Today’s Whiteboard Friday, Helen shows how you can identify the gaps in your SEO abilities to always evolve and grow into your SEO’s best self.
Video Transcription Hi! I’m Helen, the head of SEO at Car & Classic, and I’m here today to provide some helpful strategies to determine your SEO weaknesses and the best way you can fill them.
This is a bit inconsiderate. Saying you’re lacking skills? I’m not sure who you are. You may be an expert SEO. We’re certain that you are. You’re aware that we inform our clients and bosses that SEO is extremely difficult and constantly evolving algorithms? Oh, it’s true. They’ve evolved yet. The truth is that what we say to our bosses and our customers to stay in our jobs is real, and due to this, we need to remain on the cutting edge of our skills to keep up with everything that’s happening in our field as well as to ensure that we’re SEO’s top SEOs.
However, SEO is broad but isn’t that so? We often make the mistake of categorizing it into online SEO, online PR, and technical SEO. However, can you be a specialist in all three of them when they’ve developed vast and diverse skills? Is that a little reduced, considering local SEO, Edge SEO, or enterprise SEO?
Learn about the technical aspect of SEO skills. How do SEO technical skills stop and developer abilities start? Let’s look away from the heavy pile of confusion I’ve presented to you and discuss different types of abilities, including hard skills as well as soft capabilities. Let me categorize the hard skills in terms of those types of SEO abilities you’ll need to be able to use for jobs in SEO, such as the ability to perform the analysis of keywords or perform an audit of technical quality. These kinds of skills that you learn. These are things that you typically learn in the course of your work as well as learn and improve in time.
Additionally, there are soft skills. These more versatile skills and knowledge can place you in great positions regardless of the kind of work you’re offered, like stakeholder communication and management. They are crucial to remember as you’ll require an array of hard and soft skills in various methods based on the job in SEO you’re working for.
We’ll take a look and then. If SEO is such a vast topic, how can you identify the essential skills to excel? In the case of an extremely skilled technical SEO professional, do you need to learn a lot about SEO for local areas? Do you have to be extremely proficient in business SEO? Do you need to know which edge SEO has, or could you pretend?
1. What kind of skills will I need?
The first step is determining the abilities required for the job and your next job. Therefore, start with a look at your present job. What do you do daily? It would be interesting to look through the week or two. Then when you’re done with each day, you can write down what you are doing. Which you’re engaged in.
For example, you could have conducted a technical audit or attended several meetings. Of course, you’ve had meetings. Every day, we work in meeting rooms. However, note them down and begin breaking them down into the skill set required to excel at all those tasks. Let’s consider the example of meetings. There may have been an opportunity to pitch your client. What abilities do you require to be truly proficient at client pitches?
If you could max out and raise your skills to 10, what skills would you have to succeed at the pitching meeting? During the afternoon, you had some classes with the developers within the team. It’s still a gathering. There’s an entire collection of capabilities. There’s training. There’s communication. This is a distinct skill that is required.
Therefore, spend your time going through your week. Break down all of the tasks you perform in your work, and then identify the capabilities you’ll need to use effectively at each of those tasks. It’s all your work right now. What are your plans for the future? What skills would you require for this? Then I’d recommend looking through some ads for jobs. It is a good idea to log on to LinkedIn to get rid of those 20 ads trying to convince the guest posts you can make and take a peek at some of the advertisements for job openings.
However, don’t take a look at the advertisements that can be found currently. Check out the ads for jobs that are more aspire-like. For instance, if you’re a tech SEO, you should look into ads for senior technical SEO or the head for technical SEO. Begin looking through those adverts for jobs just a few steps above the position you’re in currently, and look at what kind of expertise they’re looking for. The ones they feel are essential and which they consider to be desirable because this will give you some idea of the abilities you’ll need for the future if your career is moving in the direction you’d like to take.
In addition, you’ll need to get started deconstructing some of those complicated capabilities. These are the general, vague abilities that we are always tempted to mention in advertisements for jobs. Things like stakeholder management. What is stakeholder management mean in SEO? This means that you’re in control you want, and the incredible SEO method you’ve been spending hours developing will be accepted by individuals who must agree to it.
It’s a bit of what stakeholder management is. However, if you can break it down into its components is the ability effectively and convincingly communicate. Understanding business demands as well as blockers. It’s all about recognizing the development cycle and where your demands might work within these. Thus, stakeholder management is an expansive skill. However, you must begin to determine what the key abilities are for those complicated ones.
Finally, it would help if you talked with your boss. Ask them for a progression plan, and establish certain goals for yourself. Aid them in identifying the capabilities you’ll need to fulfill your job and what you’re expected to perform well and help you develop an exhaustive list of the skills you could require in your present and future positions.
2. What can I do to work on?
Now that you’ve figured out what you’ll need to learn, how can you tell if you’re proficient in these skills or need to work on them on the skills? It’s best if starting by asking your coworkers. Request them to share with you which areas you could get better at. However, you’ll need to be precise since if you ask them to tell you what they think of your abilities, you’ll hear things like, “You’re nice, and you bake great cakes for the office, and you’re friendly,” which is very uplifting. However, it’s not useful in this situation.
You could create an online survey for them since everybody loves spontaneous surveys while working. However, ask them to anonymously provide feedback about the competencies you believe you should be able to demonstrate for the job and request them to rate your score out of, say, five or ten regarding how skilled they believe you’re. Also, do it yourself. It is your matrix of skills. This is how you can determine the areas you believe you’re at about your skills and abilities in this particular skill.
It’s a good idea to break it into smaller pieces. For instance, if you’re thinking about websites that are moving, place yourself based on your knowledge of web-based migrations. But also the practical knowledge you have gained from them since you may have read every article published on the Moz blog on web-based migrations but never actually conducted one. Your theoretical understanding could be quite high.
You have a good comprehension of what is involved in an online migration. However, you do not have the necessary experience. You could give yourself a score of five points for knowledge but a negative for actual knowledge. Invite your team members to take on this task, then take it on yourself, after which you’ll have the most accurate understanding of where you stand about your skills. Ask your boss in your reviews of performance to begin evaluating you.
They could be more impartial. They can provide you with an understanding of what kind of abilities they believe you’ll develop, which you may not have identified you. They should be able to assist you in assessing your progress against the performance strategies they’ve implemented for you. Finally, attend conferences and read blogs. Scroll through Twitter. What are the places where you find yourself feeling out of touch during these conversations? In what place do you think, “I have no idea what they’re talking about. They’re going on about edge SEO again.”
3. How do I improve?
Which area do you require to increase your knowledge or apply it practically? So, you’ve figured out the things you should be aware of. What do you know that you’re not doing so well in? How can you get better? This is step three. You should begin by being surrounded by thought leaders. Go to Twitter or Mastodon or whatever. They are the cool kids in the present and locate the thought leaders you want to follow.
These may not be experts in the SEO sector, but they may be experts in different disciplines. Search for individuals who can excel in what you’d like to improve. For instance, if you’d like to improve your persuasive communication, follow some political leaders. Suppose you’re interested in getting more knowledgeable about how development cycles function and the best way to get acceptance from engineers. Look at some engineers’ managers.
However, you must first learn those who have the capabilities you’re seeking to develop in how they accomplish things, as well as how they learn and improve their skills. It is also possible to find a mentor. It’s great as you’ll be surrounded by someone who knows who you are and your direction throughout your job. They will help you find areas where you’re a tiny bit unprepared and aid you in understanding areas where you can improve.
These days, mentors can be very expensive or completely cost-free. Many mentoring programs are on the market, including the amazing Women in Tech SEO one or others that you could benefit from. Find someone to mentor you, such as an old colleague, an ex-boss, or one you work with. However, find someone you believe is a couple of steps above your own regarding their work experience and the types of abilities you wish to build and request their assistance.
Training. We’ve received these fantastic training budgets while sitting in interviews for jobs. We should utilize these budgets. Therefore, find the right training programs specifically tailored to the skills you want to acquire. Do not just take a look at a bunch of SEO-related courses that are generic. If it’s stakeholder management, look for an appropriate course to cover this, or if you’re interested in public speaking, look for an online course. Receive feedback from your coach, colleagues, or your supervisor.
Request that people let you know whether they feel that you’re gaining these abilities. Take a look at your matrix of skills. Check to see if you’re not putting it down in your computer to accumulate the dust of your imagination, but instead, clean it up and conduct an overview. What has your progress been over time compared to those abilities you mentioned in the past? If you have any particular skill you’re hoping to master, then you must try the skills.
If it’s an ability to speak in public that you’d like to master or you’re about to take that step of seeking out whether you can manage a customer meeting, or if you could conduct a workshop or even speak in front of a crowd, you’ll need to test it. It’s not just a matter of time. The learning doesn’t stop with that. This is a continuous cycle. It’s necessary to return to the beginning of stage one. Set yourself up to set a timer once every year for a review at this and ensure that you’re working towards the job which you’re aiming for and continuing to improve the skills you’d like to enhance.
