Your SEO manager will be one of the most important members of your digital marketing team. Without a solid SEO strategy, all of your other marketing efforts will ultimately be for nothing. The internet is a big place and the barriers for entry for those who want to launch their own website have never been lower. While it is a good thing that the internet is so open and accessible, even to those who have only a very basic level of tech knowledge, it also has the side effect of saturating the internet with a deluge of websites catering to every niche and interest imaginable.
How is an aspiring business meant to make their mark when their voice is being drowned out by a cacophony of other websites, a cacophony that is only getting louder with time? The answer is search engines, of course. Search engine optimisation refers to a variety of techniques that businesses and website owners can use to make their website more visible to users searching for relevant search terms.
Many business owners spend years asking themselves “should I hire someone for SEO?” before they finally take the plunge. However, the benefits of hiring an SEO company to handle your SEO, Your SEO manager will take the lead in helping your business formulate a coherent SEO strategy and will, therefore, be essential in determining how successful you are at maintaining a high SEO score. If you don’t know how to hire an SEO specialist, then the tips below will guide you in the right direction.
Defining The Role Of SEO Manager And What It Entails
There are many aspects of being an SEO manager that overlap with the role of marketing manager within most businesses. Both types of managers are concerned with achieving the same overall goals. They are both aiming to increase brand awareness and drive sales. The difference is that your SEO manager will be focused exclusively on how you can use your position in search engine results pages to drive more traffic to your website, increase the exposure of your business, and ultimately reach out to customers who would otherwise never encounter you.
In order to achieve these goals, your SEO manager will need to have a much better grasp of technology than a normal marketing manager. For example, an understanding of the technology that underpins search engines is imperative if an SEO manager is going to be effective.
What Does The Job Entail?
There are lots of good reasons to hire an SEO manager. They perform a multi-faceted role in modern businesses and their work often goes beyond marketing and touches on other aspects of the business as well. Here are just some of the things that an SEO manager can do for your business.
- Optimising content for your website, social media profiles, and other digital channels.
- Overseeing the development of website content to ensure that it maximises your SEO.
- Negotiating with other websites and businesses to provide backlinks.
- Formulating and disseminating your SEO strategy and overseeing its execution.
- Directing your keywords research and market analysis to ensure that they are delivering worthwhile results.
What Key Skills Will You Be Looking For?
Given how varied the work of an SEO manager is, it isn’t surprising that the best SEO managers are those who demonstrate proficiency in a variety of different areas. When you are looking to hire an SEO manager for your business, these are the key skills and proficiencies that you need to look for.
Good Communicator
When you hire an SEO specialist for your business, you are bringing in someone who possesses a unique skill set. The work of an SEO manager will touch on numerous other roles in your business but there won’t be anyone else who is doing what your SEO manager is doing with respect to your digital marketing. You need an SEO manager who will be able to communicate clearly with the rest of your digital marketing team, so they know exactly what they need to do to play their part in keeping your SEO score high.
Their Past Experience And Work
An SEO manager with experience under their belt and a proven track record for success is obviously going to be more valuable than a fresh-faced SEO manager who is still untested. If there are any examples of campaigns or strategies that a candidate has been responsible for in the past, analyse these for an indication of what to expect from them as an SEO manager within your business.
Their Understanding Of The Current Landscape
The world of SEO moves at breakneck speed. Many of those who are trying to keep up find it difficult to keep pace with the constant changes that are occurring. An SEO manager is no good to you if they are stuck in an outdated way of doing things and incapable of evolving. You need to hire an SEO specialist who is familiar with all the latest and most important developments in the field.
Their Managerial Experience And Philosophy
Whenever you are hiring someone for a managerial role, it is important that you take the time to get to understand exactly who they are as a manager. In order to do this, you will need to interrogate their past experience and ask them about their overarching managerial philosophy. Both of these data points can tell you a lot about how they will operate within your business should you decide to hire them.
Defining The Role Of SEO Marketer And What It Entails
Not every business can justify the costs of hiring a dedicated SEO marketer to work within their business. For these businesses, it is possible to hire SEO agencies or even freelance SEO specialists. If you hire a technical SEO specialist, s/he can provide you with many of the same benefits of an SEO manager, although so they will not be a permanent fixture in your business.
An SEO marketer or external SEO marketing business that you hire to tackle your SEO on a short-term basis will fulfil the same roles and duties as an SEO manager. They will be responsible for overseeing your SEO strategy for the duration of their contract.
What Key Skills Will You Be Looking For?
If you are about to hire a dedicated SEO expert for your business, there are some key skills that you need to look for. As with the role of SEO manager, there are innumerable skills that can help an SEO marketing specialist in pursuit of their goals. However, there is also a core set of competencies that you should insist on from any applicant you are seriously considering.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking skills essential to anyone who has to regularly solve problems in the course of their professional life. An SEO marketer is constantly strategising and refining their approach to the job. This means that they need to always be on their feet and always thinking critically.
It is only by making a conscious effort to understand past campaigns, specifically their strengths and weaknesses, that any SEO marketer can build on past experience and improve upon their promise. When you are assessing a candidate’s suitability for your business, you should consider whether you think they will be a versatile and adaptable thinker.
Good Communicator
Even if an SEO marketer will only be with your business for the duration of a single campaign, it is still vital to ensure that they are good and effective communicators. Communication is at the heart of any type of marketing. If you can’t able to effectively communicate with your audience than your messaging will be unclear and ineffective. You can look into their past work or any references they provide for an indication of how good they are at communicating, but the best way of ascertaining their communication skills is to sit down and talk to them.
When you are interviewing a potential SEO marketer, use the interview as an opportunity to ask them to explain both their ethos and their workflow. Pay particular attention to how they answer the question as well as what they say, both of these will tell you a lot about their communication skills.
An Analytical Mind
An effective SEO marketer needs to be able to not only analyse and evaluate their own past work but also the work of your competitors. The best SEO marketers are constantly analysing their surroundings and paying keen attention to how the world of digital marketing is engaging with SEO. When you are interviewing a prospective SEO marketer, make sure to ask them to analyse some existing work, whether it’s their own or other people’s, and tell you what they make of it. You are looking for a marketer who can provide you with some genuine insight into other people’s thought processes as well as their own.
Motivated To Succeed
Above all else, you need an SEO marketer who is capable of motivating themselves and has the drive to succeed. If an SEO marketer is only going to be with your business for a single campaign, you want to get as much out of them as possible. An SEO marketer is much more likely to inspire your existing workers to redouble their own efforts if your workers can see that they are motivated, passionate, and enthusiastic about what they do.
Having the right SEO managers and marketers in place is essential for any business that wants to maximise returns on its digital marketing. It is worth taking the necessary time to establish exactly what you want from a new SEO hire and how you will establish whether candidates are right for your business or not. Stick to the advice above and you should have no trouble hiring the best SEO marketers for your business.
If you’re about to embark on hiring SEO talent into your business, make sure you request our FREE guide on How To Write a Job Description That Delivers High-Performing Digital Marketing Candidates.
