The Top 5 Soft Skills SEOs Should Develop

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), and particularly technical SEO, we frequently discuss the need of having hard skills. There is no doubt that vlookup and regex may be your best friends. However, there are some crucial soft skills that you need to learn in order to flourish in your work and advance your career.

But before we get into it, let’s take a look at the actual definition of what we mean when we talk about “soft talents.”

What are soft skills?

Soft skills, also known as people skills or people talents, are characteristics that enable a person to interact effectively and work amicably with others.

Your soft skills will assist you in navigating any work environment and process, regardless of whether you are a content or technical SEO, working in-house or for an agency. This is due to the fact that we are always interacting with other people, even when we are functioning in a technical capacity. Not to mention the fact that SEO is primarily an effort made by a cross-functional team, which means you’ll need to be comfortable interacting with the stakeholders in your organization.

In addition, if you are an SEO who works at a management level, you can discover that the relationships you have with your leadership are much more challenging. Particularly if it is your responsibility to acquire approval for organic plans and projects you are working on.

I’m going to share five soft skills with you today that you can start focusing on to enhance how you communicate with your team members, stakeholders, and leadership, which will ultimately help you develop in your career and create success for yourself.

Five soft talents for SEO success

1. Compassion

Empathy is the capacity to identify and understand the feelings and thoughts of other people, as well as the ability to put oneself in another person’s shoes and speculate about their thoughts and feelings. According to the findings of current studies, empathy is the quality that contributes the most to effective leadership. But why is it so vital for search engine optimization?

The reason why empathy is considered the most important quality for a leader to possess is that it enables one to develop stronger, more meaningful relationships with the people they work with as well as a solid understanding of those individuals. This is absolutely necessary for SEOs because their work requires them to interact with a wide array of stakeholders on a regular basis and spans multiple different departments. Having empathy for others can make it easier to successfully participate in and resolve conflict, which will in turn boost productivity, teamwork, and results.

Examining your own preconceptions and paying attention to how you engage with the people in your environment are two of the most effective ways to increase your capacity for empathy. Pay attention to the way you communicate and interact with people who have viewpoints that are in contrast to your own. This is not about the rationale that anyone uses to support their viewpoint; rather, the point is to gauge how well you can comprehend the sentiments and experiences that lie at the heart of why another person thinks differently than you do. To demonstrate empathy, it’s not necessary to concur with another person’s viewpoint; rather, you should concentrate on comprehending, acknowledging, and giving credence to the experiences of other individuals.

2. Analytical and critical thinking

To generate an opinion based on an objective, unbiased investigation and evaluation of the information that are accessible, critical thinking is the process that is used. It is vitally essential in a field such as search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing because SEO is loaded with views and occasionally facts, and it can be difficult to remain neutral and be aware of our own biases in this field.

In order to enhance critical thinking skills, one of the most important things you can do is practice asking questions. You will need a balanced mix of curiosity and skepticism in order to accomplish this goal. Skepticism will help you acquire the habit of challenging assumptions and strengthen your practice of thinking via logic, while curiosity will inspire you to seek out diversity in other people’s perspectives. You also want to develop your research abilities by evaluating the credibility of the sources you use and making an effort to find opinions that are contrary to your own.

This is not a simple task by any stretch of the imagination. It takes time and effort to go out of one’s way to do research, ask questions, and participate in a respectful conversation with others whose viewpoints and experiences are different from one’s own.

This ability comes in handy when assessing search engine optimization (SEO) viewpoints, analyzing data, and reviewing search engine guidelines and algorithms. When presenting to stakeholders or decision-makers, it can also be of great assistance to have this information. The ability to think critically can help you avoid falling prey to confirmation bias and better prepare you to address concerns and objections.

3. Active and attentive listening

Listening actively, also known as proactive listening, is paying close attention to the person who is speaking to you. It is necessary for you to take in what is being said and to listen with the intention of comprehending the entirety of what the speaker is trying to convey to you.

Now, you might have figured this already, but one of the most important aspects of developing empathy and critical thinking is actually engaging in proactive listening. It is essential that you do not mix the act of listening to someone with the act of hearing what they are speaking to you. Particularly due to the fact that when we speak about proactive listening, we mean more than simply taking in the words that are being conveyed to us. Not only is the content of the communication important, but also the manner in which it is conveyed. When trying to completely comprehend another person, it is important to pay attention to both their body language and the tone of their voice.

You can increase this ability by, first and foremost, paying closer attention to what is being spoken to you and being more present in the moment when it occurs. Make some notes in your head about the conversation. You could try to understand how the other person is feeling by ascribing labels to their thoughts and actions. Are they anxious, excited, or just indifferent about it all? Listening actively will not only assist you in better understanding your stakeholders, team members, and leadership, but it will also lay the groundwork for our next essential soft talent.

4. Open and honest conversation

Clear communication involves making good use of both verbal and non-verbal modes of communication in order to exchange and explain ideas and concepts in a way that is understood by all parties involved. The purpose of the communicator is to guarantee that the recipient of their message has a complete comprehension of the information being conveyed to them.

Convincing someone else of your point of view is not the purpose of clear communication. It is for the purpose of assisting others in comprehending the message that was intended. It is essential to stress this point for the following reason: we frequently believe that if someone doesn’t like our concept, it is because we haven’t presented our case in a clear enough manner to the other person. Despite the fact that that is a possibility, there is no correlation between the two. It is possible for unclear communication to result in rejection just as much as it is possible for clear communication to do so, and vice versa.

When working to enhance this ability, you should concentrate on increasing how well your audience understands the message you are trying to convey to them. Therefore, the essentials of effective communication include a strong awareness of your audience and the demands that they have, the use of the appropriate language and examples, and a message that is clear. You can make this even better by actively seeking out and listening to the feedback provided by your audience, and then improving your communication skills in accordance with that feedback.

5. Storytelling

The act of passing on a narrative is what is known as “storytelling.” It seems straightforward, doesn’t it? We all tell stories. We tell one other our own unique stories, such as significant moments from our pasts. Something that we have witnessed, listened to, or experienced. We also talk about the things that we are afraid of or the things that we hope to accomplish in the future. Stories not only assist us in making sense of the world around us, but also enable us to communicate information in a way that forges emotional bonds between individuals.

But why did I add telling stories on this list since we are all already familiar with the process? Why is that? Well, it’s because in order for us to be successful in our careers, we will also need to learn how to apply it there.

Let’s take this and dissect it. Because of the way that stories help us make sense of the world, it is possible that a narrative could assist deliver a clear message even while discussing the most complicated of topics. If you want your audience that is not familiar with SEO to grasp the distinction between crawling and indexation, you may make an analogy about how search engines are similar to librarians and how the database that is behind a search engine is similar to a library. The use of analogies in storytelling is an excellent way to assist explain unknown concepts by comparing them to well-known examples.

Because stories can assist form emotional connections, employing them in business can help you create trust with stakeholders and leadership, which is vital for getting buy-in and achieving success.

Finding a narrative that works well for your audience and developing your own unique storytelling style are both skills that require practice. The good news is that each of these abilities builds on the previous one, and you are able to devote your full attention to enhancing both of them at the same time.

In conclusion, when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), cultivating these five soft talents will help you be more effective in the following areas:

• Developing stronger ties with a wide range of stakeholders and ensuring that teams are better able to accomplish their goals.

• Having a successful presentation for leadership and receiving their approval of the plan.

• Increasing efficiency in initiatives that involve multiple functional areas.

• A more in-depth and factually accurate grasp of Google’s algorithms for those who are not SEOs.

• Increasing your awareness of “the big picture” and the high-level links between SEO and other aspects of a company’s operations.

The development of your soft skills might be challenging, and there is no objective accreditation that can verify that you have achieved mastery of these abilities. It is something that requires practice and consistency, and just like SEO, it is something that is never completely accomplished. It is a frame of mind that encourages one to carry out the work on a day-to-day basis and motivates one to keep expanding their skill set.