SEO
SEO Manager Role & Skills (Explained by SEO Managers)
SEO is one of the most multidisciplinary marketing fields. It’s intertwined with many other aspects: marketing channels, product, and development. SEO managers are here to make it all work like a well-oiled machine that aligns with the marketing strategy and business objectives.
But what does an SEO manager do on a daily basis? What are the most important skills you need to become one? And how much can you expect to earn? We’ve got the answers.
I reached out to some of my Twitter and LinkedIn connections with SEO manager roles in their respective bios. Huge thanks to the following SEOs who helped me put this article together:
Let’s dive in.
What does an SEO manager do on a daily basis?
If you’re looking for a diverse job, you hit the jackpot. When I collated the answers from the article contributors, I got a big list of tasks and activities. I found there is an overarching sentiment that no day looks the same when you’re an SEO manager.
The daily agenda depends on whether you’re an in-house employee working for one company only or in an agency managing multiple clients. For example, you can generally expect more tactical work in-house while the agency side has more meetings and strategy planning.
I divided the daily tasks into four categories to make sense of it all. And we’re kicking it off with…
Management
Well, duh. SEO managers manage things and people. In smaller companies, SEO managers are often in charge of the whole SEO department and directly report to a CMO. In bigger marketing teams, there can be a head of SEO in between.
Management can be seen as a vague term. So here’s an example list of managerial tasks that you can expect in this role:
- Participating in meetings with clients and team members
- Coordinating the team’s tasks, answering questions, and addressing problems
- Taking care of team education, training, and motivation
- Working with stakeholders
- Creating pitch decks for new, potential clients (if you’re in an agency)
Strategy
An SEO strategy is a battle plan that guides all SEO-related efforts toward higher visibility in search engines. As part of the strategy, managers plan various SEO campaigns and ensure that they’re executed properly. SEO managers also make sure that all of these efforts are an integrated part of the broader marketing plan.
Tactics
Tactics are how you execute your strategy to be successful. These are all the SEO techniques, hacks, efforts, activities, and all the other words you can find in the context of taking action.
It comes down to the fact that you can execute thousands of different things as an SEO. But generally speaking, if an SEO manager gets involved in tactical tasks, those are usually the more advanced things that they can likely do better than others in their teams. Or they’re reviewing the work of others, e.g., content plans, outlines, drafts, or proposed technical changes.
The scope of tactical work for SEO managers depends on the resources available for the planned SEO work. If the manager has a small team, they’ll likely engage in hands-on SEO work more often than someone looking after 10 SEO specialists.
Reporting
When I say reporting, most of us will likely first associate it with the good old SEO report decks (or Google Data Studio dashboards if you’re fancier):
You usually create these once a month to report what has changed, improved, or got worse. That’s far from being a daily task. But if you work in an agency with many clients, the process of creating the first report may as well be a frequent activity.
Then there’s ad hoc reporting. It’s not necessarily about reporting to clients or stakeholders. Rather, it’s about reporting within your team or checking the progress for yourself. Two of the contributing SEO managers actually mentioned checking reporting tools on a daily basis.
In terms of specific reports, rank tracking was mentioned the most:
Followed by checking branded mentions across the web:
What are the most important skills for an SEO manager?
This is the second question I asked our contributors. Of course, solid SEO experience and skills are a given, so soft skills were mentioned most. I bundled together some of the answers and got the following top five skills an individual needs to become a great SEO manager:
Communication skills
A unanimous winner that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Many of the daily tasks mentioned above revolve around communication.
Here’s what communication skills mean in SEO:
- Having the ability to convey complex SEO concepts using simple language that even non-SEOs understand
- Assigning tasks in a way that everyone knows what they should be doing and what the point of doing the tasks is
- Being able to share feedback constructively
- Being empathetic toward team members
- Possessing negotiation skills and knowing how to “sell” the value of SEO to stakeholders
Data-driven mindset and critical thinking
I completely agree with Abby’s thoughts:
Having an affinity or at least an interest in data is crucial for any marketing role.
This is especially true in SEO. You can’t do much without knowing what data to look at, what it means, and what to make of it. And that’s also largely related to critical thinking.
Based on my own experience of interviewing many marketers, these are skills most should work on. To be a great SEO manager, you should know your way around Google Analytics, Search Console, an all-in-one SEO toolset like Ahrefs, and then be able to create great SEO reports using data from these tools.
Curiosity and constant learning
The basic principles of SEO have stayed the same over the years. But Google keeps everyone busy with its algorithm updates and changes on SERPs. Meanwhile, SEO tools keep releasing new features; also, smart SEOs are always coming up with better solutions to many problems we’re facing.
And if this isn’t a good enough selling point for the importance of constant learning and curiosity, we’ve got another: Your ideas will fail sometimes. There are no guarantees in SEO, and you’ll have ample opportunities to learn from your mistakes. And yes, failures in your team are part of your responsibilities as well.
Time management, prioritization, and delegation skills
Even if you’re not a manager, you probably know what it’s like to be swamped with messages, deadlines, and never-ending meetings. That’s your opportunity to create efficient systems and make sense of the chaos.
Not only do things get more chaotic as you step up, but you’ll also be partially responsible for other people’s chaos. However, you need to make things work for you and not against you by managing time well, prioritizing important tasks, and delegating work to others.
Technical skills
As an SEO practitioner, you may get away with knowing just the basics of technical SEO if these are not your responsibilities. But any SEO manager should go beyond the basics, as they’re often the ones approving technical SEO changes and communicating with developers.
A basic HTML orientation should not be taken for granted at all SEO levels. In addition, here’s a sample of more technical skills that can come in handy:
How much do SEO managers make?
Finally—the money talk. It’s clear that you can’t become an SEO manager right after you finish your first SEO course. It requires quite a lot of skills and experience, which are indicators of a lucrative job.
In the U.S., the average salary of SEO managers based on several job and HR databases is around $75K. However, good candidates can expect at least $100K. (I came to this conclusion after discussing with U.S.-based SEOs and reviewing many job postings.) You could go even higher than that in the most popular technological hubs.
In the U.K., the average compensation seems to be around £40K (~$55K). SEO salaries in the U.K. aren’t that attractive (yet), so I can only encourage you to ask for more to change that. Of course, you should expect large discrepancies between London and the rest of the country.
As this is a suitable job for 100% remote work, I’ve also been keeping an eye on remote job postings. These jobs start at $40K but can go well over $100K too. The best candidates can get U.S. salaries regardless of where they are in the world.
Final thoughts
Being an SEO manager is a diverse and interesting job. However, we haven’t mentioned what comes after that. In many companies, SEO roles don’t go beyond this level, but the finish line can be a manager becoming the head or director of SEO.
Every SEO should broaden their horizons and focus on marketing in general if they want to climb the career ladder—with being a CMO as the end goal. So that’s a bonus skill you should focus on (besides the top five mentioned in the article).
Again, thanks to Abby, Sugan, John, and Axel for sharing their insights and experience.
Got any questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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wpnulled pro (@[email protected])
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