How to Assess and Hire SEO Managers?

Can you recall how many times you have scrolled all the way down to the second page of your search engine results?

Never, right?

That's because top SEO managers stand on their feet day and night to rank their websites at #1 and produce the best content out there.

Without SEO, content is pointless. The articles and blogs will just be pieces of information floating around the web with no creativity.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a buzzword and is continuing to create an impact on businesses.

With so much at stake, you can’t just go on recruiting an SEO manager without preparing for it. Thankfully, there are multiple options available on the internet that can help you to hire a superstar and #1 ranking SEO manager for your organization.

But first..let us understand more about SEO managers.

Who are SEO Managers?

An SEO manager is a digital marketing expert who creates custom strategies to get brand content high ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

The aim is to gain organic traffic that can help brands attract more visitors, leads, and conversions.

An SEO manager is primarily concerned with how they can use your position on search engine result pages to enhance the number of visitors to your website, the visibility of your company, and ultimately, the number of clients you can reach.

Skills of SEO Managers

While assessing candidates for the job role of SEO Manager, you should consider and vet the candidate against the following skills.

Look for their Track Record

Look for an SEO manager who has experience working with companies like yours to get outcomes. A seasoned SEO manager will be able to give numerous instances of effective SEO campaigns and demonstrate how those optimizations impacted the client's bottom line.

To avoid wasting time or money, you should engage a professional that has experience dealing with various technological platforms, budgets, and levels of organizational buy-in while working with companies in your industry or markets with a similar level of competition.

A Strategic Perspective

An SEO manager should be able to adopt a strategic viewpoint and match SEO strategies with your company's goals and objectives. Without this, it will be challenging to convince the business to invest in SEO. A strategic viewpoint enables you to establish a methodology and build a long-term vision for how you foresee organic search providing value over time.

Domain Expertise

It should go without saying that the SEO professional you hire should be knowledgeable about current best practices and trends in the industry. They should also have a firm grasp of the SEO toolkits and platforms that make keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink optimization possible.

A successful SEO also starts with the ability to write copy and a solid technical understanding of website architecture.

If you hire an SEO manager, you want more than just traffic—you also want leads and sales. In today's world, you need to look for a well-rounded strategist that has experience in a variety of digital marketing disciplines, such as PR, social media marketing, and content marketing, rather than a strictly technical SEO.

Product Sense

Understanding and using each individual search engine ranking criteria is a crucial ability, but the secret to creating a long-term SEO plan is having a keen product sense and business understanding.

A top-notch SEO manager will build a plan by gaining a true understanding of the product, the users, the business model, and the competitive environment that will help you be competitive in the search channel. A professional SEO will always begin by probing you about your company in-depth to help guide his thoughts about how to increase your internet presence.

Creative Geek

You want to hire an SEO expert who can generate ideas, put them into practice, and evaluate the results.

An SEO must be at ease performing repetitively geeky analytical and technological tasks. The expert will have to sort through a lot of data, so they should be sharp enough and be able to make inferences.

At the same time, problem-solving and creative thinking are key components of SEO. The consultant must be able to come up with strategies for drawing in potential consumers early in the sales funnel when a transactional keyword is either highly competitive or has little search volume.

And now, some bonus skills,

Content Marketing – Designing, planning, creating, and sharing valuable content for prospective customers.
Technical SEO Optimization – Optimizing the technical implementation of a website to increase its organic search visibility.
Link Building – Implementing specialized techniques and methods that encourage other trusted websites to link to the customer’s website.
On-Page SEO – Optimizing individual web pages to enhance their visibility in organic search results.
Website Administration – Using website content management systems to publish SEO-optimized content, manage comments, and perform other administrative tasks.
HTML/CSS – HTML and CSS are languages that define the structure, style, and format of content on a web page. SEO managers who understand HTML and CSS can implement simple coding changes to a website without developer assistance.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – Using specialized software to perform content experiments for the purpose of increasing conversion rates and driving revenue.
Copywriting – Creating informative and engaging website content, guest posts, and other creative media.
Project Management – Planning SEO projects, establishing realistic timelines, communicating with stakeholders, allocating resources, troubleshooting issues, and delivering (and measuring) results.
Client Relationship Management – Meeting with clients regularly to align marketing activities with business goals. Setting realistic expectations and presenting positive results.

What do SEO Managers do?
Apart from the skills, the day-to-day roles and responsibilities of an SEO manager include
Keyword Research: An SEO manager does keyword research to determine which keywords the business should target with SEO material, whether they are working on SEO for their own company or a client company.
On-Page and Technical SEO: The goal of technical and on-page SEO is to increase website traffic, and SEO managers are in charge of doing this. In order to increase search traffic from queries containing a certain keyword, on-page SEO entails optimizing individual web pages around that term. Technical SEO is the process of evaluating and enhancing a website's technical implementation to make it more user-friendly for both humans and machines, particularly search engine crawlers.
Content Strategy: A content plan should be created and implemented by SEO managers. A digital marketing strategy called content marketing strives to produce and share content that is informative, practical, and ultimately beneficial to potential customers. A company that uses effective content marketing is positioned as a reliable authority within a certain sector or market. SEO managers take part in the development of content strategy and may also spend time authoring content themselves or writing content briefs for a fellow writer.
Data Analysis: To determine which websites or search terms are bringing in the most visitors, leads, and sales for their clients, SEO managers examine online traffic data from sources like Google Analytics. This enables SEO managers to prioritize their optimization efforts for the most impact and make data-driven decisions about keyword targeting.

Salary Trends of SEO Managers

According to Salary.com, the average Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Manager salary in the United States is $92,757, but the salary range typically falls between $80,167 and $105,013. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, and experience.

Tips to hire Superstar SEO Manager for your Organization

Conduct an Interview

Pay attention to the questions the candidate asks during the interview. A competent SEO expert will be interested in learning about your company as a whole and will pay attention to how, rather than just where, your website appears in the search results.

Be alert if someone guarantees to rank your website first on Google. These kinds of exaggerated claims are a hint that the person is probably not the best option for you.

Have a Peek at their References

Next, ask for references from the applicant for the clients or businesses he has worked in the past. You can ask the references questions like,

Did the SEO expert offer any helpful advice?
Did the SEO expert collaborate well with their team?
Were the results by the SEO expert long-lasting or just topical?

You may verify the reliability of an SEO expert by understanding the experiences that other business owners just like you have had with them.

Request an audit of your site

Have them perform an audit of your website before they make any changes and provide you with a prioritized list of what they believe should be improved for SEO.

This audit will offer you a sense of the candidate's mindset and what it would be like to collaborate with them.

Use Pre-employment Assessment

Pre-employment assessments have been breaking the recruitment market nowadays. Employing these assessment tools for your hiring purposes will slash your time and cost to hire by significant percentages.

You can employ SEO manager assessment tests from online tools to gauge your candidate effectively and also reduce recruitment bias if any.

Important Interview Questions

You can ask these questions to your candidates to reflect on their skills.

What experience do you have with SEO?
How do you stay up to date on algorithm changes?
What strategies would you use to improve our website’s ranking?
How would you optimize our content for search engine visibility?
What kind of link-building tactics do you employ?
What do you consider to be the most important SEO trends?

Wrapping Up

Understanding SEO and knowing how to use it to improve your company’s rankings can be a challenge.

Instead, you can invest in hiring the top SEO manager for your organization and stay on top of every search engine result page.