We started by looking for commonalities among SEO Specialist job descriptions on popular hiring portals. This wasn’t a scientific process by any means; we did it by eye. Then we created a survey based on those patterns and sent it to 20 SEO hiring managers. 15 replied.
The survey was split into two sections:
Responsibilities
Skills and requirements
Let’s take a closer look at the responses.
Responsibilities
In this section, we presented SEO hiring managers with 19 of the most common responsibilities from SEO Specialist job descriptions. Then we asked whether or not each of these would be a day-to-day responsibility for their ‘SEO Specialist’.
Here are the results.
To no one’s surprise, standard SEO duties like keyword research, on-page SEO and technical SEO are part of the expected day-to-day responsibilities. So are other key tasks like collaborating with other teams (especially content teams), reporting, presenting SEO strategies and recommendations to internal/external stakeholders, and developing new SEO tests.
Keeping up-to-date with the latest industry news and trends is also an expected part of the job. However, SEO specialists are not expected to create content and build links.
Of course, we didn’t presume to know everything so we added a question:
Are there other roles and responsibilities you’d like to add that aren’t on this list?
While a couple of people gave more specific examples of responsibilities, I thought this answer from Jessica Levenson was worth highlighting:
Honestly, it’s a skillset. I want someone that is curious. They don’t have to have all the skills, they have to be willing to learn and be perpetually curious.
Jessica Levenson
Jessica Levenson, Head of Digital Strategy & SEO Oracle NetSuite
Skills and requirements
In this section, we presented the SEO hiring managers with 15 of the most common skills and requirements from SEO Specialist job descriptions. We then asked if these skills were very important, somewhat important or not important to them if they were hiring a ‘SEO Specialist’.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Here are the results.
Interestingly, we can see that the skills that most, if not all respondents, agreed on are soft skills (e.g., attention to detail, data-driven mindset, communication) or attitude (e.g., passion for SEO and internet marketing).
As Jessica Levenson added,
Aptitude over experience is always my stance. I can teach anyone SEO provided they are willing and able. On the flip side, I cannot untrain tough personalities or an unwillingness to learn.
Jessica Levenson
Jessica Levenson, Head of Digital Strategy & SEO Oracle NetSuite
Of course, that doesn’t mean that hard skills are not required. The respondents still agreed that a good understanding of SEO best practices, good technical SEO skills and prior experience in the SEO industry is preferred.
How many years