Top 8 Skills Every Great SEO Professional Needs to Succeed

Do you have what it takes to build a career in SEO? You'll need certain skills to be successful. Learn what those skills are here.

Despite being around for a couple of decades now, SEO still isn’t taught in many colleges or mentioned in most marketing curriculums (at least according to all the interns I interview.)

SEO professionals come from a variety of backgrounds. Some are programmers, some are entrepreneurs, some traditional marketers, some journalists, some even used to be rappers.

Throughout the course of my job, I spend a lot of time interviewing candidates for open SEO roles.

There’s no consistent list of SEO skills that everybody needs, but there are a few things I look for in every candidate – depending on the experience level and position.

To put it simply, I’m looking for somebody who has some sort of background I can build on (development, marketing, content, etc) and a thought process that is data-driven and results-based.

If you read the interviewing article above, that should be readily apparent.

Anyway, let’s talk about the top skills for success in SEO.

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1. Critical Thinking

This is a hard one to measure, but it’s important for SEO pros to be able to have an analytical mind that’s capable of differentiating correlation and causation.
I want an SEO who can look at data and understand the “3 What’s”:

• What happened.
• Why “what happened” happened.
• What we should do about it.

There are many ways to measure this, but I stop short of asking them to figure out the shortest way to cross a bridge with a shared flashlight or the classic lightbulb problem.

2. Speaking & Writing Ability

An SEO professional who can do their own keyword research and author content that includes it is incredibly more valuable.
We aren’t just talking about writing articles like this one or speaking at conferences though.
I want an SEO who can convince internal teams and clients to do the right thing and that comes from speaking at meetings and writing decks, case studies, POVs, etc. All of those encompass speaking and writing skills.

3. Technical & Programming Skills

I’m sure there’s going to be some debate about this. I’m equally sure there’s tons of SEO pros doing a kickass job right now with no programming knowledge whatsoever.
The truth is, they could be doing even more of a kickass job with some programming knowledge.
As SEO professionals we make recommendations about page speed, rendering, lazy loading, server side redirects, microdata tagging, and basic HTML tags.
All of these conversations go easier if you can speak with the developer and offer insights rather than just demands.

4. Social Skills

Over the course of my career, I’ve made so many great relationships and learned so much just by hanging out at conference events or socializing with other SEO professionals – even virtually.

To do that, however, you can’t be a creep and you have to be able to get along socially with others.
Some of the best conversations happen in conference hallways, events, and meet and greets. Some of these events involve alcohol.
If you choose to attend these events, you’ll need to keep it under control.

5. Analytics Skills

SEO professionals can save a lot of time if they can log into Adobe or Google Analytics and pull their own data.

A basic understanding of business KPIs is also required for proper SEO strategy.

I offer my teams the opportunity to get Adobe and Google Analytics certified because even if they aren’t pulling the data, the understanding helps – but also, most of the time we end up pulling the data.

If you aren’t able to pull and segment data, you’re likely missing out on some insights.

6. Data Skills

When I first wrote this post I called this section “excel skills” and that’s still true today, but it goes beyond that.

Pulling the data isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to manipulate it a bit to get the insights you need.

I’ve met a lot of SEO pros who can’t do the simplest tasks in Excel.

Vlookups, Concatenates, and IF statements (among literally 473 other functions – seriously there are 476 built-in Excel functions) should be part of every SEO pro’s toolset.

Over the course of my career, I’ve created countless Excel templates that help solve everyday problems.

7. Drive, Motivation & Adaptability

The thing I both love and hate about working in SEO is that it doesn’t just turn off at 5 p.m.

Marketing isn’t one of those jobs that you leave at the office every night. It stays with you in your brain.

To truly be great at SEO these days you have to have the internal drive 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 understanding machine learning, there’s always something to learn.

The candidates who jump to the top of my hiring list are the ones who have their own side project websites or who create their own tools to solve their problems.

8. A Sense of Humor

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 til tomorrow. A sense of humor goes a long way toward making our jobs a lot more enjoyable and productive.

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