8 Must-have Skills for an SEO Expert to Be Successful

You might have a great looking website, but what is the use, if it does not attract the right audience. Getting traffic is easy but getting the right audience to read your content is difficult and can impact your online business.

You need to get more “bookers” than “lookers” on your site. Which mean you have to master the art of having the right content and the right SEO expert. The required skill sets of an SEO expert are generally wide, but there are a few basic traits that make a good SEO expert.

What makes a good SEO expert ?

1. Should be aware of the different areas of specialization in SEO :
– Search Engine Marketing is a wide area with numerous divisions like – Content development, Analytics, Link Building, Keyword development, Reputation management, Pay-Per-Click advertising & Social Media Marketing. It is a must that an expert should possess the working knowledge of all these different areas of specialization in SEO.


2. Familiarity with all the 3 levels of SEO:

– There are 3 levels in SEO –
(1) Technical – the construction of the website, which determines, if it is easy or difficult for the search engines to crawl and index the contents.
(2) On-page optimization – The use of HTML tags, which helps increase the organic search traffic to the site.
(3) Off-page optimization – the link building tactics.

3. SEO experience & Certifications:
– Many claim to be SEO experts, but fail to get desired results. Search engines keep changing their algos and that has an impact on search results. There are hundreds of factors that affect SEO and impact rankings, its a constant re skilling exercise which requires certification and skill up gradation.

4. Ranking results to measure SEO success:
– If you are looking to hire an SEO expert, you should look into a minimum of 3 to 5 current seo related website or projects that they have handled & discuss with them on the seo strategies implemented for high ranking keywords.

5. Market Savvy:
– The SEO industry has updates every now & then, and it is the responsibility of the SEO professional to stay in par with the industry to add value to the SEO skills.

6. Good Communication skills:
– A search engine optimizer should have the skills to communicate as to why a change should be made on the website and how it will aid the site or keywords on ranking. They should also be able to communicate to the technical team to make relevant changes as required.

7. Flexibility:
– Each website is different & SEO tactics change with every new update or algo change by search engines. An SEO expert should be able to switch between strategies and implement the with a lot of easy.

8. Analysis:
– Measuring and analysis is an important aspect of SEO , if you can’t measure what you have done you wont be able to show progress. An SEO expert should be able to interpret analytics of the site and drive business results.

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