SEO Skills that Great SEO Pros Have

Key SEO Skills SEO Specialist must have – Joanna Vaiou

Hello and welcome, this is Joanna Vaiou a Professional SEO Services Company Owner.

What are SEO skills?

Today I am sharing with you an article with information about what are a professional’s key SEO skills in order to make a career as a remote professional SEO expert, specialist, consultant, or employee.

What expertise is needed to be hired remotely as an SEO Professional online?

Now that you are looking to be hired remotely as an SEO consultant online, do you know what type of SEO skills are required by companies?

10 Top SEO Skills List

From my experience as a business owner, I share 10 skills and responsibilities that you need to tackle in order to become a valuable partner of the companies that hire you to do SEO work for them.

1. Website Technical Analysis

To succeed as an SEO professional anywhere, you will have to analyze the client’s website and if needed, you may have to re-construct it, in order to conform to the Google webmaster’s rules and become friendlier to the user.

You have to be able to measure the success of the campaign and provide the client with accurate reports of the performance of their websites (at all times).

This part requires collaboration with an experienced web developer who can apply your SEO guidelines.

There is a misconception in the SEO industry that web developers do SEO work and that SEOs do web development work.

WEB DEV work and SEO work and two different types of expertise and work together in SEO projects.

You may find a great SEO expert who also is a great technical person but that is rarely the case.

2. Keyword research development

You have to research the most strategic search terms related to their brand and use them naturally throughout the page’s important SEO elements that Google checks to understand what your site is about.

Your keyword research development process must contain:

Easy and fast to rank for (on Google) keyword/phrases which are usually the long-tail phrases or the “low handing fruits” in the SEO language.
The medium-competition keywords and of course.
The super competitive ones are the long-term keyword goals.

3. On-Page level SEO

Once you have your keyword goals set up you need to assign target pages one them or create new target pages from scratch to rank for each keyword type.

Your websites’ pages and posts must have enticing and clear:

Meta titles.
Meta descriptions.
Page titles.
H1, H2, H3 titles.
Optimized images and videos according to the keyword goals per page.
Easy to read/formatted content (small paragraphs, etc).
Create strategic internal links between relevant pages on your own websites, etc.

4. Mobile-first optimization

Usually, it is the responsibility of the SEO Person to make sure the developers keep in mind that more than 60% of web traffic is mobile-based. Thus, develop a website and content optimized for and that is mobile-friendly.

5. Strategic content creation or consultation

The actual text and graphics of a website are the most important pieces of the puzzle.

You either need to generate unique content on-demand according to your projects’ goals or provide the guidelines to your team’s copywriter in order to create high-quality, informative, educational, helpful, or entertaining content that helps your ideal target audience.

The search engines’ robots have the ability to detect bogus hidden text and keyword stuffing leading to penalties.

6. ORM

Some clients suffering from negative online publicity will require that you provide a solution and improve their online reputation on Google search results in order to gain some control over the way their brand appears when people type their brand name.

As an SEO expert, you need to have five-star reputation building and management skills.

Online Reputation Management on Google is also necessary to protect a brand from future damage.

By owning all the top Google page results for your employer’s or your client’s name you provide a safety zone for them and at the same time you show Google users that you have a strong brand not only offline but online as well.

7. Client expectation management

Usually, you have to handle clients and keep their concerns, brand, and strategy in mind while you work for them.

You must always understand their objective so you can all work towards achieving their goals, not yours.

This is important if you have to get hired repeatedly and earn your money.

8. Link earning

Backlinking still remains one of the most important ranking factors in Google for websites to win top page organic listings.

As such, it is important that you have a firm knowledge of how to build, develop, or earn authentic backlinks to the client’s website to improve their SERPs ranking.

The best types of links you can get are the earned links which are a result of you building quality relationships with other bloggers in relevant industries and provide helpful information to them to share with their audiences.

9. IT – Technical skills

A set of IT skills including HTML, CSS, and coding skills are a great add-on to have as a remote Search Engine Optimizer even if not necessary.

It is in your best interest to be familiar with several Content Management Systems as well.

I personally do not have coding skills. Nevertheless, I learned how to build and optimize websites on WordPress CMS from online courses.

This helps me a lot as I know how to apply the on-page SEO strategies that I design and not depend on a web-developer to do it for me.

To get hired as an SEO professional you will need to have an area of expertise and specialization, but having also technical SEO skills or the means to collaborate with a more technical/IT person than you, will be very helpful.

Depending on the job specifics, there may be other requirements including experience in marketing or degrees in business and IT-related professions but the above are the fundamentals.

10. Adaptability!

In the world of SEO, nothing is (or stays) the same between two different periods of time. No same strategy works for different projects or different goals.

Every SEO Specialist has their own custom training and uses their own strategies according to their experience and what has worked best for them.

For this reason, the SEO Expert you choose to manage your SEO must on top of being very good with numbers and data analysis to be also creative and try new things and learn new strategies as the standards of Google change very frequently.

Do Professionals need to have coding skills or not and why?

Have you ever wondered whether as an aspiring SEO or professional it would be worth your while to learn some coding skills?

As mentioned earlier, it does count to have an idea of what developers do.

As an SEO consultant, you will work closely with developers to produce speedy optimized websites for your clients.

It is, thus, imperative that you have basic knowledge of programming (HTML does not count) to ensure that you know what is happening.

You do not want a situation where you are working as an SEO expert in collaboration with developers and you are completely clueless as to what they are doing.

Below are some of the reasons why SEOs benefit if they include coding in their SEO skills.

1. Contribute to the solution

Rather than throw problems at the developer’s team who probably already hate you, you can contribute to the solution to the problems you raise.

With an understanding of what they are doing, you can help with breaking down the technical glitches into smaller ones that they can fix.

Without this kind of knowledge, you risk coming across as criticizing their work which they won’t take lightly.

2. Create faster more efficient pages and content

With coding skills up your sleeve, you can tell what a well-formatted XML sitemap should look like.

Also, you learn all these important parts of the web machine that must be running in optimum condition for your website to be easily accessible to the robots.

Knowing how to analyze a site for page load times is an invaluable trick that you can have up your sleeve.

To become the ace SEO PRO you want to be, it will help you to go the extra mile and learn how to code.

3. Work well with developers

Your developer team probably already hates you. Every time you ask a question developers will tend to be defensive and dismiss your concerns.

However, with coding skills in your arsenal, they are bound to love you since you will not be bothering them with what they may perceive as silly questions anymore.

4. Know what is possible and what is not

All too often lazy developers will dismiss your requests by saying, “That’s impossible.”

This happens because they are unwilling to go through their code and identify gateways to make effective changes.

This won’t happen if they know well that you know what can be done.

5. Get hired by more clients

It is a well-known fact that most clients seeking Search Engine Optimization consultants do not know exactly what they do.

Before they hire you, they will ask for your qualifications followed by some technical programming questions.

SEOs that have coding skills are more likely to get the job especially if the job is working on a new website.

In conclusion, having some more technical SEO skills will fast track your career as one of the best SEO professionals of all time.

With these, you can work faster and more effectively with developers to produce quality websites.

Also, you will land more SEO jobs.

To your SEO skills growth and business success!

Contact Joanna Vaiou

Email me at [email protected] for any questions.