Due to the lockdown measures to curb the pandemic’s spread, businesses have taken several steps to ensure that they remain afloat. One of these measures includes the adoption of online channels.
With lots of businesses striving to maintain a robust online presence, the demand for search engine optimization has never been greater.
Besides maintaining a strong online presence, businesses also seek to outrank competitors on search engine results, increase web traffic, and improve conversion rates. You need to give more attention to several SEO skills to help businesses achieve these results.
At Sydney SEO Agency, we have put together a list of the SEO skills you should focus on this year.
Contents
Data Analysis
As SEO is a long-term process, it is vital to have strong analytical skills to make periodic assessments. Since the data you have at your fingertips is only as good as what you make of it, one can never overemphasize the importance of data analysis.
We can measure the success or failure of any SEO strategy by analytics. Although lots of search engines provide analytics, you should be able to interpret this data too.
As data analysis aims to identify areas of the SEO campaign that are performing below par, it is also necessary for you to create an action plan based on the results to improve the SEO campaign.
Critical Thinking
As SEO requires strategic planning, you also need to focus on developing your critical thinking skills. SEO involves seeing problems from different perspectives and being able to come up with unique solutions.
No two websites are alike, and there is no one-size-fits-all SEO strategy. Therefore, you would often be required to tweak your system by carefully considering the several factors.
Most times, SEO goes beyond optimizing the website in question but outdoing the competition too. Hence, you need to monitor your closest rivals’ SEO campaigns, identify their most efficient strategies, and tweak these strategies to suit your campaign.
Research
Your knowledge of any industry is mainly responsible for most of the SEO strategies that you adopt.
Most of the time, research takes up a significant portion of the time involved in creating SEO strategies. Besides researching keywords and other relevant content, you would also need to study the competition too. Therefore, you need to pay attention to developing efficient research techniques that provide the data you need within the shortest possible time.
Proper research also keeps you updated on any changes in the policies of search engines. Besides ensuring that you remain in the game, it also equips you with useful information you could use to tweak your SEO strategies.
Writing
Most SEO campaigns require a reasonable amount of written content. Unlike other forms of writing, SEO writing requires a higher degree of finesse. It involves weaving keywords and phrases into content and ensuring that they blend in naturally. Therefore, you need to pay attention to developing strong writing skills.
Forcing keywords into your content might improve your site’s ranking, but it will only be for a short while. Although the keywords may be relevant, visitors to the site will spend less time reading poorly scripted articles, and this will reduce your click-through rates. Besides being found out by your site visitors, search engines will also spot stuffed keywords and eventually penalize you.
Writing is also essential to building links. By writing blogs and getting them backlinked from other relevant sites, you could direct more traffic to your website. These blogs do not have to center on the service you provide but should contain general information that establishes your position as an expert and directly linked to your site.
Prioritization
As SEO involves lots of processes, you could quickly become overwhelmed by the massive amount of workload. Therefore, prioritization is a skill that is too important to ignore. It would be best if you had an adequate understanding of every step involved in the SEO process. This knowledge will help you prioritize each of these steps based on their importance or difficulty.
Although SEO might be a long-term process, you will rarely have the luxury of time. Hence, prioritization is a necessary skill if you must make effective use of your time.
Compared to other processes such as content development, getting backlinks to your website is more critical. Backlinks serve as an endorsement of your site and quickly improve your site’s ranking. Therefore, you will need to devote more time to building backlinks than the time spent on tweaking content.
Since most of your site visitors would be accessing your site with mobile devices, you should prioritize making your websites mobile-friendly.
Decision Making
SEO involves making lots of split-second decisions. As it takes lots of variables into consideration, decision making is often a complicated process. For your SEO strategy to succeed, you must make the hard decisions as soon as they come.
Search engines put new measures in place over time. You could discover that some of your best strategies have become obsolete or that your website content no longer complies with the updated policies.
However, by developing strong decision-making skills, you could continually adjust your strategies to ensure that your site rankings do not suffer.
Web Coding
Most of the SEO strategies involve websites. Hence, web coding is a skill that is too important to neglect. You do not need to be a web design expert, but it is crucial to understand how website design works.
As web design for SEO involves creating mobile-friendly sites, it places greater emphasis on raw data and less on artistic skills, unlike most programmers believe.
Sufficient website design experience helps relay more precise instructions to the programmers on your team.
It also allows you to appreciate any feedback they offer.
People Management
Although SEO focuses mainly on websites, a significant portion of the job is done offline and involves interacting with many people. Therefore, you need strong people management skills.
Besides effectively coordinating the team of experts you are working with, people management skills also help you deal with demanding clients. So many clients fail to understand that SEO is a long-term process and expect immediate returns on investment. Such clients could quickly lose patience with you after the first month. However, by having efficient people management skills, you would be able to reassure clients while effectively explaining your point.
Conclusion
It is impractical to believe that you have no SEO expertise that you could use some improvement.
Regardless of your search engine optimization experience, focusing on the SEO skills listed in this article will help you achieve the desired results for your business this year.