Want to land your dream job in SEO or attract high-paying clients?
It all starts with developing your SEO skills.
When I started my SEO journey, I obsessively consumed every piece of content I could find. I wanted to understand everything—keywords, on-page optimization, crawlability—you name it.
But I quickly discovered that hands-on experience is what truly sets successful SEOs apart.
So, if you’re ready to level up your SEO abilities, I’ll show you exactly what you need to learn and how to apply it in the real world.
To help you navigate your career path, I organized the skills into four expertise levels that naturally progress in complexity.
You’ll also see I provided an estimated learning time for each level, along with an impact level and learning difficulty rating for each skill, to help you plan your SEO career path.
Now, let’s dive into the 28 skills that will transform you into a sought-after SEO pro.
Foundational SEO Knowledge
Estimated learning time: 2-3 months to learn the basics
The fastest way to build your SEO chops is by starting your own site. It doesn’t need to be perfect—think of it as your SEO playground.
You’ll be able to practice all of the foundational SEO skills below without worrying about making mistakes on someone else’s site. Plus, it’s proof of your skills when you’re ready to pitch yourself.
1. Keyword Research
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Keyword research is the process of identifying search terms people use to find information, products, or services online.
This helps you understand your target audience’s search behavior, identify valuable search queries, and determine which keywords to target in your content to increase organic traffic.
To conduct effective keyword research, understanding key metrics is essential:
- Search intent: The goal behind a query (informational, transactional, commercial, or navigational)
- Keyword difficulty: How competitive a keyword is affects how difficult it is to rank
- Search volume: The number of searches for a keyword over a period
- Long-tail keywords: More specific, lower-volume queries that typically bring in targeted traffic
How to Develop This Skill
Keyword research tools like Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool help you identify and filter keywords based on the above metrics (and more).
Start by exploring keyword suggestions. Then filter by metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent to focus on the most strategic opportunities.
This basic SEO knowledge will help you analyze and select keywords that will drive relevant, actionable traffic to your site.
Further reading: Keyword Research for SEO: What It Is & How to Do It
2. Link Building
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks from other websites to improve your site’s authority, traffic, and search engine rankings.
Quality matters more than quantity—focus on links from relevant, high-quality sites. A single, well-placed link from an authoritative source tends to have more impact than multiple low-quality links.
How to Develop This Skill
- Create shareable, valuable content that naturally attracts links
- Find unlinked brand mentions and request a link
- Guest blog on respected sites in your industry
Link building tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can help you analyze your site’s backlink profile, compare it with your competitors, and find opportunities for outreach.
The key is earning links that build trust and enhance your site’s SEO. Focus on long-term strategies, such as creating high-quality content, that prioritize value and relevance.
Image of Semrush Link Building Tool
3. On-Page Optimization
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
On-page optimization involves refining webpage elements to improve rankings, user experience, and alignment with search intent.
How to Develop This Skill
Start by analyzing your pages with Google Search Console (GSC). Open the “Performance Report” to pinpoint pages with low click-through rates (CTR). These are your best opportunities for improvement.
Focus on refining the most impactful on-page elements:
- Title tags and meta descriptions: Make them concise, relevant, and aligned with search queries. For example, replace “SEO Tips” with “10 Actionable SEO Tips to Boost Rankings Fast.”
- Headers: Ensure your headers logically guide readers and include descriptive, keyword-rich phrasing. Replace vague headings like “Step 1” with “How to Boost CTR with Better Titles.”
- Internal links: Link related pages using descriptive anchor text. Swap “Click here” for “Optimize meta descriptions.”
- Content: Prioritize readability—short paragraphs, scannable headers, and visuals make a significant difference
4. Crawlability and Indexing
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Crawlability determines how easily search engine bots can access your website, while indexability ensures those pages can be added to a search engine’s index. Both crawlability and indexability are critical. If your pages aren’t indexed, they won’t appear in search results.
To master these skills, you need to understand two key components:
- XML sitemaps: Files that list all your important pages to help search engines find and crawl your content. Your sitemap should only include canonical (main) URLs and be kept up to date.
- Robots.txt files: This is a text file that tells search engines which parts of your site they can and cannot access. Configure it to block low-value pages (like admin areas) while allowing access to essential resources like CSS and JavaScript files.
How to Develop This Skill
Google Search Console is the most effective way to manage crawlability and indexability.
Start by exploring these tools:
- Page Indexing Report: Shows which pages are indexed and highlights any crawl errors or exclusions
- URL Inspection Tool: Helps diagnose specific indexing issues, such as noindex tags, blocked resources, or server errors
- Robots.txt Report: Shows whether Google can process your robots.txt files, and any warnings or errors
If you find unindexed pages, investigate the cause in Google Search Console and make necessary corrections—like removing noindex tags. Request reindexing through the URL Inspection Tool to ensure those pages can appear in search results.
5. Competitor Analysis
Impact level: High
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Competitor analysis involves researching and evaluating the strategies of competing websites to identify opportunities and weaknesses in your own approach.
It’s about understanding what’s working for your competitors—such as their ranking keywords, backlink strategies, and content performance. Then, use that insight to refine your tactics and gain a competitive edge.
Knowing how to do a solid competitor analysis can help you:
- Find keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Identify and close any content gaps
- Discover competitor link sources to expand your backlink profile
In the bigger picture, mastering this skill ensures your resources are focused on high-impact opportunities. By analyzing competitors’ strategies, you can choose to focus on tactics with measurable results.
How to Develop This Skill
Practice makes perfect. Use competitor analysis tools like Semrush’s Keyword Gap to compare rankings against competitors. It provides detailed insights into your competitors’ SEO, content, and marketing strategies.
Focus on identifying keywords where they rank in the top 10, and you don’t rank at all.
6. SEO Copywriting
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
SEO copywriting is creating content that answers user questions clearly and effectively while encouraging engagement and conversions. It’s about understanding what your audience is looking for and delivering it in a way that’s easy to digest.
How to Develop This Skill
To excel at this, focus on writing engaging content that addresses both the user’s intent and the structure that supports SEO. Combine persuasive writing techniques and SEO best practices to create:
- Compelling headlines: Craft attention-grabbing titles that include target keywords naturally
- Strong introductions: Hook readers immediately while addressing search intent
- Clear structure: Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and subheadings to improve readability
- Natural flow: Incorporate keywords smoothly without sacrificing readability
- Effective CTAs: Guide readers toward desired actions without being pushy
Tools like Hemingway Editor and Grammarly will help you refine readability by checking sentence structure, grammar, and clarity.
Image of Hemingway App
SEO platforms like Clearscope and SurferSEO will help you optimize your copy by identifying high-value keywords and suggesting related terms to enhance relevance and search rankings.
7. Content Marketing
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Content marketing goes beyond writing copy. It’s about a strategic approach to creating and distributing free content like blog posts, videos, case studies, and infographics. The goal is to attract, engage, and convert visitors using content.
Key content marketing skills required for SEO include:
- Creating content strategies aligned with business goals
- Identifying content gaps and opportunities through competitor research
- Measuring content performance and ROI
- Building content distribution plans across multiple channels
Effective content marketing provides value by solving problems or answering questions, positioning your brand as an authority.
How to Develop This Skill
Use content marketing tools, such as Topic Research, Answer the Public, and Exploding Topics, to identify topics and keywords that resonate with your audience and align with your business goals.
For optimization, ensure your content is SEO-friendly with tools like Semrush or Yoast, and prioritize readability with tools like Hemingway. Clear, concise writing and proper use of headings and internal links will help improve user experience and drive results.
8. Analytic Reasoning
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Moderate
As an SEO, you often deal with an immense amount of data. This includes rankings, traffic, click-through rates, bounce rates, user behavior, and more.
Analytic reasoning is what helps you make sense of it all. This is the ability to interpret data, identify patterns, and draw meaningful conclusions that can be used to inform your strategy.
If you can look at data and determine where things are going wrong (or right), you’re already miles ahead. This skill is crucial to deliver tangible ROI for your projects.
How to Develop This Skill
Spend lots of time reviewing performance in GA and GSC. When analyzing data, always ask “why” at least three times.
For example:
- Why did organic traffic drop? (The rankings for three key pages fell.)
- Why did the rankings drop? (Competitors’ content outranked ours.)
- Why did their content outrank ours? (They added updated stats and a better internal linking structure.)
Answering these questions helps you dig deeper and find actionable solutions. It’ll also help you communicate issues and solutions clearly to leadership or clients.
9. AI Prompt Engineering
Impact level: Medium
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
AI prompt engineering is the skill of crafting precise instructions to get accurate results from AI tools like ChatGPT.
I use my prompt engineering for tasks like:
- Creating content outlines and meta descriptions at scale
- Analyzing top-ranking articles’ headlines
- Generating technical elements like JSON-LD schema markup
- Extracting and analyzing SEO data patterns
How to Develop This Skill
Start playing around with various AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot.
When creating prompts, it’s important to be specific about the task, format, and context. The clearer the prompt, the better the response.
While it may take some trial and error, experimenting with different phrasing can help refine results and reduce guesswork.
For example, a vague prompt like “Cluster this list of keywords” is unlikely to produce the output you want.
But a detailed prompt like “Group the following keywords into three intent-based clusters: ‘buy shoes online,’ ‘best running shoes,’ and ‘shoe repair near me’” is much more likely to lead to a high-quality response.
Once you understand how to create effective prompts, you can apply AI to tasks like keyword clustering, content creation, technical SEO, and data analysis. Mastering prompt engineering enhances your ability to use AI in your SEO workflow, which will save you time and improve efficiency.
Technical SEO Skills
Estimated learning time: 6 to 12 months to learn the basics
Technical SEO involves optimizing a website’s backend to ensure search engines can efficiently crawl, render, and index content.
While not every role requires SEO technical skills, understanding technical SEO allows you to identify issues, diagnose complex problems, and make strategic recommendations for improving site performance.
These skills help you communicate effectively with developers, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately enhance your ability to drive results.
10. HTML
Impact level: Medium
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
Hypertext Markup Language or HTML defines the meaning and structure of web content.
While many SEOs rely on content management systems (CMS), understanding HTML gives you valuable hands-on control over crucial technical optimizations.
- Headers: Ensure proper hierarchy (e.g., H1, H2, H3) to improve content readability and relevance for search engines
- Meta tags: Quickly optimize title tags and meta descriptions to align with target keywords and search intent
- Alt text: Add descriptive alt text to images, improving accessibility and helping your site rank in image searches
- Canonical tags: Use canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues and consolidate link equity
- Hreflang attributes: Implement hreflang tags to target the correct language and regional audiences
- Robots directives: Use robot directives to control which pages are indexed and crawled, helping manage your site’s SEO and crawl budget
This way, you aren’t always dependent on a CMS or a developer, which means you can move faster and make changes right away.
Image Source: HTML.com
How to Develop This Skill
Take an online course from Codecademy, Coursera, or W3Schools. There are also a lot of free tutorials on YouTube.
Once you have the basics down, use Chrome’s “Inspect Element” tool to analyze and troubleshoot HTML in real time. It’s a quick way to spot missing tags, duplicate elements, or areas for improvement without digging through the backend.
11. JavaScript
Impact level: High
Learning difficulty: Difficult
Modern websites often rely on JavaScript (JS) frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.js to load dynamic content. However, if Google can’t render and index that content, it won’t appear in search results and won’t rank.
While Googlebot is generally able to render JavaScript, it’s not always perfect—it can be resource-intensive, slow down indexing, and sometimes fail altogether.
As SEO consultant Nick LeRoy says in his #SEOForLunch newsletter:
Not everyone wants to be a technical SEO. However, I would argue that understanding if/how Google renders JS is a critical skill. Get this wrong, and all your other efforts could be for nothing.
How to Develop This Skill
To learn JavaScript quickly, check out this helpful guide: The Beginner’s JavaScript Cheat Sheet. Online courses and YouTube will also be great resources for you.
Start exploring this skill further with the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console. It allows you to view a page the way the Googlebot sees it.
Then, review details like the loaded resources, JavaScript console output, and rendered DOM. It will also display other key information that could help you find the source of the problem.
If there are issues, you may need to implement server-side rendering (SSR) or prerendering techniques, which serve fully rendered HTML to search engines, ensuring your content is visible and indexable.
12. XPath
Impact level: Medium
Learning difficulty: Moderate
XPath is a powerful tool for locating and extracting specific elements from HTML or XML documents. Building your skills with this tool will help you streamline audits and automate the extraction of key data such as meta tags, anchor text, and structured data.
XPath is particularly valuable for SEO tasks like extracting structured data (e.g., schema markup or product information), identifying missing or incomplete meta tags (like title tags or descriptions), and analyzing anchor text to optimize internal linking.
Image Source: Screaming Frog
How to Develop This Skill
First, you’ll want to have a foundational knowledge of HTML and JavaScript. Once you’ve nailed those skills, read an online XPath guide or watch a YouTube tutorial.
To effectively practice XPath, focus on applying what you’ve learned. Start with basic queries like //meta[@name=’description’]to target specific meta tags. Use tools like Screaming Frog to test these queries, extract website data, and identify patterns.
Take it a step further by auditing websites for common SEO issues, such as missing meta descriptions or broken internal links. Consistent practice in these areas will help solidify your skills and build confidence in applying them.
13. Site Speed Optimization
Impact level: Medium
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
Site speed optimization ensures your site loads quickly. You do this by compressing images, minimizing code, and using browser caching.
How to Develop This Skill
Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix will show you exactly where you’re losing speed. It might be from oversized images, unused CSS, or a sluggish server.
Image of Google PageSpeed Insights
WebPageTest allows you to diagnose precise performance issues, such as Time to First Byte (TTFB)—the server response time—and render-blocking scripts (JavaScript or CSS files that delay page rendering until fully loaded).
These insights help you avoid generic fixes and target the root causes of slow page loads. Combine WebPageTest with Google PageSpeed Insights for actionable, data-backed recommendations that improve your site’s speed effectively.
14. Schema Markup
Impact level: High
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Schema is a type of structured data that helps search engines understand your page’s content more fully.
By implementing schema markup, you can tell Google exactly what information is on your page—such as a product review, event details, recipe, FAQ, or more.
One key benefit of schema is making your content eligible to appear in rich results. Rich snippets enhance your listing with extra information, such as star ratings, images, pricing, or event dates, making it more engaging and likely to attract clicks.
How to Develop This Skill
Start by exploring free guides and tutorials that break down schema implementation step by step. SEO WordPress plugins like Yoast and Rank Math can simplify the process by automating schema setup for common use cases.
That said, learning how to add schema manually is a high-value skill that sets you apart as an SEO professional.
Test your schema with Google’s Rich Results Test to ensure it’s valid and eligible for enhanced SERP features.
Image of Schema Markup Validator
For generic schema validation, use the Schema Markup Validator to test all types of schema.org markup without Google-specific validation.
15. CMS Knowledge
Impact level: Medium impact
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
Understanding how to navigate popular content management systems like WordPress, Shopify, and Magento is critical for SEOs. Each platform has unique features that impact how SEO is implemented.
How to Develop This Skill
Playing around in various CMSs is the best way to get the hang of them.
- WordPress: For on-page SEO tasks such as meta tags and sitemaps, use plugins like Yoast and Rank Math directly within the dashboard
- Shopify: While Shopify offers built-in SEO tools, advanced tasks like handling canonicals or structured data may require third-party apps or custom code
- Magento: Magento is highly customizable but often requires technical expertise for tasks like custom URL structures or advanced SEO configurations
Image of Yoast SEO for WordPress
16. Internal Linking
Impact level: High impact
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Internal linking is the practice of linking one page on your site to another page on your site. It helps distribute authority across your site, improves crawlability, and enhances the user experience. Strategically done, it supports topic clusters and cornerstone content, which are vital for boosting SEO.
How to Develop This Skill
Effective internal linking doesn’t require technical expertise but demands a strategic approach.
Focus on:
- Anchor text: Use relevant and descriptive anchor text to improve context and relevance for both users and search engines
- Linking structure: Use tools like Screaming Frog to visualize your internal linking structure, identify orphan pages, and ensure links are distributed efficiently across your site
- Prioritize high-authority pages: Link from high-authority pages to orphaned or lower-authority pages to pass on link equity and boost their visibility
Image Source: Screaming Frog
17. Excel or Google Sheets
Impact level: High
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Proficiency in Excel and Google Sheets is crucial for managing and analyzing SEO data. These tools help you organize large datasets, track key metrics, and make data-driven decisions efficiently.
How to Develop This Skill
Take an online course from Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, or Coursera. Then, practice, practice, practice.
- Pivot tables: Summarize keyword performance, traffic, or backlink data quickly
- Formulas: Use functions like VLOOKUP to match and retrieve data from different tables or datasets and SUMIF to calculate metrics like CTR
- Filtering and sorting: Organize data by important criteria, such as keyword difficulty or traffic sources
- Dashboards: Create simple, visual dashboards to track key SEO metrics, making it easier to report results
Image of Google Sheets
Managerial SEO Skills
Estimated learning time: 2-4 months to learn the basics
SEO manager skills go beyond hands-on SEO and include project management, team leadership, communication, and reporting.
These skills can accelerate your career in SEO, whether you’re leading a team, collaborating with colleagues, or starting your own agency.
18. Reporting
Impact level: High impact
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
SEO reporting is the process of tracking, analyzing, and presenting key metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. It helps stakeholders understand how your strategies are impacting business objectives.
You’ll typically include metrics like organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rates, and backlink growth. The goal is to report on your progress in a way that’s easy for non-technical stakeholders to understand while showcasing the value of your work.
How to Develop This Skill
Create reports using Semrush’s “My Reports” templates. These templates provide pre-built dashboards that highlight KPIs in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand format.
Practicing with these tools will help you streamline the reporting process while ensuring your data tells a clear, compelling story.
Well-structured reports make it easier for stakeholders or leadership to understand SEO progress, recognize its value, and justify ongoing investment in your strategies.
19. Team Leadership
Impact level: Medium
Learning difficulty: Moderate
From an SEO perspective, team leadership involves guiding and coordinating cross-functional teams—such as content writers, developers, and designers—toward common goals.
How to Develop This Skill
To excel in team leadership as an SEO, focus on building the following key skills:
- Clear communication: Convey SEO strategies and technical requirements clearly to all team members. Use collaboration tools like Slack, Asana, or Trello to maintain transparency and ensure everyone is aligned on goals and progress.
- Conflict resolution: Mediate competing priorities, such as balancing marketing deadlines with developer tasks. Regularly communicate with teams to identify roadblocks early and collaboratively find solutions that keep projects on track.
- Strategic alignment: Connect individual tasks to broader SEO and business objectives. Regularly review progress with your team to prioritize high-impact work that drives measurable results.
Image Source: Asana
If you can learn to lead and structure an SEO team effectively, your projects will progress much more smoothly.
20. Project Management
Impact level: High
Learning difficulty: Moderate
SEO projects often span weeks or months and involve coordination between content writers, editors, developers, designers, and strategists. Effective project management is essential to ensuring campaigns stay on track and deliver results.
How to Develop This Skill
Developing this skill requires a combination of hands-on experience, foundational knowledge of project management principles, and proficiency with the right tools.
Start by learning the basics of project management—such as setting timelines, delegating tasks, and tracking progress—and explore methodologies like Scrum for managing iterative workflows.
Image Source: Monday.com
Applying these skills in real-world projects while leveraging tools like Asana, Trello, or Monday.com will help you streamline processes and achieve better results.
21. Budgeting
Impact level: Medium impact
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
Effective budgeting ensures resources focus on activities that drive results, helping you avoid overspending on low-impact tools or tactics. Mastering this skill allows you to make ROI-driven recommendations, maintain profitability, and align SEO efforts with broader business goals.
How to Develop This Skill
Whether working with a pre-set budget or setting one yourself, key strategies include:
- Analyzing costs vs. benefits to prioritize high-impact efforts
- Using tools like Google Sheets for tracking, Semrush for campaign ROI, and Looker Studio for performance insights
- Tailoring budgets to business objectives, such as prioritizing growth or conversions
Strategic budgeting positions you as a partner who maximizes value for the business—not just someone who executes SEO tasks.
22. Prioritization
Impact level: Medium impact
Learning difficulty: Easy to moderate
Effective SEO prioritization means focusing on tasks that deliver the greatest impact, like resolving indexing issues or improving site speed, while deprioritizing less critical tasks, such as tweaking meta descriptions.
How to Develop This Skill
You’ll naturally develop this skill as you get more SEO experience.
To allocate resources effectively, adopt frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix to categorize tasks by urgency and importance. This ensures you focus on high-priority efforts that drive results first.
For example, prioritize urgent tasks that affect site performance and long-term efforts like link building while saving less critical changes for later.
Enterprise SEO Skills
Estimated learning time: 6-9 months to learn the basics
Enterprise SEO requires specialized skills and strategic thinking.
If you’re looking to move beyond routine SEO tasks and lead large-scale initiatives for high-profile clients or complex projects, mastering SEO enterprise skills is essential to your growth.
23. Scaling SEO Efforts
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Scaling SEO is about maximizing impact while minimizing manual tasks.
Automating processes, like data collection and reporting, is crucial for efficiency. While tools like Python scripts can save time on repetitive tasks, some areas still require human input, such as strategic decisions and content creation.
Standardizing workflows, creating report templates, and documenting processes ensures that your team can work independently. This allows you to focus on high-level tasks and tackle more complex challenges without being bogged down in day-to-day operations.
How to Develop This Skill
- Invest in robust SEO platforms: Familiarize yourself with enterprise-level tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog for comprehensive site audits, competitive analysis, and backlink management.
- Learn advanced automation tactics: Many enterprise tools offer automation features that allow you to schedule and automate tasks like keyword tracking, reporting, and monitoring site performance.
- Data integration: Enterprise SEO tools also integrate with other business tools like Google Analytics, Looker Studio, and Salesforce, giving you a more holistic view of your SEO performance alongside other business metrics.
Image of Google Looker Studio
24. Advanced Analytics
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Difficult
Advanced analytics are crucial for enterprise SEO, providing deeper insights that go beyond basic metrics like traffic and rankings.
Custom dashboards, data segmentation, and multi-channel tracking can help you gain a more comprehensive understanding of your SEO performance.
How to Develop This Skill
Start by using Looker Studio or Tableau to create dashboards that combine SEO data with broader business KPIs. This lets you demonstrate the direct impact of your SEO efforts on measurable business outcomes.
Image Source: Tableau
As you get better, dive deeper into data segmentation to identify how different audience segments interact with your content, and use multi-channel tracking to understand the synergy between SEO and other marketing efforts.
25. Cross-Department Collaboration
Impact level: High
Learning difficulty: Moderate
In enterprise SEO, cross-department collaboration is key. You’ll need to work closely with product managers, developers, content teams, and even legal teams to implement changes.
How to Develop This Skill
Building strong cross-department collaboration skills takes time and consistent effort.
- Set up brief weekly syncs with key teams to maintain alignment and address issues early before they escalate
- Actively listen and seek to understand the goals and challenges of other departments so you can align SEO strategies with their priorities
- Take courses on project management, stakeholder management, and effective communication through platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, or Udemy
- Learn frameworks like Agile or Scrum to manage cross-department collaboration efficiently, prioritize tasks, and improve team workflows
26. Python Knowledge
Impact level: Very high
Learning difficulty: Very difficult
Python is a powerful tool for SEOs, particularly at the enterprise level. It allows you to automate data tasks, process large datasets, and simplify reporting, saving hours that would otherwise be spent manually working with spreadsheets.
Even a basic understanding of Python can significantly improve your efficiency. For example, Python can be used to pull ranking data, analyze keyword lists, and generate reports.
How to Develop This Skill
Take an online course from a site like Codecademy or DataCamp to learn Python.
Then, practice what you’ve learned by using Python to automate repetitive tasks, such as extracting metadata, cleaning up URLs, or generating sitemaps.
For larger websites, tools like BeautifulSoup are great for web scraping.
Image Source: Google Colab
27. Global SEO
Impact level: High
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Global SEO involves optimizing your website’s content to ensure it is effectively targeted and ranked across different countries, languages, and regions.
How to Develop This Skill
First, take an expert-led course like Traffic Think Tank’s International SEO Course, which features tips from Matthew Howells-Barby, cofounder of Traffic Think Tank.
Then, build on what you learned by focusing on the technical aspects, like implementing hreflang tags and structuring region-specific URLs. You’ll also want to understand local search behavior by analyzing SERPs in different regions (tools like Semrush and Ahrefs let you do this).
28. Brand Reputation Management
Impact level: High impact
Learning difficulty: Moderate
Brand reputation management in SEO focuses on maintaining and improving how a brand is perceived online.
This involves tracking brand mentions, addressing negative reviews, and shaping the brand’s appearance in search results to align with its core values.
For enterprise brands, protecting reputation is just as crucial as driving traffic, as negative search results or damaging reviews can significantly affect public perception.
How to Develop This Skill
To manage brand reputation effectively, monitor mentions using tools like Brandwatch or Semrush’s Brand Monitoring. Quickly responding to negative feedback can help prevent issues from escalating and ensure your brand’s online presence remains positive.
Image of Semrush Brand Monitoring tool
Learn SEO Skills That Pay the Bills
If you’re ready to get serious about SEO, start working on these SEO skills. And to put what you’re learning into practice, sign up for a free Semrush account.