What are the skills needed for SEO?

What are the skills needed for SEO?

Effective search engine optimization requires an amalgam of disciplines. Most of the skills needed for SEO fall on the realm of advertisement and marketing, technology and software, and creative content production.

Conversations about the skills needed for SEO are commonplace in the industry. For one, most clients express curiosity about it and ask to better understand what goes into the job. Then, there is always people looking to get into the SEO business. They are eager to learn what the most effective path for success is.

In any case, those three major fields fulfill a role to different degrees in almost any SEO project. It is fair to say that every SEO professional specializes in all of them. However, there are many additional skills and knowledge sources that also complement them.

To better understand what skills you need for SEO, we will divide them into categories. Let´s take a closer look at the role they play.

Marketing and Advertisement

Basically, optimizing content for search engines is an advertisement endeavor. No matter your particular goals for a piece of content online, the aim is to help people find it through search engines and interact with it.

Every SEO job needs to have that ultimate goal in mind. The strategies you end up going for, and the content you create, should always bear that in mind. Marketing and advertising specializations are the perfect source for ways to reach customers effectively.

Technology & Software

You can’t do SEO without good servers and developers. The whole discipline is based around the way the internet was built, and how we use it to share information today.

In that sense, understanding how search technology works – search engine algorithms, keyword research, digital trends – is also fundamental. Now, not every SEO professional needs to also become an accomplished programmer or designer. However, the more knowledge one can accumulate in those areas, the more versatile and skilled the SEO expert will be.

Creative Content Production

Any SEO project must be linked to great content. This can be in form of articles you want to use to tug people’s attention. However, there are many other types of content that effectively carry your message across. Pieces of video, infographics, social media posts, memes. All of them constitute content with the potential to stand out from the competition and get you the traffic you are after.

And that’s why content creation is among the skills needed for SEO. Every SEO professional must hold some expertise in content management and production. Even if he’s not directly producing it himself, the overseeing efforts go much more smoothly if we understand everything that goes into content creation.

As far as complementary skills that can benefit any SEO project, the list is expansive. However, some of the most valuable are:

  • Critical thinking.
  • Effective communication.
  • Programming/Web Development.
  • Problem-solving.
  • Management.
  • Investigation & Research.
  • Decision Making.
  • Flexibility.