Advancing your in-house SEO career can be incredibly lucrative and fulfilling. But most advice is theoretical, too high-level, and comes from people who haven’t done it.
I had the good fortune of a very fruitful in-house career, leading large organizations at companies like Atlassian, G2, or Shopify.
Over the recent years, I have had the honor of helping companies like Ramp, Hims, Nextdoor, and many others hire top-tier talent and design effective teams.
But my experience is subjective, so I asked four of the most accomplished SEO pros in the world to share their insights as well (you can find their full answers at the end of the Memo):
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Thank you so much for sharing your valuable insights!
The 5 Core Competencies Of SEO
SEO professionals need five core competencies to succeed in the long-term, that I broke down into three skills each.
I created the framework based on John’s, Malte’s, Jordan’s, Tom’s, and my own experience. Each skill is critical. You cannot just be strong in four. You need to be strong in all of them to succeed in the long term.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Skill 1: Communication
Communication is made up of alignment, collaboration, and outward communication.
Creating internal alignment means helping everyone understand what matters in SEO to get buy in, but also contemplate what’s happening in a crisis. For example, when an algorithm update hits your site.
Since SEO is a recommended discipline, it’s critical to collaborate effectively with supporting teams like engineering, design, content, etc., and adjacent teams like legal or procurement.
Outward communication, the way you present yourself and the company at events or on social media, matters it comes to hiring new talent and raising your company’s reputation.
Skill 2: Learning
Learning breaks down into adaptability, experience, and filtering information.
Adaptability is important because Google’s algorithms and design change a lot. Just think about the shift we’re going through with AI search right now. So, you need to be able to shift gears, leave old mental models behind, and develop new ones. You can learn about SEO, but doing it is a different kind of beast. To learn, you can have one or more side projects to tinker with or analyze and reverse engineer other sites.
It’s also important to at least know the basics of other disciplines because they all impact SEO: copywriting, positioning and messaging, conversion optimization, design, web development, and product development.
Lastly, get good at filtering information. What do you read? How do you learn from experiments, and how well are you connected to the industry so you can learn from peers?
Skill 3: Business Savviness
Business savviness breaks down into planning, focus, and execution.
Planning is a crucial skill for almost anything in life. You need to be good at setting goals, priorities, timings, and responsibilities. Planning also includes knowing what resources you need and pitching for them. Also, develop proficiency in forecasting and projecting impact.
Focus is the skill of working on the most important projects while tuning out the noise. It’s measuring the right data to know whether you’re successful and to report upwards and sideways.
Good execution is really hard. In my experience, it comes down to good project management but also understanding how your business and industry work.
Technicality doesn’t mean technical SEO but the skills of automation, data analysis, and a general technical understanding.
Automation is about doing work more efficiently while controlling for dependencies and liabilities. This skill is rapidly becoming more important as AI gets better. It used to be about proficiency with Excel, Google Sheets, SQL, web analytics, etc. But in the future, a lot of it will come down to prompt engineering and workflow automation.
Data analysis is the skill of getting and analyzing data, i.e., knowing which data to look at and how to interpret it well.
A good technical understanding comes down to learning how Google works but also being “technical” enough to talk to engineers and product managers. For example, you want to learn what tech stack your company’s site and application is built on, how the engineering team works, etc.
Leadership is the result of advocacy, hiring, and relationship building. To be clear, you should develop leadership qualities, whether you have management responsibility or not.
Advocacy means representing SEO where it matters. It demands you to proactively find out where conversations happen that impact SEO and how to influence them.
Good hiring skills come down to whether you have a high bar and if you can bring in good talent. Who do you know, and how do you evaluate them for the job?
Relationship building is critical for rapport with your manager and peers. You need allies and “friends” to lean on and learn from. Part of this is getting good at coaching others and finding a good coach.
The five core competencies offer you a helpful overview of what you need to develop. But without understanding how to apply them, they’re only half as useful.
General Vs. Specific Skills
Everybody needs to be proficient in the five core competencies, but you need to adjust the emphasis of your skills based on the industry and business model of the company you work for.
I have three tips for you:
Learn more about technical SEO and product development when you work on larger sites, usually in B2C. Get better at demand generation and content marketing for smaller sites, usually in B2B. The reason is that you want to align your skills with the biggest growth levers of the business.
Develop expertise in SERP Features that matter for your industry. For example:
News: top stories.
Ecommerce: product grids.
SaaS: video carousels.
SMB: Map Packs.
Tailor your skills to the size and maturity of a company. For example, in startups it’s more important to execute fast while you need to invest more time into creating alignment at large enterprises.
Hard Vs. Soft Skills
Hard skills are not as important as soft skills in SEO because you need to constantly adapt to Google changes and learn new hard skills as tech and consumer behavior evolve.
I recommend writing down and refining your mental model about how Google works and what drives success.
Forcing yourself to explain and think about why things are the way they are allows you to truly refine your approach to SEO.
You need to balance two things at the same time: being confident in your approach but open to new insights. Jeff Bezos: “Strong opinions, loosely held.”
Career Planning
This is hard, but most people never think about where they want to be and what it takes to get there.
But without focus, it’s easy to dabble in too many areas and waste time. What are you optimizing for?
Think about your endgame and what you need to get there. Remember, you can always change your goal. But have one.
I love Ray Dalio’s five-step framework for endgame planning 1:
Have clear goals.
Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals.
Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes.
Design plans that will get you around them.
Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results.
I want to finish by leaving you with some top-notch resources you can use to keep developing yourself.
1. Malte suggests Learning SEO by Aleyda Solis, probably the most comprehensive repository of SEO learning material.
2. Jordan recommends three books:
3. Tom suggests the SEO MBA, especially the SEO maturity matrix, and the Lethain article, A forty-year career.
4. John mentions Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO, WIX SEO Guide, Semrush Academy, Ahrefs Academy, Harvard Business Review Case Studies, and two books:
“Leaders Eat Last” by Simon Sinek.
“Lost and Founder” by Rand Fishkin.
Full Answers
I present to you the raw inputs I got from John, Tom, Jordan, and Malte:
What core skills and knowledge areas are essential for success in SEO today, and how do you recommend developing them?
Jordan Silton: If I were recreating my personal career path, I would emphasize technical expertise, data analysis, communication skills, and business acumen.
However, SEO roles today are so varied across different business types, industries, and strategies that a multitude of skills are valuable and relevant.
Malte Landwehr: I think SEO has become so diverse that there is no longer one set of skills.
A technical SEO needs very different skills from a content-marketing-focused SEO. A director of SEO needs very different skills from a principal SEO consultant. The SEO work for a B2B SaaS looks totally different from the SEO work for a marketplace or aggregator. News SEO is completely different from ecommerce SEO.
If I had to pick the traits that helped me the most, I would say:
The ability to simultaneously hold multiple, contradicting frameworks and mental models in your head. Two SEOs might tell you two completely different models, how they implement SEO. Both might be wrong – but you might still learn something from both approaches.
Embrace uncertainty. When reverse engineering the Google algorithm, there are many unknowns. You need to get comfortable with that.
ELI5 & ELIPhD. You need to be able to explain SEO to everyone. During your career, you might talk to a CEO, CFO, CMO, CTO, CPO, Head of Web Product, Product Manager, Content Editor, Software Developer, Analyst, and many other roles. Each of these people needs different information. And to convince them, you need to tell different stories. You must develop the ability to talk to each of them.
John Shehata: Today’s SEO landscape has evolved from a generalist approach to a more specialized one. We now see technical SEOs, content SEOs, commerce SEOs, and many more.
The most critical skill right now is adaptability. Google’s algorithms are becoming more sophisticated, advanced, and complex, requiring SEOs to maneuver through frequent changes and quickly pivot strategies when necessary.
Developing this skill involves staying informed through industry updates, engaging with the community, and experimenting to see what works in real time.
Equally important is the ability to think with a business mindset. Historically, SEOs have been focused heavily on driving traffic, but generating traffic for traffic’s sake is no longer enough.
SEOs today need to align their strategies with business goals and revenue streams, focusing on attracting the right audience that converts rather than casting the widest net possible. This shift requires optimizing content not just to attract visitors but to support key business objectives.
Additionally, leveraging AI is essential – not just for automating tasks but for enhancing your analysis and decision-making.
AI can streamline workflows, handle complex data analysis, and support content optimization, allowing SEOs to focus on strategic tasks.
To build these skills, SEOs should learn about AI tools, experiment with them, and stay updated on new developments.
However, none of these skills will be fully effective without strong communication abilities. Being able to translate complex SEO insights into clear, actionable recommendations for non-technical stakeholders is invaluable.
This involves bridging the gap between technical teams and business units, ensuring that all departments are aligned and moving toward shared objectives.
Lastly, data analytics is a foundational skill that ties everything together. A deep understanding of data helps uncover hidden opportunities and supports informed, strategic decisions.
Mastery of tools like Google Analytics, BigQuery, and Looker Studio will allow SEOs to extract meaningful insights that can shape strategies, validate recommendations, and ultimately drive better business outcomes.
Tom Critchlow: This will be no surprise to those who know me, but business skills are critical.
The ability to first understand the full revenue profile and mechanics of the companies you work with, and then being able to communicate confidently, credibly, and clearly.
SEO is more than ever a cross-functional activity and so what we consider “soft skills” are actually critical to be able to convince teams, stakeholders, clients and organizations to invest appropriately in SEO.
Of course, you need some knowledge of SEO too! I think the ideal career experience is a role that allows you to invest in your technical and analytical SEO skills while getting a front-row seat to the wider business context and communication.
What pivotal experiences contributed most to your professional growth?
Jordan Silton: I’ve been fortunate to keep learning different roles, and each shift into a new context accelerated my growth.
Starting in paid search/SEM taught me to monitor KPIs, optimize for ROI, and use an experimental approach to improvement.
Evolving a reporting team into a data science and experimentation team expanded my understanding of how teams and metrics connect across the entire business.
Becoming a product leader was transformational in teaching me how to build consensus and influence to move a business forward.
Malte Landwehr: For me personally, it was a combination of three things:
I started tinkering with websites in my early teen year. I did everything on my own, from repairing corrupted SQL databases, to editing .htaccess files, creating content, attracting visitors, and former partnerships for monetization. This allowed me to understand the full picture of running a website.
I studied Computer Science with a focus on graph algorithms, web scraping, machine learning, information retrieval, and NLP. This allowed me to form a deep understanding of Google’s algorithms and patents.
I worked in Management Consulting. One thing I oversaw was making sure our PowerPoint slides can be read on a BlackBerry in the backseat of a car. This gave me the skills to talk to the C-level and craft proper proposals.
John Shehata: My career growth has been shaped by a diverse range of experiences.
Coming from a technical background as a software engineer and transitioning to marketing has given me a strong foundation.
One key moment was learning to translate complex SEO concepts into a language that editorial, PR, and marketing teams could understand, which helped bridge the gap between SEO needs and business objectives.
Another pivotal decision early in my career was to become a well-rounded marketer instead of specializing only in SEO.
I gained expertise in social media when platforms like Twitter and Facebook were in their infancy, built one of the first social media teams for a major news publisher, and developed a deep understanding of newsletters and partnerships. This diverse experience allowed me to eventually lead global audience development strategies for large organizations.
Managing cross-functional teams was another formative experience.
Working closely with development and engineering teams taught me to speak their language, advocate for SEO needs, and propose technical solutions that accelerated our initiatives.
While working with Editorial teams taught me how to respect the craft and appreciate all the due diligence that goes into writing content.
Working with all these different teams and understanding their strengths and needs, strengthened my ability to push back when necessary and collaborate effectively, which is crucial for driving SEO projects forward within complex organizations.
One of the most fulfilling aspects of my career has been mentoring and team building. I’ve had the privilege of hiring hundreds of SEOs and mentoring some of the best SEOs in the industry, helping them develop their own skills and grow into leadership roles.
Watching them succeed has been one of the most rewarding parts of my journey.
Finally, a turning point in my career was the conscious effort I made to build my personal brand.