What types of jobs are there in SEO?
SEO (Search engine optimisation) is the practice of trying to improve the quantity and quality of web traffic that comes to a website from search engines. It is an important method of increasing the number of people that find or return to a business and is therefore a skill set that is highly valued.
Jobs exist both “in house” where you focus on one business or within a company or at an agency/ freelance level where you can help a variety of clients improve their website’s rankings in search engines.
Below we have listed some of the most common jobs that exist in the SEO world.
Head of SEO/SEO Director
A senior hire with typically 7+ years of experience, this role is responsible for the success for the SEO function and is typically in larger companies where organic web traffic is an important driver of success. Key aspects of the role are setting the strategy for the SEO team, keeping up to date with changes to SEO guidelines and managing processes.
Managing a team of SEO specialists and setting targets for them means this role requires strong leadership skills.
SEO Executive
An SEO executive is a junior level role in an SEO team with a broad range of responsibilities. This includes analysis of the site and how pages are performing, keyword research and trying to get backlinks for pages on the site. Dependent on the size of the business an SEO executive may work closely with a content writer for building out new pages and blog entries, or will be responsible for writing these themselves.
Technical SEO Specialist
A technical SEO specialist focuses on optimising the back end of a website, to make it as easy as possible for search engines to “crawl” a site as well as making it attractive to rank highly.
This can involve fixing link redirects, building out site maps and back link analysis, all of which should help with the site’s SEO.
This role can involve working closely with other parts of the business such as back end engineers in order to get changes to the website made, occasionally putting together business cases to get this work prioritised.
SEO Analyst
An SEO Analyst’s focus is looking at the website and using a variety of SEO tools, try to understand the SEO quality of it. This can include looking at the performance of individual pages through to competitor research to understand whether there are opportunities for new pages.
They will then need to take all of the performance data and ideas they have and be able to translate this into actionable recommendations for the wider team
Strong knowledge of SEO best practices, ability to deal with data sets and conduct keyword research as well as experience with the most common SEO tools like Google analytics, Screaming frog and SEMRush are all requirements for this role.
SEO Copywriter
An SEO copywriter is someone who writes content that is search engine friendly for a website. This content should be user friendly and aligned with the search terms that the different pages rank for, so that users are able to find the information they want.
There is an important balance between making sure the content contains the relevant keywords so a search engine can find them and making it easy to read for the user.