SEO is an intrinsic and unnegotiable part of any successful content strategy. Most SEO marketers might feel a bit stagnant after getting their badge as SEO professionals. Up-gradation is the key strategy for survival and this is true for all professions in the 21st century including SEO professionals.
Here are 11 skills that SEO marketers can focus on to get rid of the stagnancy in their careers, and to achieve new pinnacles of success.
1. Intent Analysis
Intent analysis is all about decoding a user’s intention behind the keyword that they wish to search on a search engine. Understanding your searcher’s intent can prove to be a key competency that can help marketers aptly satisfy users’ needs when they land on a page.
This also multiplies the likelihood of a page getting featured on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Users must perceive what search engines perceive users to want from the pieces of content that they are searching for. Users’ intent might vary drastically even when it comes to local searches. Sometimes the users may wish to opt for a local restaurant while other times they might be willing to compare the options available in the local area.
2. Coding
SEO experts needn’t be fully-fledged developers; however, a basic understanding of SEO will only help the cause. This can help the marketers find and fix issues with indexation, crawlability, and rendering.
Understanding the basics of coding or being able to read code can boost your SEO skillsets. With a good understanding of SEO techniques, the communication with developers becomes congenial and pretty smooth.
This can help the SEO experts be better with writing and debugging schema. Moreover, learning new skill sets such as Python and SQL can help marketers streamline their SOE processes by enabling them to automate labor-intensive activities such as URL redirects and keyword research.
3. Decoding Server Management
A server can probably handle a lot of website visitors. SEO experts must understand how servers can impact the crawlability, load speed, and reliability of a website. This essential technical SEO skillset provides you with a holistic view of how web hosting can impact the experience of an end-user on your website.
Also, this way Google is able to access the essential necessities to lay a strong technical foundation for optimizing the users’ experiences.
Marketers must also try to understand how geofencing; primary and secondary geolocations impact SEO results. Also, they must essentially understand the concepts like uptime and location and how these parameters can impact the performance of their websites on the search engine result pages (SERPs). This way, the knowledge of servers can aid your SEO results.
Possessing a better knowledge of server codes beyond the standard 404 and 301 can help marketers communicate more effectively to those in charge of servers where there are critical issues.
Learn about the common errors such as 502 & 504. The 5XX errors usually symbolize that there’s something wrong with the server that’s preventing a request from the client. One can understand the actual meanings of status codes by looking at httpstatuses.com.
4. Writing and Editing
SEO & content strategy go hand-in-hand. One might not be a great wordsmith himself; however, polishing your writing skills never hurts. No matter how good you’re with your SEO strategy, unless you can establish an emotional resonance with your target audience groups, nobody will even care about your pieces of content.
To complement your writing skills, some other strategies need to be given equal impetus such as editing and proofreading.
An SEO strategy applied in conjunction with a tailored and focused content strategy help marketers optimizes their overall content game for the better.
SEO-focused writing, to begin with, helps marketers serve their content in front of a larger audience group.
5. Define, Report, Audit, Augment and Optimize Your SEO KPIs
SEO marketers must understand that in order to thrive in the SEO world they must define their SEO KPIs. The SEO KPIs ideally should be aligned with your business goals as well as with your basic SEO goals. Marketers must prioritize the expectations of stakeholders in their SEO reports.
Marketers must also learn to figure out ways to demonstrate the true value of the work they do. The KPI reports should be done in a way that allows the end-readers to gauge them and derive inferential business decisions.
Also, marketers should constantly work on refining and optimizing the KPIs. Well-constructed, precise, and truthful reports allow SEO marketers as well as the stakeholders to optimize their business top lines and bottom lines in congruence with the strategies suggested by the SEO executives.
6. Precognitive Insights
Trend mining is essentially one of the important skillsets of SEO marketers. The actual skill, however, is how the marketers can build on the strategies that they are already good at.
Precognitive insights that are data-driven help the business people and stakeholders to make the right decisions at the right time to optimize their overall SEO game. SEO marketers should be well-versed with techniques such as the ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) of data so that they can reinforce precognitive insights just at the right time.
To add to their innate skill sets the SEO marketers can also specialize in their intricacies to reporting and dealing with big data and techniques such as automation and machine learning.
7. Analysis of Logfiles
Logfile analysis enables the SEO marketers to comprehend from the record who have visited their website and for what purposes they paid a visit.
Analysis of logfiles can also help the marketers understand the specific pages that have been visited and the details of the device platforms wherein these pages have been opened.
This facilitates the users to understand the Googlebot or other search engine crawlers’ behavior on their sites. By analyzing the logfiles, it can be better understood what pages can or can’t be accessed by the search engine bots.
Also, SEO experts can identify the traps on their website or the frequency at which their website is being crawled. Gauging these patterns, the technical SEO experts can keep themselves informed of the next steps.
SEO experts should develop their skillsets in a way that once they log files they analyze them enough to draw actionable insights or conclusions from them.
8. Get your Migrations Rolling
As SEO experts, marketers should place a lot of impetus on how they exhibit great skills for facilitating website migrations. I would suggest getting hands-on experience with certain more complicated scenarios such as merging multiple websites and essentially with the nitty-gritty of the website migration.
9. Look Beyond Google
Google is the world’s number one search engine. No doubt, each one of us wants to rank on Google. Getting featured on page one or even in the random setup on the SERPs allows marketers to generate maximum traction through their pieces of content.
However, in an era of omnichannel marketing, your audiences are looking for more. A seamless conjuncture of digital and physical experiences has to be amalgamated to serve your audience with the data-driven, and intent-centric, yet holistically seamless experience that they are looking for.
Moreover, Google is day-by-day growing more advanced as a search engine that prioritizes intent-based queries. Due to this reason, most of the search traffic directed to your website organically starts converting on the SERPs itself unless they are looking for a more comprehensive or detailed piece of information or resolutions in the form of products or services.
Due to these reasons, webmasters need to focus on more search engines. Along with Google, they need to optimize for other search engines alive such as Yahoo and Bing. Also, optimizing for YouTube is quintessential in an era wherein visual imagery and videos are getting more popular day by day.
Along with search engines, your social media channels are also a comprehensive source of your referral traffic; therefore a larger part of focus needs to be shifted on getting the maximum number of referral traffic through social channels such as Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
You should also optimize your reviews and referrals present on certain platforms such as Yelp.com, TripAdvisor, and more. So, if your brand hasn’t had yet a presence over these platforms, start tapping into these channels and learn how to develop a more authoritative, trustworthy, and comprehensive brand voice to drive more website traffic and conversions.
10. Managing a Multi-Region Website
Yes, you need to look beyond the national SEO tactics and must learn how to take your business on an international level and how to optimize your web pages for languages other than English.
Targeting your primary geo is important; however, what if you literally want to take your business global. In such cases, you might have to optimize for multiple geographies and in multiple languages.
This can be quite a task. However, with some A/B testing and experimentation, one is bound to get this correct. Taking your business global requires constantly deepening your SEO knowledge, experimenting a lot, and ultimately sharpening your skills in light of the upgraded business paradigm.
11. Develop a Comprehensive PR Strategy
Public Relations (PR) is everywhere. As long as you have a community you bank upon you’ll have to work on your PR strategy. Also, within the modern pretext of marketing, PR is almost synonymous with building your brand equity, developing a stronger brand voice, and having a reliable omnichannel reputation management framework.
So, you see, it’s not just about having a brand anymore but having a brand that operates with vision and is vocal about it. You can’t leave ideologies and values that compelled you to start, in oblivion and expect your business to succeed.
Also, PR is indispensable to network marketing and hence all modern marketers must sharpen their PR skills and should gradually work on building and optimizing a reliable and resilient PR framework that supports the root from where the branches of your brand stem and compels them to grow and proliferate further.
In Conclusion
As the digital space grows largely interdisciplinary, modern marketers must make the best of the chance to grow as professionals. In an era of accelerated digital transformation, many new and interesting opportunities can come to those who work on their skillsets.
The possibilities for an SEO specialist are also limitless and featured above are just a few of the tips to help you become a more cogent SEO professional.
