6 Soft Skills that Today’s SEO Should Possess by @neilpatel | Dramel Notes

It’s cliché to say that SEO is a changing field.

By now, we all know that. Google’s world-dominating algorithm adjusts multiple times a day. Major algorithm updates make national headlines and spawn cottage industries and strategy shifts.

What’s the obvious response to the ever-changing nature of SEO?

The easy answer is this: Learn the new skills that are required to succeed.

But there’s another, deeper answer. SEO isn’t just about the technical skills. It’s also about the soft skills.

For both agency and in-house SEOs, soft skills are essential. I intend to explain the what, why, and how of soft skills in SEO.

What are Soft Skills?

First, let me define soft skills.

The simple definition is this: “Personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.”

Soft skills are the personal qualities of the SEO, and they translate into how effective or ineffective the SEO is at managing and interacting in a professional environment.

Hard skills, on the other hand, have to do with SEO’s specific training, experience, and technical acumen. They may include things like creating meta-tags, mapping URLs, developing a content calendar, or improving site speed.

Soft skills are completely removed from the analytical data-driven repertoire of the SEO’s technical capabilities. Soft skills are focused on people, behavior, and interpersonal situations.

Soft skills are so much a part of a job that some employers view them as the yang to the hard skills’ yin.

From a neuroscientific standpoint, this very well may be true. The conventional bifurcation of right brain/left brain thinking does an adequate job of differentiating soft skills from hard skills.

Left brain thinking involves logic, analysis, facts—the SEO’s ability to parse data, configure robots.txt, and analyze ranking factors. Right brain thinking involves persuading the content team to implement longtail keywords, and explaining to the development team the importance of minifying CSS to improve site speed.

Most employers look for soft skills, whether they are explicit about it or not. As an example of this, I searched “SEO jobs,” and clicked on the first result that came up from Indeed.com.

The application is standard and straightforward. The agency needs an individual who is adept at paid search technology and strategy.

However, the job posting is replete with understated references to soft skills. I skimmed through the bullet points and identified the need for a candidate who is driven, strategic, a leader, a communicator, curious, a learner, and an educator.

A Federal Employment agency study of job openings in the IT industry found that job postings were filled with soft skills.

Obviously, soft skills are critical. But why?

More specifically, why are soft skills important for SEOs?

Why Are Soft Skills Important for SEOs?

Hard skills are the skills and abilities that enable the SEO to do the job, but soft skills enable them to get the job done. In other words, the SEO can’t effectively do their job unless they possess the right soft skills.

You’ve probably heard of the concept of the T-shaped marketer. The idea is that every successful marketer should possess a broad array of skills, but go deep in a particular area.

In any given SEO agency, you may find an individual who is really good at technical SEO. Perhaps this person also dabbles in social media marketing, video, blogging, and email marketing. Nevertheless, her primary skill is technical SEO and its attendant tasks, but she has an awareness of the other essential areas of marketing.

The T-shaped concept is really helpful, but it only focuses on technical skills. Behind this T-shaped marketer is an entire halo of important skills. They are less objective, more intuitive, and no less important.

These are the soft skills of the SEO. Although we can and should identify our T, and the T of those we hire, it’s also important to be aware of all the soft skills that go into allowing the person to thrive.

Here are some of the concrete reasons why SEOs should possess soft skills:

• To coordinate: Many agency SEOs have the important task of getting various departments to work together. Unless you get your dev team talking to your creative team talking to your design team, while all talking to you, you’ll get nowhere fast.
• To learn: This article opened up with the statement that SEO is constantly changing. The field, by its nature, demands SEOs keep pace with the change, and continually upgrade our knowledge and skills. We can’t rely on last year’s strategy to make an impact this year.
• To adapt: Adaptability is key. Pivoting from a defunct strategy to an innovative new channel is part of the fun and confusion of being an SEO.
• To educate: A lot of people still don’t “get” SEO. The SEO’s job is more than doing. It’s also explaining. Whether you need to explain responsive design to the CEO or the importance of site speed to the designer, you’ll constantly be in teaching mode.
• To persuade clients to act: As Grant Cardone wrote, “We’re all selling, all the time, whether we know it or not.” Selling requires persuasion. Perhaps you need to persuade the client to purchase your services. Perhaps you need to persuade the client to implement your advice. Perhaps you just need to persuade your boss that content marketing is indeed important. Whatever the case, persuasion — a soft skill — is required to make SEO work.

In a nutshell, the SEO needs soft skills in order to succeed. It’s just that simple.

In one study by Right Management, nearly 1,000 professionals were asked about the factors that lead to “accelerated performance.”

You would think they would pick things like “experience,” “knowledge,” and “skills.” Those were indeed part of the overall picture of success, but not the predominant parts.

The biggest components of success — 78% — had to do with soft skills.

Even If you possess the world’s deepest and most advanced SEO knowledge, you’ll be ineffective in an agency or business if you don’t have honed soft skills.

So, let’s talk about those soft skills.

What Soft Skills Should an SEO Have?

1. Persuasiveness

An SEO who is a skilled persuader will be a powerful force in any organization.

SEO requires persuasion on many levels. You may need to persuade skeptical customers to purchase your services, or skeptical executives to implement your strategy.

2. Adaptability/Flexibility

I can’t emphasize this point enough. Adaptation to industry changes and flexibility to bend marketing strategies are a regular part of the SEO’s job.

Take a look at what SEO used to be versus what it is now.

How much time has passed since the “old SEO?” Just a few years. How much adaptability have SEOs had to embrace the mean time? A whole lot!

A 2014 survey of marketing soft skills identified “the ability to embrace change” and “adapt strategies quickly” as the top two skills.

The field of marketing is always changing. But the field of SEO is particularly affected by this constant change. SEOs, as players in the most change-vexed field of marketing, must be highly flexible.

3. Patience

SEO doesn’t produce instant change.

Sure, there may be some rapidly indexed pieces of content, and some quick wins due to some optimization, but overall, SEO demands a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach.

While it is true that SEO rapidly evolves, it is also true that consistent gains require a substantial amount of time.

Google’s algorithm has shown us that it is quick to punish sites (you could drop out of the ranks overnight), but slow to reward sites (gaining a few positions in the search results takes months).

What this means is that SEOs should possess the soft skill of patience.

4. Strategy

SEOs should learn to embrace all of marketing, not just their own niche of SEO.

SEO is a very narrow slice of the great big marketing world. SEOs need to integrate disparate strategies, approaches, and methods in order to make a meaningful impact.

UpCity’s Guide to Hiring a Professional SEO paints a picture of the SEO as someone who can integrate different types of marketing into a strategic whole.

How can we define an integrated approach? An integrated approach views SEO as part of the digital marketing milieu. SEO is a marketing methodology, and it must interact with other methods such as paid search, content marketing, branding, PR, and social media. ‘Strategy’ runs the risk of being a buzzword. Nonetheless, an overall strategic vision is critical. SEOs with a strategic mindset can better adapt to the integrated approach discussed above.

The greater amount of strategy the SEO possesses, the more successful they will be.

5. Curiosity

SEOs should be curious.

Why? Because there are constantly new strategies to learn, new techniques to investigate, and new data to learn from. A high degree of curiosity will enable the SEO to successfully understand more about their job and how to improve.

6. Team Player

Even though “team player” is last on my list, it’s one of the first soft skills that an SEO should possess.

What do I mean by “team player?” A team player is someone who can easily interact with, enjoy, and provide value to his or her team members.

Why is this so crucial in SEO?

Here’s why: SEO is no longer the realm and responsibility of one person in an organization (an in-house organization); nor is SEO a single department in a marketing agency.

SEO is everywhere. SEO has wormed its way into everything tech and marketing — mobile, content, paid search, UX, design, personalization, customer personas, conversion rate optimization, split testing, user testing, coding, everything.

SEO is also an imperative for any type of business — local, global, or anything in between. From legal agencies to manufacturing behemoths, SEO plays a role in the business’s success and survival.

Keith Goode, the Chief SEO Evangelist at seoClarity, calls this the “democratization of SEO.” As he explains, “SEO [is] embedded into the fabric of your organization.”

The SEO’s role becomes intensively team-focused, since the SEO must both train people, and then have those individuals champion the cause of SEO.

SEO needs to be backed by an alliance of knowledgeable individuals within the organization who understand SEO’s principles, and realize SEO’s value in the overall success of the company.

What does this require? It requires the SEO be a team player.

Conclusion

Each SEO has a unique blend of technical skills. In the same way, each SEO has a unique blend of soft skills.

If every SEO had the same soft skills to the same degree, the world of marketing would be boring and predictable.

As you assess your own soft skills and those of the SEOs around you, you’ll see a huge variety. Whatever kinds of unique approaches, abilities, and idiosyncrasies you identify, you’ll no doubt see the importance of soft skills.

What soft skills do you think are important for SEOs to possess?

 

Image Credits

Featured Image: Pressmaster/Shutterstock.com
All screenshots by Neil Patel. Taken November 2015.

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9 Roadblocks That Could be Harming Your Google Rankings by @barriesmithii | Dramel Notes

Almost every business in the world wants to rank on the first page of Google, but very few ever get there. With the best SEO will in the world, top-result status is a mountain many marketers struggle to climb.

It’s not for want of trying. With Google’s algorithm changing constantly, it can be hard to keep up with best practices. Unfortunately, as with any supply and demand situation, there are also a number of unscrupulous “specialists” offering to help unsuspecting businesses raise their ranking. The blind leading the blind, often enough.

Should you give up on SEO? Categorically not. Your search engine ranking can have a major impact on your business, driving traffic to your site and helping you secure more customers.

As the saying goes, everything worth having is worth working hard for. 

I have put together this guide to help you out, highlighting nine roadblocks that could be holding your website back from ranking success.

The Overarching Principle

The most important thing to grasp when it comes to SEO is the underlying principle: Google wants to help its users. It really is that simple.

When Google searches websites and decides where to rank them, what is really happening is a decision on how useful and relevant the content is to people using the search engine.

The concept gets obscured sometimes, but that’s the most important thing to bear in mind–and it’s the logic that dictates each of these nine roadblocks. The algorithm changes pretty regularly, leaving SEOs everywhere scrambling to keep up, but you can’t go far wrong if you bear that principle in mind.

1. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content isn’t useful content. Whether it’s your website copy or your blog pieces, Google proactively penalizes sites which don’t have original content.

In the era of content marketing, people can fall into the trap of thinking that any content is worthwhile content. That simply isn’t the case. The moment you start sacrificing quality for quantity is the moment your traffic will plummet.

But what if your website has pages with duplicate content? The likes of product pages or location-tailored landing pages? In these situations, you can use canonical URLs, which are a way of telling Google which specific instance of that copy is to be taken as canonical.

A common example of this would be blog posts, where the same post can be accessed by a variety of URLS. For example, you might ‘tag’ a blog post in multiple ways, which would generate different post URLS:

• /blog/nutrition/top-tips-for-healthy-living
• /blog/fitness/top-tips-for-healthy-living

And so on.

Without a canonical version, Google would register the different URLs as duplicate content and penalize accordingly. You can easily check if your content will pass Google’s beady eye for duplicates by running it through tools such as Copyscape.

2. Thin Content

Thin content is just as bad as duplicate content. Think back to our overarching principle–thin content (literally, not enough ‘meaty’ content) isn’t useful to users searching for information on a topic.

It used to be that the Google ranking algorithm prioritized link building, but this isn’t the case so much anymore. With the introduction of the not-so-affectionately regarded Panda update, Google penalizes any site it deems as offering thin content.

Think rich, in-depth, engaging content and you’re on the same lines as Google. This is even more important for highly-competitive keywords. To stand a chance of competing with the big boys, smaller businesses may want a content-rich site.

As with every Google change in the past, the businesses that are penalized are the ones that put ranking first and their users second. Always think about how you can make your site more relevant, more useful, and easier to navigate and Google will reward you accordingly!

3. Anchor Text Over-Optimization

The world of SEO is one of constant push and pull–new ways to rank are identified, those methods are abused, Google introduces new rules to penalize cheaters. And so on it goes.

Anchor text has been far from immune. Back in the day, SEO was simple. Identify a keyword, then use that keyword a few times in your copy and in the anchor text. Hey presto, hello first-page ranking!

Then people figured that out, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Dodgy SEOs started spamming their backlinks with highly optimized anchor text keywords, and usefulness and relevance took a back seat to bad SEO practice.

Predictably, Google then changed the algorithm to actively penalize anyone who over-optimized their anchor text. The principle is to reward unique, useful content–and to stop people from tricking the system when that’s not what they offer.

The key here is to focus on building a bank of rich, shareable, interesting content, instead of focusing on spamming your anchor text. Sure, it’s important to bear keywords in mind–without them Google can’t identify relevance at all – but don’t prioritize your anchor text over creating amazing content. Think human first, search engine second.

4. Bad Backlinks

Backlinks are still one of the most important factors in search ranking. Google uses backlinks to determine how relevant and valuable that content is–figuring that a link from page 1 to page 2 is effectively an endorsement by page 1 of page 2.

In simple terms, if I link out in this piece to an article by, say, HubSpot, that link counts as a backlink for HubSpot and will help elevate their ranking.

Backlinks followed the same cycle as the rest of SEO–first it worked well, then people figured out how to abuse it, now you can get penalized in Google if you don’t stick to stringent quality guidelines.

Look back less than a decade, and SEOs were wildly building links–focusing on quantity much more than quality. Every site, every tactic, was fair game–from directory submissions and article directories to comment spam and guest blogging.

That’s not to say that those are automatically bad practices, by the way. The point is that they’re bad practice, as with everything in this piece, if the people using them are focusing on manipulating the SERPs rather than adding value to users.

Directory link building, for example, can actually be really valuable. There are directories out there that are really useful to users–providing high-quality, relevant lists of links giving an in-depth oversight of the topic area.

The problem becomes when directories have low standards, allowing anyone in for a price, simply to build backlinks.

You will probably have noticed a trend throughout this article. The best way to get onto directories that can help your SEO strategy is to write comprehensive, valuable content on a topic. Make the editor want to include you on the directory, by virtue of how good your content is.

Guest blogging is the same. It is a legitimate practice, if done legitimately. Unfortunately, what a number of people did is start building links on poor quality, irrelevant websites simply to get the backlink. It doesn’t work. It’s spammy. Google doesn’t like it, people don’t like it, and it can damage your brand reputation.

Saying that, as with directory link building, guest blogging can still be a useful strategy. Guest bloggers getting exposure on the high authority domains – Forbes, for example – are getting incredibly high-quality backlinks, plus exposure to a huge audience. How do you get a guest post accepted on an industry-leading platform?  Your content needs to be exceptional.

If you want to read more about good link building, you can check out my traffic improvement guide published here on Search Engine Journal in March 2015.

5. Non-Optimized Page Titles

SEO is about balance. You have to think about keywords, because that is fundamentally how Google determines ranking, but you don’t want to think about it too much or you will get hit with a penalty!

Page titles are an element that Google weights very heavily when deciding what your page is about and how valuable it is. The logic here is that your page title has to capture everything your page is about in a short character limit, so it’s probably a good indicator of content.

It’s really important to include the core keyword you’re targeting in your page title, basically. Not only will this be better for your ranking, it is also better for your click-through rate as people can immediately identify relevance to their search query (page title comes up first on Google results).

Image credit: Marcus Tober | Searchmetrics | ‘The Content Evolution‘

As with everything SEO, the importance of page titles is always shifting, but it’s still worth focusing on. Research from Searchmetrics actually suggests page titles are declining in importance slightly, but it’s important not to forget to optimize them. Even if Google decreases the importance of the page title as a ranking factor, it still has a huge impact on your click-through rate.

6. Insecure Site

This is another relatively recent change from Google, who announced last year that site security is a ranking factor. Basically, all sites that start with https:// are secure sites, and this will now have a role to play in determining ranking.

It’s hard to determine how important this factor will be, but when it comes to SEO any boost is a worthwhile boost.

Also, switching to secure https has the major benefit of improving your traffic referral data. We’re unable to effectively track visitors that move from a secure to an insecure site, so we can’t build an accurate picture of our traffic sources. If your site is https though, all visitors can be tracked, wherever they come from.

Although switching to https is more effort than some of the other ranking factors, it’s definitely worth doing if you can. If not purely for the SEO benefits, for the better vision it gives you, as well as the increased trust you can build with consumers by offering a safe site.

7. Accidentally No-Indexing

No-indexing is one of those things that seems really obvious, but it can so easily be missed. A single line of code hiding on your website, and your site is invisible to Google.

Even big businesses fall afoul of no-indexing errors–I’ve worked with enough of them! This is one of the first things you should check, if you’re convinced you should be ranking in Google but aren’t.

8. Bad User Experience

Search ranking can only get you so far. If your user experience is bad, it doesn’t matter how many visitors your site gets, because your bounce rate will be outrageous.

Google looks for signals that people who visit your site find it valuable – one such signal is how long they stay there. A high bounce rate is an indication that your traffic quickly leaves, which Google figures to mean it’s not useful.

There are loads of factors that come under the heading of ‘user experience’. Basically, anything and everything your site can do that improves things for visitors, which includes:

• Making it easy to navigate
• Including a user-platform for reviews
• Including a ‘related articles’ tab
• Transcribing videos so content is more easily accessible
• Fast loading speeds
• Consistent calls to action
• Easy to find Contact and Help pages
• Mobile-responsive design
• Well spaced and easy to read
• Enabling easy social sharing
• Inviting feedback
• Choosing appealing colors and design
• Including Testimonials
• Displaying FAQS

Try and think from the perspective of a website visitor yourself – what do you find annoying, frustrating? What stops you getting what you need to do done? What makes you leave?

All of these things come under the user experience heading, and are critical to getting users to stay on your site, which in turn is critical to getting Google to rank you favorably.

9. Using a Bad Agency

With the best will in the world, reading a few articles online won’t make you an SEO expert. The world of SEO is confusing, ever-evolving, and time-consuming – so most people hire an agency to handle everything for them.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of charlatans in this game. It stems from the ease–and massive potential rewards–of cheating the system back in the day. Many SEOs still believe they can get back to the black-hat glory days, manipulating Google to secure high returns ranking.

That simply isn’t possible anymore, but too many SEOs are still clinging onto the dream. Instead of genuinely taking the time to learn the SEO landscape–and keep on top of it regularly–they’re putting up a front.

For clients, who often don’t know much about SEO at all, it can be an alluring front indeed. “I can make you rank first on Google,” they say: “Guaranteed first page.” Except nothing is guaranteed, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

SEOs who try to ‘trick’ Google are destined to trail behind the search giant, who pours millions of dollars and leverages the best minds in the world to stop people abusing the system. You might get lucky one week, but you’ll never win out overall.

Instead, your best bet when it comes to hiring the right agency is to check references extensively. Ideally, you want to see testimonials, case studies, and tangible evidence of results. And you want someone who recognizes that SEO is about genuinely providing value, not about manipulation.

 

Image Credits

Featured Image: rusty_clark/Flickr.com
In-post Photo #1: Unsplash/Pixabay.com
In-post Photo #2: mintchipdesigns/Pixabay.com
In-post Photo #3: ClkerFreeVectorImages/Pixabay.com

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