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7 Skills Every Agency SEO Specialist Needs in 2019

2 mins read

SEO specialists are required to have a lot of diverse skills in order to be able to keep up with their job role and the industry shift as a whole. To be successful within the role, the right candidate must obtain a certain set of essential skills.

As the marketing industry is evolving and growing further, a fundamental knowledge of SEO is becoming more and more normal. Which means that the experts and specialists are having to delve deeper with their knowledge of the role and industry too.

So, if you’re not sure of what these skills are that an SEO specialist should have in 2019, we’ve got you covered in this blog post.

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We’ll cover:

Critical Thinking

SEO experts must be able to think critically. Thinking of meta descriptions and titles that are going to be successful and please the client is only one way. If the client disagrees with them, a specialist should be able to show how they critically came to the decision to do it that way. For example, by looking at statistics and analysis to back it up and show the correct logic.

You should be able to give an explanation and understanding of what has happened, why it happened and what you should do about it when reviewing an SEO campaign.

Writing Proficiency

An SEO specialist tends to do their own keyword research and create SEO audits to persuade clients to choose a certain route, strategy-wise.

In order for these audits to be perfect and effective, they need to be written well. An audit sent out to a client with grammatical errors or written poorly can have the complete wrong effect and can also look unprofessional and not very well successful.

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UX and Analytical Skills

It’s one thing persuading people to click through with your meta titles and descriptions, but it’s another analysing and understanding the user experience (UX) and what visitors do when they’re on your page. These analytical skills will allow you to understand your audience a lot better, identify trends and base decisions from them.

Drive and Motivation

Working in SEO isn’t a job that starts at 9am and finishes at 5pm. To a certain degree, you have to take it home with you. It always stays with you in your brain and you’re constantly thinking of ways you can improve new campaigns or different tools you can try out to make your work life easier.

SEO requires the drive and motivation to not get down when you get knocked back a couple of times. Like all marketing jobs, there’s going to be times where the client overrules what you think is right and there will be times that you have to admit to clients that what you have chosen isn’t working anymore. An SEO specialist is thick skinned and doesn’t let this bother them, moving onto the next one determined to smash it.

Video Optimisation

A lot of marketing channels and actions are heading in the video direction, so it’s important that SEO doesn’t get left behind. Just as the main aim of SEO is reaching the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), we need to reflect this in video SERPs too - especially YouTube.

This is especially helpful for brand awareness, which in turn can help SEO if people are Googling your brand. Everybody in 2019 should have a video production strategy and an optimisation strategy to go with it.

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Creativity

Organic traffic gets directed all over the place. Whether it’s to ads, local results or even video. So, in order to reach the top, it’s becoming much more challenging, which requires you to be as creative as you can in order to reach the top and stay there. When thinking of meta titles and descriptions, you need to be just as creative and show off your flair as the content department do or even the design department.

Social and Communication Skills

Your relationship with clients is super important. It can be the difference between making a mistake and losing the client altogether, or them being sound about it and letting you resolve your problems and make things better.

But it's not just about maintaining great relationships with various different clients. You also need to have a good relationship with the rest of your team. After all, your colleagues help with the success of your work and of course, for your own enjoyment of the role. SEO isn’t the most interesting topic to somebody who isn’t interested in it, so you might have to craft up other conversation starters to your peers on your lunch breaks.

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Why Not Join Our Team?

Having read the above skills, have we just described you in a nutshell? If so, why not check out our latest vacancies on our careers page by following the button below. Don’t be shy, you never know where your future may lie in a fast-paced, ever-changing SEO role.