Microsoft Lists SEO as the Most Important Hard Skill for Marketers (2024)

FAQs

Is SEO a hard skill? ›

At the top of the list of important hard skills is search engine optimization. Data from the study is based on a LinkedIn poll conducted by Microsoft with 600 global senior marketer participants.

SEO skills are more demanding in the 21st century since old and new companies frequently require SEO to cultivate their customers and revenues. SEO is a great thing to learn because it allows you to learn different online marketing strategies, content writing, and content curation that you keep ahead of other domains.

As an SEO, it's your job to act as a gatekeeper and support content ideas that can add value to search engines and users. Basic skills like keyword research, finding content gaps, and distributing your content will come in handy.

SEO is not that hard to learn, but it can be confusing and overwhelming to get started. Learning SEO means learning about a long list of individual digital marketing strategies, which can feel a bit like adding new weapons to your arsenal as you learn how to wield them.

At its core, marketing is about communicating to an audience, so it's no surprise that communication is the top skill those in the field need to have! Being able to express yourself and convey concepts to others in a clear, engaging way will be essential to your work as a marketer.

Winning SEO job descriptions on resumes have to highlight your expertise in building and optimizing websites for search engine traffic. Show you can develop content with relevant keywords to increase organic traffic, analyze SEO performance, solve technical SEO issues, and develop and implement SEO strategies.

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Pro-tip: Learn these and more skills with a structured SEO certification Course. SEO professionals are in high demand, as companies need search optimization in order to compete in most niches.

What is SEO and how it works? ›

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of getting pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google. Because search is one of the main ways in which people discover content online, ranking higher in search engines can lead to an increase in traffic to a website.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In the simplest of terms, good SEO optimizes your visibility online. This means that the more people see your website, the more your online traffic increases, and the better your chances to provide your product or service to a greater number of people.

Having an SEO strategy is important because it helps you stay on track when creating content. Instead of just creating what you think people are looking for, your strategy will ensure that you're creating content that people are searching for.

In simple terms, SEO is a collection of best practices, methodologies, and software tools that marketers use to make a website and its contents “findable” by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

SEO has major benefits for websites and can lead to long-term exponential growth. Brands that invest in SEO can build credibility and trust with audiences, making it a pivotal part of a digital marketing strategy.

The four Ps are a “marketing mix” comprised of four key elements—product, price, place, and promotion—used when marketing a product or service. Typically, businesses consider the four Ps when creating marketing plans and strategies to effectively market to their target audience.

The importance of marketing for your business is that it makes the customers aware of your products or services, engages them, and helps them make the buying decision. Furthermore, a marketing plan, a part of your business plan helps in creating and maintaining demand, relevance, reputation, competition, etc.

Strong communication and interpersonal skills are essential for marketers. If you are unable to communicate information or messages clearly with colleagues, it's doubtful whether you will be able to create effective communications for clients or customers. Creativity and analytical skills are also vital.

What is important hard skill? ›

Hard skills are objective, quantifiable skills gained through training, school, or work experiences. Hard skills are often usually something that can be taught or learned. For that reason, hard skills can typically be easily proven — you either know how to write code, or you don't.

Hard skills represent the requirements necessary to properly perform a job, while soft skills help employees cope and react to situations. When you offer employees hard skills training, you are providing them with the tools necessary to learn and strengthen specific capabilities needed to carry out job functions.

Both types of skills are important. Certain professions require very specific and well-developed hard skills. Without them, you would fail instantly. But even then, soft skills will assist you to develop and use your hard skills successfully.

Hard skills, also called technical skills, are job-specific, relevant to each position and seniority level. In other words, each position in every company will require a unique hard skills list.

Hard skills, also referred to as technical skills, are specific skills or competencies that a person needs to succeed at the specific job they are doing.

Hard skills can be demonstrated through educational certificates or practical demonstrations. For example, software development requires knowledge of some programming language and can be used for a variety of tasks, but the main goal is to write a computer program. The proficiency level can be easily measured.

Keywords are the words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they're looking for. For example, if you were looking to buy a new jacket, you might type something like “mens leather jacket” into Google. Even though that phrase consists of more than one word, it's still a keyword.

SEO is divided in two parts: On-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to all techniques that can be implemented on your website to improve your ranking in SERP (search engine results pages), whereas off-page SEO refers to everything that can be done outside of your website to improve its visibility on the web.

Who can benefit from SEO? ›

According to Edoxi's salary trend report, which forecasts job salaries in digital marketing over the next year, U.S.-based, entry level SEO specialists can expect a starting SEO salary of $35K, mid-career SEO specialists are likely to earn closer to $47K, and experienced SEO specialists will earn on average $65K in ...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website through organic search results, as opposed to other channels like direct, referral, and paid advertising. To do good SEO, it's important to understand how search engines work.

To make an impact, you need to cultivate desirable soft skills. Soft skills are those that are complementary to your hard skills. In SEO, your hard skills are your core technical skills and would be things like using spreadsheets, creating SEO strategies, executing SEO tactics and so on.

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Pro-tip: Learn these and more skills with a structured SEO certification Course. SEO professionals are in high demand, as companies need search optimization in order to compete in most niches.

Understanding the intricacies of SEO can put you in a great place career-wise. Not only is this a high income skill that's in great demand, but knowing SEO opens up doors for working freelance or starting your own business.

Technical SEO is all about improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization.

Winning SEO job descriptions on resumes have to highlight your expertise in building and optimizing websites for search engine traffic. Show you can develop content with relevant keywords to increase organic traffic, analyze SEO performance, solve technical SEO issues, and develop and implement SEO strategies.

Why is SEO so difficult? ›

It is a very complex set of tasks and to top it all off SEO changes dramatically all the time, so the fundamental best practices are often very very similar from year to year but there's always nuance, new additions, new opportunities, new ways that the search engines are changing up what the results look like, how you ...

SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.

With NLP, Google can understand what a word in a sentence means by looking at its context. This means that Google no longer relies on the specific words or phrases that users are searching for to provide them with the right answers. Rather, they're looking at the intent behind each search.

SEO is not dead in 2023. SEO is still a very powerful digital marketing strategy. SEO will continue to change as Google updates its algorithm but that is to be expected. If you are considering SEO for your website now is a good time to get started.

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels.