Growing as an SEO (1/4) – Writing better Job Descriptions for SEO Roles

By Martijn Scheijbeler Published May 2, 2018
SEO

Writing a resume isn’t fun (IMHO) and writing job descriptions is probably even less fun. Over the last years I’ve written many of them, usually following a similar template that would help us define what the role is about. Which isn’t always a good thing, depending on the seniority of the role you want to make sure you use the right approach to hire and make it as personal as possible. Which usually makes for better hiring, most of my best hires came through my network of people I was at least ware of. Over the last months I’ve received many requests if I wanted to take a look at an SEO job description, if I knew people that were looking for a job and wanted to share it with my network, you get it. But what I started noticing is that most SEO job descriptions are incredibly generic and don’t really seem inviting too many people.

“We’re looking for somebody to set up or SEO strategy, we’re looking for somebody to work with our engineering and design team to create content. You’ll pick the right keywords for us to focus on”. Yada yada yada. You’ve seen and heard it all before. Obviously when you’re on a job search in SEO you’ll come across all of these requirements and responsibilities easily. But I think companies need to do better, definitely in an area like Silicon Valley, to hire the right SEO talent or to get them even interested. There isn’t that many of us, but the information you give ‘us’ isn’t always great. That got me thinking on what information should be mentioned in job descriptions for SEOs. But I also wanted to take a look at what job descriptions look like right now:

Saving job descriptions

I must admit, I have a weird obsession, if I see well written (or really poor) job descriptions, for whatever type of role in digital, growth, marketing, you name it, I have a tendency to save them (in Evernote). Over the years that has build up to a nice archive (150+ JDs) that I can use for writing new job descriptions that I’ve used for hiring. The list of 16+ companies that are amongst them: Airbnb, Uber, Groupon, Booking, Zillow, Hulu, Porch, Tesla and the descriptions range from SEO Assistants to more senior positions like Senior Director of SEO. Fill that up with all the job descriptions that you can easily find on most job sites (LinkedIn, Glassdoor) and you can get a good enough understanding of what managers + recruiters are thinking about while sourcing/hiring for SEO roles.

Almost unfortunately, Postmates didn’t have a job description for me. As my previous boss asked me to fill this need within the Growth team, otherwise I would have loved to share that original one.

What companies are looking for?

It doesn’t exist, even when you’re in the right position and you might be able to write your own job description. But most of them have some issues, so I decided to look at all the SEO job descriptions that I could find and see if there are any patterns in what companies are looking for. So let’s look at the two main areas of job descriptions:

Responsibilities

Tag clouds are good for something I guess, that’s why I just threw in all the requirements for a dozen job descriptions and these were the main keywords that came up in the tagcloud. Some of the ones that stood out for me:

    • Performance: This keyword was interesting to me so I did some digging on the context, I expected it to be a requirement to know about performance marketing. Turns out the overwhelming majority of companies wants better performance reporting around their SEO strategy.
    • Content: People in SEO need to have a solid understanding of content, know how to create it and maybe even more important, know how to improve it.
    • Technical: Guess what, these days SEOs need to be technical. As most of the job descriptions are from Bay Area companies, that doesn’t surprise me at all considering that the work with product managers (or in some orgs are even PMs) and engineers most of the day. This is also important regarding technical audits that are usually performed inhouse.
    • Strategies/Initiatives: SEOs need to be able to make strategic decisions. For most companies they’re one of the people working on usually the biggest traffic channel for the site so they need to be able to think strategic as they can make changes to a platform that have a bigger impact than just SEO.
    • Team(s): They either need to be great working in teams (aka teamplayer) and in the more senior positions they need to be great at building up their own teams, or building out.

Missing?

While analyzing this there were a few things that I was missing that I thought were interesting so at least I wanted to mention them.

  • Agencies: A good portion of SEOs that I know work with agencies, but there was barely a mention in job descriptions about working with agencies, finding them, etc.
  • ASO: Most companies that I went through had mobile apps, but ASO was never really part of the job description.

Requirements / Qualifications

  • Experience in SEO: For starter roles this is usually not a requirement, as they can only have experience with the work that they’ve done on the side and not in an actual job/company.
  • Experience in Analysis: Most SEOs needs to be at least familiar on a basic level with a web analytics tool like Google Analytics, Omniture, Adobe Analytics so they can analyze their performance (one of the core responsibilities).
  • Tools: Often I see experience with Google Search Console being mentioned, but I’d love to see more companies mention the other tools in their toolset too. In the end you won’t share that much information with your competition by telling them what tools you’re using.
  • Delivering results: Although you can’t guarantee that your work will help you need to be able to show the progress that you’ve made on other sites and the work that you’ve done there. If it didn’t result in an uplift, at least you’re able to provide answers on the why not and what your original hypothesis was.

Missing?

What I feel is missing in the list of requirements & qualifications is a few things, what about the setup that you already have, or are they diving into a new field of opportunity. Are you going to expand your business, are you operating in new niches? For some companies the future manager will already know what projects (s)he wants work to be done for.

  • Tools? What is your current toolset, if somebody has exceptional expertise with a certain tool that for sure would help. Anybody can learn more about a tool, but experience is important too.
  • How often have they played ‘this’ game before? How many sites have you worked on, what was the scale/business model of the sites? I have way more experience then on average with publishers and marketplace models then probably other SEOs. While somehow I have barely worked for ecommerce sites and SaaS companies thus far. This also gives better insights if they have a certain ‘play book’ on how to approach certain issues.

Writing the Ultimate Job Description

I’m on a journey to change the world. OK slowly. And one by one. But I believe we can do better, making people find the right jobs will make them happier and increase the productivity and output for the company. The first step to get that started would be to improve job descriptions so people have a better idea on what they’re getting into then setting up a very generic one. Not all bullet points will apply to every job description, but you likely get the point:

Responsibilities

  • Define the SEO strategy: we’re wanting to grow (X metric) with approximately XX% this year. SEO is one of the channels that we depend on, so we’re looking for somebody who could build out the channel after an intensive audit and figure out what opportunities we really have.
  • Reporting: be able to use our analytics infrastructure to dive into customer & traffic data to find new insights and opportunities for us to grow SEO as a traffic channel.
  • Reporting Up: be able to talk to our stakeholders and peers in the company about the performance and opportunities that you see within SEO. Be able to communicate the results of the work that we‘ve done.
  • Analytical: be analytical and data driven, are you able to write SQL and work with large amounts of data? Great! We have some of our analysts ready to work with you in supporting the insights that you need to gather.
  • Technical: we have developers ready to work with you, so it would help if you could code and be able to explain in detail what your wishes are for implementations regarding SEO and new features.
  • Content: we’ve been wanting to create & produce more and better content. It would be great if you have worked with copywriters and are able to take our blog & content marketing efforts to the next level. We have copywriters that we work with and also our PR specialists.
  • Build out the team: be a team leader and builder. Currently the team is 2 people that will be supporting you, but we hope to build out the team with your support. So we’d like to see experience leading people & teams.
  • Performance: you need to be able to identify opportunities, build out the resources needed and along the way have a ton of fun while always striving for better results.

Requirements / Qualifications

  • You have X years working experience in online/digital marketing and you know what channels are important for our type of business to be successful.
  • You have worked on (multiple) big sites regarding SEO before, it is important to us that you can show experience building out a strategy for a bigger site (50.000+ pages).
  • You have worked with web analytics tools and understand how you can use these insights to further improve user experience and optimize pages for search engines. Preferred tools would be: Google Analytics, Amplitude Analytics, Adobe Analytics, …, etc..
  • Do you have experience writing or have worked with copywriters before, great! This will help push forward our ideas on content marketing.
  • You have experience managing different products/projects at the same time, our teams are divided between products/projects and some are cross functional (designers, engineers).
  • You have worked before with tools that we already have in our toolset: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO, Screaming Frog, … , etc. but you’re free to look into other SEO tools (up to enterprise budget) and evaluate needs for our organization.

This is not even good enough but hopefully a good start, in the job descriptions that I usually write I also try to give insights into the company, mention what the team looks like and what the perks & benefits are of the role. But most important what type of person we’re looking for and how we think this role will help the bigger team grow & support. In the end it’s a two way stream and we want to make that clear from the start. You need somebody’s skills but you also want them to feel welcome and appreciated!

What’s missing?

What do you think is really missing in job descriptions these days that should be reflect. What are you looking for in a next or first SEO role? Let me know, I’d love this post to become the ultimate SEO job description for the rest of the world. Hit me up on @MartijnSch on Twitter for feedback!

Growing as an SEO

In this series I’ve also blogged about: