10 Essential SEO Skills for Marketing Professionals

Congratulations! You have finally taken a plunge into your dream marketing career. Undoubtedly, you have embarked on an exciting journey where you will get immense opportunities to connect with customers, create and narrate convincing stories, learn new trends, and have the freedom to experiment. But the other side of the coin is that you may run into some challenges as you begin working on your marketing campaigns, such as understanding customers' evolving needs precisely, entering a new market, acquiring new customers, and much more.

The below-given chart highlights the top marketing challenges-

Source Vitaldesign

Fear not! You can easily navigate most of these challenges by learning SEO skills.

If you are wondering which skills you should master out of diverse SEO skills to create a rewarding trajectory for your marketing career, this article will help you. Let’s dive in!

#1. Research Skills

There is no standard set of codes and guidelines in search engine optimization. Activities performed based on gut feelings or guesswork won’t make your SEO campaigns successful.

So, it’s important for marketing professionals to develop and strengthen the following research skills.

• Keyword Research

The keywords you choose directly impact your website’s ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), traffic, and conversion rate. That’s why perfecting your keyword research is crucial.

An in-depth and meticulous knowledge of search intent and search engine algorithms aids you in researching the right low-competition, high global volumes keywords for your blog post, website, and social media posts. It also helps you create an effective content strategy that boosts organic traffic.

• Competitor Research

Keeping an eye on your competitors’ content strategy, backlink profile, keyword targeting, and optimization strategy is paramount to strengthen your SEO strategy and outperform the competition.

Wondering how you can identify your competitors? Well, you can do so by searching your main/target keywords on any search engine. All the top-ranking websites/domains for similar keywords are your competitors.

You can also use an AI-powered keyword rank tracker tool to gain insights into your organic competitors.

• Statistical Research

You need relevant figures, stats, and data to support your existing SEO strategy or plan a new SEO campaign. Here comes the requirement of research skills.

#2. Content Writing and Optimization

Do you know what’s the backbone of SEO? Keywords.

Content enables you to strengthen your SEO’s backbone by allowing you to incorporate long-tail and related keywords. Remember, the content should be high-quality and interactive.

A research study by DoubleVerify shows that in 2020, global online content consumption was double. According to Demand Metric, companies with blogs get over 67% of leads every month. These statistics reveal how important it is for a marketer to learn the nitty-gritty of content writing and optimization to make a huge difference in their SEO efforts.

Understand how you can use different forms of content to focus on user experience and improve the likelihood of ranking in SERPs.

#3. Social Skills

A digital 2024 global overview report by DataReportal states that active social media user identities have reached 5 billion (which is equivalent to 62.3% of the global population).

The growing popularity of social media has made it vital for marketers to gain knowledge about various social platforms and their use to get search volumes and clicks on the targeted keywords.

SourceLyfemarketing

Here’s how social media can take your SEO efforts to the next level-

• The search engine spiders crawl the content you publish on Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms and index it. So, if any of your social media posts go viral, the positive effects on the SERPs can be seen.

• If your post has a higher number of social media shares, your website gains more relevant backlinks, which, in turn, increases your domain authority. Thus, you get more brownie points from search engines.

As a marketer, you must understand the importance of social media analytics and learn this skill to devise effective SEO-based social media strategies.

#4. Critical Thinking and Analytical Skills

Marketers with critical thinking skills can better understand the customers’ response to the SEO strategy and make informed decisions to improve it further.

Critical thinking, combined with analytical skills, empowers you to analyze your competitors, grasp a thorough knowledge of your niche, and understand the competitive landscape. You can figure out weaknesses and gaps in your competitor’s strategy and spot opportunities. Leverage this information to devise your own strategy and beat the competition.

Excellent analytical skills also help you leverage the online SEO tools to the fullest, decipher the cause-and-effect relationship, monitor and measure the set KPIs, and figure out areas of improvement.

#5. Presentation Skills

The success of your SEO strategy depends on its effective implementation. And your team plays an important role here. So, as a marketer, you must have good communication and presentation skills to align your team with the SEO plan.

A captivating visualization of the SEO roadmap and digital marketing KPIs directs your team on the right path, giving them a better clarity of their respective roles and the organization’s expectations. Also, present milestones and achievements to keep team members motivated.

Good presentation skills also help you convince the management team to provide you with needed support for implementing the proposed SEO strategy or buy you the SEO tool for better analysis and reporting.

For all these reasons, consider mastering this skill too.

#6. Prioritization

Conducting research, optimizing metadata, checking for broken links, building high-quality backlinks, analyzing user behavior and website traffic using Google Analytics, and so on - the SEO tasks list is comprehensive. However, not all tasks yield fruitful outcomes. Hence, you must have prioritization skills to decide which tasks to conduct first (based on difficulty level and impact) to make the SEO campaign successful.

Though some tasks are high-impact but require lots of time and resources, they are crucial to perform on priority. For example - building backlinks.

A marketer with good prioritization skills is responsive and can quickly adjust the SEO strategy in line with the updated search engine algorithm, evolving industry trends, and changed project requirements.

#7. Web Coding

Web coding skills are usually attributed to web designers. However, a basic understanding of coding, such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, is a must for marketing professionals. In addition, you must have the knowledge of how to manage redirects, optimize header tags, and implement schema markup.

This knowledge helps marketers collaborate with web designers and ensure the website is designed considering all SEO requirements. It also enables them to fix SEO issues, like content presentation, site structure, etc., on their own without seeking help from designers.

#8. Knowledge of Search Engine Algorithms

Algorithms are complex mechanisms search engines use to present the best information to a given query. Search engines change their algorithms from time to time to boost the relevance and accuracy of results.

Marketers must have knowledge of various criteria, such as user experience, quality content and backlinks, keyword relevance, website speed, etc., that these algorithms consider for ranking websites in search results. You must also stay updated with the changes made in these algorithms and quickly adapt your SEO strategy according to these changes.

#9. Ability to Use SEO Tools

You can’t rely solely on your theoretical knowledge to overcome the SEO challenges. You must have hands-on experience using various online SEO tools to manage different aspects of SEO, like research, content, backlinks, duplicate pages, rank tracking, broken links, monitoring performance, etc.

These tools save you time, streamline your work, and deliver better results to clients. You can also send automated monthly/quarterly reports of a specific SEO campaign to the client using these platforms.

#10. Link Building

Backlinks are one of the top factors search engines use to decide the ranking of a website/webpage for a specific keyword. If your page has more backlinks, its chances of getting organic traffic increase.

You must have proficiency in internal and external link building. You must also understand how to check the authority and quality of a page on which you want to build a link and how it impacts the ranking of your page.

The Bottom Line

Mastering SEO skills is imperative for marketing professionals to boost and maximize the impact of their marketing efforts and achieve tangible outcomes. SEO skills enable marketers to adapt to constantly evolving search engine algorithms, enhance user experience, improve the website’s online visibility, and position their brand as the trusted authority in the market. All these drive business growth, which is instrumental in carving out a rewarding career for yourself.

Would you like to add more skills to the list? Let us know in the comments.