FAQ: How to diversify your skillset, as an SEO professional in an evolving industry

As with all digital marketing disciplines, effective modern SEO requires a healthy mix of technical, creative, social and strategic acumen. If you possess any of these talents and wish to diversify your skillset for greater prospects in an evolving industry, see if we can tickle your tastebuds by exploring the complementary disciplines featured below.

Technical skills

Web development

If you’re technically minded, you could get deeper into web development, by learning to code better and becoming familiar with more software such as integrated development environments (IDEs) and version control software (like Git and Subversion).

If you have a strategic mindset, you could learn to be a better developer by starting with the fundamental principles of the web – Google offers an unrivalled source of comprehensive, up-to-date best-practice guidance on building better websites and apps here: developers.google.com/web/fundamentals.

WordPress

Even if you’re not yet comfortable with WordPress, there’s no time like the present to become a WordPress developer, as it’s the most popular and fastest-growing heavy-duty CMS by a long way – it’s very user-friendly and very developer-friendly. It’s no surprise, therefore, that they also offer some of the best guidance on HTML, CSS, JS and PHP coding standards – you can dive right in here!

Paid Search

Organic SEO services often take months to produce a significant return on investment (and often fail to produce any results at all), but it has traditionally offered a much greater long-term return on investment than Paid Search which only brings in traffic for as long as you’re still paying for it. Therefore Paid Search has always been a popular cross-sell to clients of Organic Search services, as a means for instant campaign results while waiting for Organic Search efforts to gain momentum. The harder it gets to achieve results through Organic Search, the more popular Paid Search will inevitably be, and while Paid is a very analytical discipline that also involves an element of trading & gambling, Organic search skills also come into play because the better optimised your ad and landing page is, and the more relevant one is to the other, the less you need to spend on ad placement, thanks to Google’s basic costing formula (cost = bid amount / quality score) whereby the quality score comprises a large element of organic SEO.

Browse Google’s own Paid Search courses here.

Analytics

If you’ve always been a fan of stats & charts, for analysing & reporting on SEO results, using tools like Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, etc – then you may wish to delve deeper into analytics and make it a potential career path.

Browse Google’s own Analytics courses here.

Conversion Optimisation

Conversion optimisation is an increasingly integral component of good SEO – it has a direct effect on rankings in so many ways, and is a great skill to develop for increased and continued employability within the digital marketing industry, working in a team not dissimilar to a tactical SEO team.

Unlike Paid Search and Analytics, which have an element of constant theory but are also substantially dependent on proprietary software that changes like the wind, Conversion Optimisation is a skill that’s mostly based on logical theory and is independent of any particular software or service providers.

Creative skills

If you’re working in SEO and have a very creative mindset, there are various avenues you could go down to upskill yourself, such as graphics or branding design and various types of content creation.

Graphics design

You could get more familiar with image and video editing software. You could learn more about the psychology of art and the impact of colours & shapes on the consumer mindset, etc. You could design logos and corporate branding artwork.

Content production

You could get deeper into content production, learning more about copywriting, photography or video production.

Product design

You could try getting into product design as a creative outlet, and could even try app development, learning more about software development tools and even programming which does require a certain type of creativity to be very effective.

Presentational & reputational skills

PR and Online Reputation Management

From content creation to social networking – whether you’re an on-site or an off-site SEO specialist, if you’re good at putting yourself in the mind of your audience to create content that boosts the widespread reputation of your brand, you might consider upskilling yourself with a view to entering the more traditional PR industry, or the more modern online reputation management niche – working for any kind of brand to ensure they uphold a stellar reputation in the public eye.

Sales and Account Management

If you have a great talent for link-building negotiations, you might try a more classical sales oriented role because that would utilise the same raw talents, or step up into account management for a higher intensity of work on a smaller selection of victims!