What Exactly Does an SEO Manager Do?

Top Skills of an SEO Manager

When you hire a search engine optimization (SEO) agency to maintain your website, promote your brand and obtain high rankings for targeted keywords there’s a good chance an SEO manager is the brains of the operation. They stay, mostly, behind the scenes, motivating the team and ensuring effective SEO strategies are put into place for each client. But this doesn’t mean they sit back and watch all the action, an SEO manager is equipped with an arsenal of skills to plan, implement and manage a company’s overall SEO & digital marketing plan. Learn more about the skills of an SEO manager and their importance within a digital marketing agency.

10 Must-Have Skills of an Expert SEO Manager

Keyword Research: A successful SEO campaign starts by identifying the correct keywords to target; this will be unique to every single organization.

Technical & On-Page SEO: Both on-page and technical SEO will increase website traffic. On-page SEO is the optimization of web pages, focusing on 1 specific keyword/keyword phrase. Technical SEO ensures the site is accessible to both users and machines (search engine crawlers).

Read More: Key Elements of Good On-Page SEO

Content Strategy: Research and developing new content is key to increase the keywords your site can rank for. Whether it is through landing pages or blogs, an SEO manager ensures the content is insightful, useful and valuable to the client’s goals.

Client Meetings/Reporting: The SEO manager is responsible to discuss current and future strategies with the client, as well as analyze quarterly reports to identify areas of improvement.

Extensive Google Analytics Knowledge: Reports will include detailed information on web pages & search queries generating the highest volume of traffic, leads and sales.

Website Administration: An SEO manager must be able to navigate a wide range of content management systems to publish content and perform website maintenance.

Read More: Reasons SEO Managers LOVE WordPress

SEO Copywriting: Blogs and landing pages should not only be informative and on-brand for the client but consist of on-page SEO elements including heading tags, meta title, meta description, keyword-rich photo file name & ALT tag and more.

Project Management: An important skill of an SEO manager is the ability to oversee multiple projects, establish timelines, communicate with the clients, troubleshoot issues and deliver results.

Client Relationship Management: Effectively communicate goals, timelines and setting realistic expectations based on targeted keywords and monthly budget.

Passionate: Since SEO techniques and Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, the most important SEO manager skill is to be passionate and driven. Staying on top of the latest trends, upcoming changes and staying ahead of the competition is what will bring in new clients to your agency and keep your loyal ones.