Do you want to know the skills necessary to become an SEO manager? Keep reading to learn what SEO experts do, if a career in SEO is the right choice for you, and what skills you need to get your application noticed and land a job you love as an SEO manager.

If you’re looking for an SEO Manager role, try managing your job search with Teal's free Job Application Tracker. This free Chrome Extension tool will help you stay organized, apply to jobs faster, tell you the keywords you need in your resume (just like this blog article does!), and help you land a job you love.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an area of marketing. The main goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic. Companies that do SEO will optimize their writing and content on their site so it ranks highly on search engines like Google. If your site is ranked higher on Google, more people will find it and possibly become a customer.

What is an SEO Manager?

SEO managers oversee a website’s content and writing and are responsible for increasing the ranking of a company’s materials. To do this, they conduct research about each topic to make sure the content they post is informative and has the right keywords. To rank higher on a search result page, content has to have the right keywords, structure, and more. The more relevant an SEO manager can make their site’s content, the higher that content will rank.

What Are the Top Skills of an SEO Manager?

Some of these top skills for SEO Managers  include:

• Search Engine Optimization Strategy
• SEO Analytics
• Keyword Research (Especially using Ahrefs and SEMRush)
• Site Building (Especially CSS, HTML, and WordPress)
• Writing (Especially informative blog writing)

Here’s a closer look at the top five must-have skills SEO managers need to stay competitive in the job market.

Search Engine Optimization Strategy

A successful SEO strategy takes time and requires upfront planning. Being consistent in posting, keyword research, and staying on top of topical news is important so your content is consistent. 

SEO Analytics

Having a strong SEO strategy is obviously essential to being a successful SEO manager, but knowing how to measure the results of your strategy is just as important. Being data-driven and knowing how to deep-dive into analytics will ensure that your SEO content is driving the best results possible. Some SEO managers even use SQL on a daily basis for data analysis.

Keyword Research

Keyword research lets you know the most relevant keywords, as well as which search results are worth targeting. You want to do keyword research so you can strike a balance between creating content that is searched for often but not content that is very competitive to rank for. Keyword research can be done on sites like Ahrefs and SEMrush.

Site Building

SEO managers are often responsible for running their company’s blog. Blogs are hosted on the company’s website and could be hosted by Webflow, WordPress, or any of the other similar sites. Knowing how the blog is built on the technical side will help you optimize articles for higher rankings. It helps your prospects as an SEO manager to know basic to intermediate site-building skills like HTML, CSS, and WordPress.

Writing Skills

SEO managers usually have a background in content creation. Having strong writing skills will benefit your blog by making the content more informative and easier to read. 

How to Know Which Keywords are the Most Impactful

Using Teal's free Job Application Tracker, you can save jobs from across the web and virtually every job board. These jobs are saved to a central location where their job descriptions are analyzed and the most important keywords are shown. The Keywords Engine shows the highest impact words, the most frequent words, and Emphasis words.

To create this article, we saved 5 SEO Manager roles to the Job Application Tracker and analyzed the most common keywords saved.