5 Soft Skills SEOs Should Build – Whiteboard Friday

Edited by Emilie Martin

Howdy, Moz fans. Noah Learner, director of Sterling Sky here to talk with you all about five soft skills that I really think every SEO should build.

Here's why. These skills are the skills that are necessary to take your career to any level that you want, really. And these are the things that I really focused on as I was trying to build my own career. And when I looked back, what I found was that these are the ones that contributed to me doubling, tripling, and almost quadrupling my salary in just a few short years. So I wanted to share these with you 'cause I think it's the biggest way that I can help out the SEO community.

I know it's 2023, and everybody thinks it's crazy to talk about anything other than AI probably, but when we did a survey, and we asked SEOs what the biggest blocker to them driving performance, it was people. It wasn't their lack of technical knowledge, it wasn't their lack of knowledge around AI, and it wasn't their lack of knowledge around technical SEO generally. It was people that mattered. And so today's topic is all about soft skills. And I think Tom Critchlow has one of the most amazing resources available. It's the SEO Skills Maturity Index. And if you look at this tool online, what you're gonna find is that there's a number of really cool charts, one of which that shows kind of your career and the skills that you need to generate or build during your career.

And then another of the charts shows the relationship of soft skills and salary. And what we see in that chart as you go through his maturity matrix, as you get to be more and more advanced and senior in your career, soft skills play a larger and larger role in how much salary you earn. And success and everybody accomplishing their dreams, it's not always about salary but I'd be lying if I didn't say that it's a big piece of it, right? And so what are the soft skills that we've learned that really, really matter? I think that there's five that are really key to focus in on.

The first is critical thinking. When we built a tool at my last role, we came to realize that SEOs really, really struggle with just basic crunching of information and how to approach a dataset, how to kind of come to it with a question so that they could efficiently get an answer. And then they also struggled with connecting that analysis with action. And so I think there's a couple steps that one can learn decision making in a really, really great way. And here's the framework for doing it. First is start with the problem that you wanna solve.

Spend a lot of time upfront learning how to go deep into that structure of the problem that you need to solve. The second step and this is where I think it's gonna be important, as SEO moves forward, I think we're all gonna need to get a little bit more technical with how we're able to work with information or data. And it could be as simple as logging into a search console and learning how to export data into a Google sheet and then using that as a source for looking at data in Looker Studio, building time series charts because human eyes really can see change over time when you start to draw it in a line format. So you're gonna learn how to sort of gather data and you're gonna learn how to explore it.

And what I mean by exploring the data is really being comfortable spending time digging into information. And the reason why is that sometimes you're gonna find insights take time to really extract. And that takes us to the next step in our decision-making critical thinking process, which is learning how to extract insights. And it's as simple as writing down things that you're finding in the information that you look at on a separate piece of paper or in a Google sheet. And as you extract more and more of those insights, what you're gonna find is that a narrative or a story will start to surface. And from that surface, that set of insights, what you're gonna find is that you're gonna come up with a hypothesis that you want to actually test in order to solve that problem. And almost all of the time, the problems that we solve in marketing have to do with accomplishing business goals, right?

So all of our exploration and all of the work that we're doing is about helping our organization or our clients' organizations accomplish their business goals. You'll come up with a hypothesis to test, you'll then test it on a website or in your marketing platform of choice, and then after the test is complete, you'll look at the results and then you'll turn the crank on that whole process with as fast a cadence as you can in order to drive performance.

Critical thinking, right? People always wonder, like, "How do I start when I'm doing that definition of the problem part of the process?" Generally speaking, you're gonna use something called first principles thinking, which is where you take a problem, no matter how complex it is, you break it into its most simple parts as you can, and you reason your solutions up from that simple place. You're not starting with, "We've always done it like this." You're trying to use the structure of the problem to determine the structure of the solution.

The second piece that I think is really critical is prioritization. I think we all struggle with that feeling of spinning our wheels when we sit down to work on a specific problem.

And the two kind of axes in any kind of prioritization solution that I think really make sense for digital marketers is thinking about the impact that we can drive with any specific thing that we want to test and the ease of implementation. How many resources are gonna need to be leveraged for us to solve this problem? How many people in the dev team, how many content writers, how much budget are we gonna need? And you wanna focus in this top right quadrant. And just to add a little bit of clarity, we're saying that impact goes from low to high and ease of implementation goes from high to low. So we want to focus on the things that'll have the biggest impact that take the least amount of effort to do. And then from there, you could focus on these two other quadrants, and you want to not do anything that's hard and will drive very little impact. This sounds like, "Hey, this isn't rocket science," but learning to know what to do and when to do it is going to have a huge impact on how much performance we can drive.

As we are growing in our careers, we wanna find as many opportunities to learn as possible. And that's really being a sponge, right? And when I'm talking about finding opportunities to learn, I think that growing in our career oftentimes means building that technical skillset and investing the time in ourselves.

And if I told you that I could help you grow your salary by 2X or 3X or 4X, most people would be like, "Yeah, I'm all in." But if I told you you had to spend 400 hours a year to get there, I think that level of commitment scares some people. But do what feels right to you. And it could be as simple as learning how to do more stuff with Google Sheets. It could be learning about how to become a speaker. It could be learning about anything that has to do with the craft, both hard or soft. But being committed to actually learning is going to separate you from so many other people who you're competing with for different roles.

Amplify. I think this is critically important. All of us are different.

We all communicate in very strong ways, but that are unique. Some of us love to write. Some of us love to interview people. Some of us love to speak on stages. I think it's really important as you're finding your way in your career to find the thing that you're really into and you're really passionate about. It's gonna be your ikigai or your reason for living, your purpose. And you're gonna go deep into that and share as much information in your unique way as possible. And there's no right answer here.

It's not what you're necessarily best at or the thing that people care about the most. It's the thing that you wanna learn about. And because of that, it's going to translate into the stuff that you're most passionate about when you go to communicate. In terms of the ways that we can do it, if it's writing a blog, consistent effort over time is gonna go a huge, huge way to building an audience. If it's doing a podcast, you're gonna find that that's an amazing way to maybe use it as a bridge to getting on stage. And if not, it's an amazing way for you to connect with your heroes, the people who are doing the same types of work that you're doing that are maybe six to 24 to 36 months ahead of you in their SEO journey, i.e. all of the lessons that they've learned are gonna be fresh in mind so that they'll help you avoid a number of pitfalls. So it'll help you build relationships, and if you're using your podcast to develop leads for your organization, you're gonna find that it's a great way to generate leads as well. And then we get to speaking, right? When I think about speaking,

I remember my first time speaking at a local SEO meetup and I remember how I was physically shaking. I think that's a great place to start because you're gonna find if you can speak at a local SEO meetup, you can speak anywhere, including places like SearchLove, or if you're really, really

lucky, MozCon. And so when we learn to speak we're gonna learn a couple different tactics or strategy to make it easier. I think I shared box breathing with an old Whiteboard Friday, but just to keep it really fast, breathe in for four seconds, hold your breath for seven, and exhale for eight. And if you do that three or four cycles, what you'll find is that you can speak anywhere. And what you'll find is that the anxiety will drain out of your body when you're standing backstage getting ready to speak. And when you get out on stage, it'll change from an experience of feeling like something you want to do to something that you're crazy excited to do.

Community. I think that this is where we get to take our soft skills to the next level. And all of this will help you double or triple your salary over time, which is really great. But community. With the tragic downfall of Twitter as the space where all of us SEOs have gathered, it's been really apparent to me that SEOs have been really yearning for community.

And I personally was really, really sad about the demise of Twitter. And we just launched a Twitter kind of replacement. It's a Slack community called the SEO Community. And what I found was that people really wanted to be a part of it. They wanted to help moderate and they wanted to kind of grow the conversation and to have a happy, safe place for us all to come closer together. And I think that by being a part of a community without kind of having to build your own is an amazing thing. And the thing that's amazing about it is that you're gonna find opportunities to collaborate with other SEOs, and you're gonna find opportunities to work together, and you're gonna find opportunities to help each other accomplish their goals. And the more that you approach community from a place of trying to give and to help and to really promote others, you're gonna find that whatever energy you put out into the world is gonna come back to you in multiples. This simple framework is going to be the most impactful thing that you can do for your career. And I would argue that that is far more important than any kind of technical skill that I could teach you here today. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.