Ideal SEO / Social Media Employee Skillset

[RG_SEO]

I’ve been wondering recently what makes a good SEO / Social Media employee. It seems to me that SEO and Social Media are in the process of merging into a single role.

What are your thoughts on the skills that this new world SEO / Social Media employee would need? Or do you think these roles should ideally remain separate and that a “traditional” SEO is more what is needed?

My own role has been moving much more towards social media recently and I was wondering if this was a common trend!

[RG_SEO]

Thanks again Seb, that makes a lot of sense. I definitely see the difficulty in finding someone who is both logical and creative, especially someone who can bring both those skills to the workplace.

[SebastianCowie]

Hi John,

No worries!

If it's an in-house SEO for a small-medium company then all of the above duties can be handles but 1 person, but you may find that the actual PR side of things is done by someone else. If itis from a consulting perspective then you may struggle a little bit.

This is a complete blanket statement and I know a lot of fellow SEO's may not agree but SEO tends to be more logical whereas Social is more creative and the two tend to attract different personalities. If you can find someone that can do all of the above and enjoys it then you've found someone that would be able to consult as well as do the tasks at hand.

Most SEO's will know at least basic HTML and CSS or have the ability to search google to find out what it is they need to do + 1 additional language (PHP / Ruby / net).

As a lot of sites are now CMS based, a basic understanding of Joomla/Wordpress is highly recommended and excel is also an invaluable tool for most SEO's.

Hope that's helped

[RG_SEO]

Thanks for your reply Sebastian!

It sounds like it's difficult to merge the two roles from a consulting perspective. Do you think that this would also be a problem for an in-house SEO?

You mention that programming is important, what technologies would be the core set that an SEO should understand?

Apologies if this is a basic question as I'm still new to the world of SEO and have mostly been approaching it from a reporting perspective!

[SebastianCowie]

I agree with you that social and SEO are merging, but I do feel that while both should know each others skill sets, they are still two separate roles, for the time being at least.

SEO:

Technical Knowledge
Programming
Copywriting 
Link Building
Understanding Social Networks / AuthorRank / Twitter / FB / LinkedIn

Social:

Reputation Management
PR
Understanding how SEO & Social work together
Brand Awareness

Due to the relative intensity of both roles, if you were to work on both for a particular client, you'd be limited to a handful of clients. Whereas if the roles are separated you can handle a larger client base.

That's the way I see it anyway!