The Perfect SEO Specialist Profile: The Skills That Make the Difference

I spent many years as an SEO specialist, and already a few years hiring and coordinating profiles of these characteristics. With all this experience, I'd like to share a portrait of the perfect SEO specialist profile. We never became one, and we will always be stronger in one aspect than another, but this would be the Messi of SEO in my opinion.

A good SEO would say that it must bring together a set of hard and soft skills, most of them workable over time, but I would say that there is a type of base condition and attitude that already predisposes you to be competitive:

1.    Attitude and mentality: the basis of everything

Before talking about technical knowledge, there are three pillars of attitude without which the rest is useless:

• To be curious: to investigate, to prove, to discover. Always wanting to try something new, without fear
• Continuous training: in this profession we must train and renew ourselves continuously, so as not to be relegated. If you didn't, don't start because it will be a waste of time
• Adaptation to change: we operate in an environment in which we do not set the rules, and we are constantly changed. You have to know how to read changes and adapt quickly

2.    Technical Domain: The Basics of SEO

Without a solid technical SEO foundation, the rest of the disciplines are lame:

• Technical SEO: without a technical SEO foundation, working on the other SEO disciplines will be superficial, partial and you probably won't find the meaning of what you're doing
• Controlling the Web. In recent years, SEO "specialists" have proliferated who know very well all the nomenclature of our vocabulary, tools, audits, reports. We have to understand that the basis on which we work the projects is technological, so it will be very helpful for us to understand, and even know how to influence the technology we touch: PHP, Wordpress, Shopify, React, servers, whatever

3.    Strategic vision and business orientation

The best technical SEO in the world is worth nothing without a strategic perspective and economic sense:

• Panoramic, transversal, business vision. Complementing the above, a solid knowledge base can make you implement a perfect SEO technical audit and that is absolutely useless if it is not applied with a strategic vision and with an economic sense of what we are pursuing. By transversality I mean the fact of understanding SEO as one more leg of something global (the marketing of the project), and not as an independent entity.
• Fair risk aversion. In SEO we often have to make decisions that can abruptly change the course of a brand's digital presence. It takes a character predisposed to make risky decisions, always measures, since paralysis leads you to a slow death, and a reckless attitude to a sudden death. But the result is the same.
• Business orientation. Often many professionals are satisfied with a project with great KPIs: I don't know how many impressions, average position, CTR and others. All this will be of no use if it does not add business value to the project, This is the central axis of what we do and SEO is a tool to achieve it, you should never confuse it.

4.    Analytical capacity and empathy

Data and people: two inseparable ingredients of good SEO.

• Trial and error: this is the usual dynamic of good SEOs. Constantly testing things, measuring their impact, sticking with what works, desiring or improving what has not yielded results. Constantly. Be careful, what worked yesterday may not work today. What worked in a
• Analytical. And knowing how to interpret it. A remarkable web analytics control differentiates good SEO from great SEO. You have to know what data should be useful to you, know how to measure and obtain it, and most importantly, know how to interpret it so that you can make the right decisions. We cannot move only by intuitions, although we must always leave a margin of action to them. 
• Empathy. To master SEO you have to put yourself in other people's shoes: what they think, what they need, what they are looking for, how they do it. Depending on the project and your role, it may be your client, whom you have to satisfy in order to pay you, but you will always have to study and empathize with the user we are addressing. There are those who even mimic Google or ChatGPT robots, you have to put yourself in their shoes as well as they are our discoverers and judges

5.    Communication and specialization

SEO is not done in a silo: you have to know how to explain it, sell it and delve into it.

• Communication skills. Many SEOs with a technical profile do not grow because they are unable to explain what they do, why they do it, what they are achieving and pursuing, and presenting it properly. In the end, we do marketing. It is possible that you find a place where you prepare the technical thing and another the view and present. But this will not always be the case. In the end, we are marketers and the essence of marketing is to persuade to sell. Selling includes promoting you and your work too
• In-depth knowledge of a specific area of SEO and all the most intersecting areas (UX, web analytics, copy, CRO, SEM...), better. It is impossible for us to know everything, and even more so with the evolution that is taking everything. What I can certify is that in this context it is essential to have an approach in which you are one of the best (technical SEO, content, Local, whatever). And that you can combine this with knowledge of disciplines that are not pure SEO but that will make you a better professional.

I could go on, but I think these are the most important points. It is impossible to comply with all of them and do it optimally, and in the end everyone has a unique approach. But I do believe that having something of each of these points will make you an SEO professional like the top of a pine tree.