SEO spending has been on the rise for years; that’s because it works almost every time. A successful campaign generates more traffic, leads, and helps websites rank higher on search engines, such as Google, Bing, etc. A lot of companies use SEO skill as it scales with time, gives businesses 24/7 advertising without costing a lot of amounts, it drives more traffic as compared to social media, generates leads, and searchers usually tend to choose organic search results over paid ads. Top rank in Google is every business dream; after all, the first page of Google receives 95 percent of web traffic. But with the constantly changing Google algorithm, it takes dedication, persistence, and creativeness to rank higher.
Now let’s look at the top SEO Skills.
Tenacious- SEO skill takes time to build; there will be a lot of ups and downs, so you should be mentally prepared to meet the challenges. You won’t become successful overnight; you will have to work hard, be persistent, and never give up. You need to develop a thick skin, swallow your pride, and be ready to receive negativity and admit that you’re wrong.
Flexible and Resilient- The search engine keeps on evolving, and as much as it does SEO industry changes along with it. The search engine’s goal is to provide the best user experience and provide searchers with precisely what they are searching for. So, to be successful, one should be resilient and flexible to be able to adopt these changes and adapt to them quickly.
Research, Planning, and Strategy– These skills are a necessity; it involves gathering information about your client, their target customers, the industry, their competitors, and products and using them to create a plan and strategy. This area will require you to do keyword research and planning, analysis of the target audience, content strategy, planning, discovering opportunity, create content calendar planning, and setting SEO KPI’s.
Content Creation and Management- The skill of creating content is a necessity for SEO professionals. You will need the skills to create marketing content in audio, graphic, or video format. To create content and manage it, you will need the knowledge of on and off-page SEO, editing skills, CMS usage, grammar and communication skills, content formatting and style, image sourcing, creation, resizing, and reduction.
Link Prospecting and Acquisition- Link building skill is another essential ability that one should possess. Link prospecting and acquisition relies on the knowledge you have of creating content, doing outreach, winning social proof, and utilizing analytics. Since Google and other search engines are sensitive to link spams and they punish the offending sites and pages, you should know how to attract editorial links from authoritative sources.
Web, Integration, and Technical Work- A slow site with security vulnerabilities will provide poor user experience, and it won’t rank on Google. Understanding web technology and being able to fix page speed, site security, troubleshooting, and other technology-related issues is a necessity. To fix these issues, you need to understand code prioritization, site speed optimization, HTML, Website maintenance, Web security, CMS, CDS, and schema markup and indexing.
PR and Outreach– PR and outreach skills help you or your client become an authoritative brand. You should have good pitching skills, social skills, communication, an international outlook, time management, creativity, and reputation management. And since Google prefers content from authoritative brands compared to those of little-known brands or websites, this skill is essential for the success of an SEO.
Social Media and Influencer Marketing- Having influencers talking about you or your clients’ products will have a great impact and can cause a huge shift in your favor. Social media skill is close to PR skill, but it leverages user data, whereas PR doesn’t do that. Connecting with influencers, be it macro or micro, will boost the site a lot as influencers tend to have a lot of followers looking up to them. Last but not the least, one should also have analytical skill SEO is nothing without it. These are some of the top SEO skill needed to rank higher on Google.
