavow links, or other things we once recommended aren't really the best idea anymore.
An SEO professional should be able to admit when he is wrong. We were all wrong, and that's okay. It does not make us less experienced. This is how science works.
Humorous
We deal with a lot of ups and downs in the SEO industry, often at a fast pace. Sometimes it's important to take a step back and remember that we're not saving lives, we're just marketing.
As stressful as the job can be, most can wait until tomorrow. A sense of humor goes a long way toward making our jobs more enjoyable and productive.
Ability to use SEO tools
The SEO industry is very complex. It involves a lot of variables.
Each client requires you to manage massive amounts of data: keywords, broken links, duplicate pages, backlinks, competitors, content, and more.
It is almost impossible to handle all these variables manually. To do this, you need to make use of the right technology.
Nowadays and in our modern age, there is a tool to perform any task that is involved in the SEO process. Although hundreds of platforms are available, we can break them down into four main categories:
Research: Tools that help you analyze competitors, keywords, backlinks, and more to find opportunity gaps and develop an SEO strategy (such as keyword planners).
Optimization : A technology that helps you understand your performance and tells you how to improve based on specific criteria (eg content optimization platforms, speed analytics tools).
Monitoring: Platforms that monitor SEO performance (such as rank tracking technology in search engine results).
All-in-One: Tools that combine all three functions in one place .
By learning how to use these SEO platforms, you will be better equipped to deliver better results to your customers while saving yourself a lot of trouble.
Content Marketing
Again, content goes hand in hand with SEO. But writing content is often not enough.
To get results through SEO, you need to understand the role content plays in your overall SEO strategy and how to organize their efforts appropriately.
Even if you don't produce content yourself, you need to know what to look for and how to optimize your client's content strategy to improve your SEO.
For example, almost no one will associate with a piece of content that does not provide value.
By helping your customers produce better and more relevant content, you will simplify the link building process, thus impacting your SEO efforts positively.
Or if you improve and improve an old article for a client, you will increase your odds of ranking for a particular keyword.
The point is that content is a critical component of modern SEO, and in order to remain relevant to the game, you must hone your content marketing skills.
Humility
As mentioned earlier, the world of SEO is constantly changing. Even experts can be left behind if they are not up to date with the constant changes in Google's algorithms.
Believe it or not, humility is a skill in the SEO world. Some people simply prefer to learn what they can do to do their work, and then go home and do other things. For an SEO expert, work can't be something that can be "get done".
Being an SEO expert never means knowing all there is to know about the SEO world. Thinking about it would be arrogant, and there's no room for ego in SEO.
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Professionals must be able to recognize when they make mistakes, accept that some ideas they have never used won't work, and move quickly and efficiently without stubbornly dragging their heels across the sand.