Top SEO Skills You Need To Succeed

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Tips And Advice

According to Digital Doughnut, there are key skills you need in order to be successful as a SEO Manager and take your career to the next level.  Read full article.

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1. Intent Analysis

Really understanding your searcher's intent can make a huge difference to your SEO success by increasing the likelihood that your page will be featured on SERPS.  

2. Coding 

You don't need to be a developer, but having a general understanding will only help you when you're trying to find and fix issues around indexation, crawlability, and rendering.  It will also facilitate smooth communication between marketing and developers, enable better writing and streamlining of SEO processes. Programming, markup and pattern-matching languages which are useful SEO skills to have include:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Python
• RegEx (regular expressions)
• Schema markup language

3. Decoding Server Management

SEO experts should have an understanding of the impact of crawlability, load speed, and reliability of a website on the servers to provide a  'holistic view of how web hosting can impact the experience of an end-user on your website'.

It will also enable better problem solving when it comes to critical errors beyond standard 404 and 301, such as 502 & 504. 

4. Writing and Editing

Having solid copywriting skills will really help with SEO. There's no point jamming keywords into text if it reads poorly and doesn't resonate with your target audience. Working alongside and sharing knowledge (both ways) with content creators can really help the success of SEO.

5. Define, Report, Audit, Augment and Optimize Your SEO KPIs

As with any role, you should define your KPI's and SEO is no different.  Make sure your SEO KPI's are aligned with business goals, especially within the rest of marketing. Demonstrating the value of your work will be key to future decision making. Data analytics is key here, and Google Analytics is the most common method SEOs use to track how organic search contributes to business goals such as ecommerce purchases and lead generation.

6. Precognitive Insights

Trend mining using tools such as Google Trends is essentially one of the important skillsets of SEO marketers and data-driven insight will help the business make the right decisions at the right time.

7. Analysis of Logfiles

The ability to run Logfile analysis and provide actionable insights will enable the SEO marketer to fully understand who is visiting their website and why and will create skill in understanding the patterns of search engine crawler behaviour. 

8. Get your Migrations Rolling 

SEO experts should place importance on developing skills for facilitating website migrations. Changes of branding or business direction can trigger the need for website migration, but smaller-scale changes such as upgrading a site to be secure (https) or to remove www from a domain can confuse search bots if not handled correctly, or lead to confusion in data analytics. Technical SEO skills such as compiling redirects and updating the site's robots.txt file and sitemaps are vital to help search engines understand your new site configuration the next time they crawl it.

9. Look Beyond Google

Yes, Google is the world's number one search engine and you really want to appear on page one and within the SERPs. However, within seamless, omnichannel marketing, make sure you're not stuck on only defining your success here - look at Yahoo and Bing, even YouTube and other social media channels.

10. Managing a Multi-Region Website

Local SEO via directory citations building and Google My Business is important but you should learn tactics to optimise your webpage for other languages if your business is global. International SEO involves careful management of hreflang tags to avoid duplicated content issues, and this can become vital to an enterprise-level SEO campaign.

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The possibilities for an SEO specialist are also limitless and featured above are just a few of the tips to help you become a more cogent SEO professional.

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If you have a strong working knowledge of SEO skills and are looking to take them to the next level, take a look at our digital and ecommerce jobs section - this frequently features SEO positions, along with broader digital marketing roles, and you can sign up for newsletter alerts as new roles become available. You can also send us your CV detailing your SEO skills so we can match you to any suitable roles.

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