#we have to write reports to get our professional designations and this person basically said they'd pay me to do theirs

[fishylife]

[henrylevesconte]

Maybe this is a dumb question, but what exactly do you do as an archaeologist? I mean, you're not digging at archaeological sites all the time, right?

Not a dumb question at all. Excavation of sites is one aspect of archaeology and it’s the one you typically think of besides running from giant boulders like Indiana Jones but an archaeologist has several parts that make up their job. I’ll just cover how archaeology works in the United States, specially what I do which is Cultural Resource Management for a Government Agency (as opposed to academic archaeology or private culture resource management archaeology).

Just so this doesn’t clog up too much space since I was a little overzealous in descriptions, explanation is below.

Archaeology in the United States follows several federally mandated laws. In 1969, the National Historic Preservation Act was passed, specifically Section 106 which is 100% of my job. This particular law mandates that if any sort of project or undertaking is done on federal land, you have to make sure it’s not going to impact any cultural remains (structures, sites, sacred places, graveyards, and more!) You can read more about Section 106 here.

Usually my job always begins with background research and planning. So that includes doing inventory assessments (see what people did archaeologically in the past) or going to local archives to do research on an area of interest. With that comes the scientific parts of the job like developing a plan and a research design. Back in the day people just dug up sites for the hell of it and had no plan for conservation or much reasoning why they wanted to do it besides “oh neat stuff!” So to combat the overflow of artifacts and sites with limited information, as a field we started asking a lot more questions. Like what sort of cultural groups were here? Why did they do what they did? How did they make x, y, z? etc. It has to have meaning and it also has to have plans for post fieldwork so if you do find something and collect artifacts, you have to have a conservation plan. For example one of my previous jobs had an agreement with the local university to have them conserve and curate our artifacts by their Anthropology students.

So once you do planning and background research then you do survey. There’s several different types of survey and not everything is about putting holes in the ground. It all depends on the state, area, country, land vs. underwater that you’re in. And there’s different levels to survey and excavation (basic, transect, phases 1-3, etc.) But this is what you think of when you think of what we do. This involves scientific recordings because archaeology is a destructive science (I love that description but it’s true!) When you dig anywhere, you are disturbing the ground. And no matter what we do, you cannot return any site back to how it was before you put that shovel in the ground. So when archaeologists find a site, you bet we do our very best to record it since only sometimes you’re allowed to go back but you’ll never return everything to how it was before you found it. Everything needs to be recorded within its context to be understood otherwise its meaningless. For example: there was an issue on one job where a supposed archaeologist would pick up historic glass bottles from the side of the road, just to collect them. They never took a gps point, nor marked it on a map, nor looked to see if it belonged to a larger cultural area and since it was never recorded, it means nothing to future archaeologist besides what the bottle itself could tell you. It could give you a date but it won’t tell you about the person it belonged to and that’s the true heart of archaeology. We care about the people behind the things they used in everyday life.

Anyways, so once you get muddy and a few more bug bites than usual, you have to do a slop load of paperwork. So that’s the other aspect of the job, once you’ve completed your survey and collected all the cool stuff that answered all your research questions, then you have to report on what you found and if there are sites, how to go about protecting them. So that includes writing site forms, curating artifacts, photographing artifacts, compiling reports, and consulting with interested parties. Typically for my job in Cultural Resource Management or CRM, you have to talk to multiple people about what you did. This includes a State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) aka a state employed archaeological expert, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (TPO) a tribal appointed archaeological expert for each federally recognized tribe you consult with, and federal agencies with shared geographic boundaries (USDA Forest Service, DOI National Parks Service, DOI Bureau of Land Management, BOEM, NOAA, Navy, FEMA, etc). So you have to tell everyone with culture ties in that area what you did, get their approval, add recomendations of what is to happen to said sites in the future (are they impacted? Are they significant and need more research? Is it just a rodent hill and not Blackbeards treasure?) and cheers you did a whole lot of archaeology.

The other aspect of archaeology is public outreach which can include educational events, hosting lectures, having people who are not professional archaeologists but love the topic come help with sites and resources, giving papers at conferences, and engaging the local community with archaeology. You also can attend different events and interact with different cultural groups too.  It’s my favorite part of the job. Getting to talk to people who are curious about what I do on a daily basis (besides send emails and go to meetings, you know, the actual fun stuff.)

People in academic archaeology do different things (with their fancy PhD’s and professorships.) That’s not really my thing unless someone would like to pay for my PhD. We also publish articles, write and take in grants, and produce studies just like academic archaeologists 

Private CRM isn’t much different than what I do, in fact private companies often partner with agencies and complete work together. Private CRM usually does contracted projects and can travel a lot more than Federal CRM. Overall we usually all work together (academic, private, and federal) to protect our history. 

I hope that answered your question or wasn’t too confusing/too much 😓

[booksandeverything-in-between]

My journalism journey

... has only just begun! 

This is my post for the “Life Narrative” assignment for JTC 326. I’ve added a “keep reading” tab because I hate putting extremely long posts on my dashboard! Keep in mind too, I’ve formatted this to fit the platform, so it’s not strictly professional. 

Also  — this is the first time I’ve shared my Tumblr with anyone who is not my sister, but it’s the perfect platform for this. 

** All pictures were taken by me unless otherwise specified, some taken from my old blog posts on here. 

A note before I start: When I first thought about this assignment, I had so many things I thought I could share, a lot of them deeply personal, somewhat dark and just not the right fit. I had a bit of a crisis; I cried a little. There is so much in my past that makes me, me, that I’ve only ever really shared with my therapist, but have generally wanted to write about. But it’s hard, and I don’t know how. And a whole lot of other stuff. BUT THEN

I realized I could share a story that I have always wanted to share! It perfectly relates to our class too and basically everything anyone would ever need to know about me! It’s amazing! I’m so excited! I hope you like it! 

(line break) 

It’s the summer before sixth grade. That’s how I define, or sort, my life, in my memories. It’s the year of school, or it’s the summer before/after. It’s not my age, or the calendar year; it’s school. For a long time my whole identity revolved around school, so it fits. 

Anyway, I’m bored. My older sister and I can only do so much Netflix-watching (because we didn’t have cable) on the Wii (because this was 2011), and I need something to stimulate my active mind. Here comes books! 

I’ve always, always been an avid reader. I was the first person in my first grade class to start reading chapter books  — something I liked to brag about a lot back then. But I’m about to be a middle schooler, so I need to find something a little more mature. My parents decide that I’m at an appropriate age to start reading some of my sister’s old books, which were originally marked for garage sale. 

One of these books has a long, juicy title, with a teen girl posed on the cover in a preppy school uniform, hand on her hip. I don’t have to look this up to remember; it is forever in my mind. The book is I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter. Juicy, right? AND I LOVE IT. Seriously. Love. It. 

Photo: I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter. 

... And I guess I move on. That part is a little fuzzy. Enter: Back to School Night, sixth grade. I always would go with my mom, because I loved school, and nights like those I thought were super cool. So, I’m hanging out with my best friend Sydney by the stairs, and she has this book from the school library with her. 

Do you believe in fate? Was it kismet? I do not know; I will not guess. But I do know, I freaked the f*ck out. Because it was the book, by Ally Carter!! I loved that book! When I asked Sydney where she got it, she said in the library, and there were a bunch of other books like it. 

That made me pause. Honestly, I couldn’t believe it. Because, what do you know, it was a series!! There were three other books to be read! How, oh how, did I not know this? It had to be fate. 

I can still picture exactly where the books are, in the Preston library. The smaller shelf, up against the wall, right by the opening into the conference/meeting room space (I don’t know what we called that room???). Bottom shelf. 

Who knew a series about teenage girls going to a spy school would set me on this path? 

Suddenly it’s the summer after sixth grade, and once again, I’m bored. But, I have access to a netbook, that my grandpa gave us. Something entices me to start Googling these books. I find Ally Carter’s website. I found out that there are going to be two more books in the series. And I stumble upon this Google search suggestion, with the word fanfiction. 

And wow. 

Stories, countless stories, about my favorite books. Eventually, I make my own account on fanfiction.net, I try my hand at some of my own stories, I get a smartphone and make this very tumblr account when I turn 13, I find a place where I can express all my nerdiness in peace and all-caps, without any sort of ridicule fear. 

But that’s not the end, nor the point, of this story. 

Photo: The first four books in the Gallagher Girls series by Ally Carter. 

(line break) 

So here I am, spending all my free time secretly reading fanfic and trying to write it, and hating my life sometimes and thinking about what I want to study in college because that’s my best chance at escape from this life that I feel I’m stuck in. 

But I can’t think of anything to write! I love to read; I enjoy writing; I am learning more about grammar because my dad has me grading his grammar quizzes he gave his JTC 300 students; but still, something isn’t right. I viscerally hate English class. 

But! There’s a way I CAN write, without it being creative! My dad is going to school for photojournalism, my sister took a high school journalism class, and now it’s my turn to register for classes in high school. I sign up for Journalism 1, the precursor to Journalism 2, which is the class that houses the student newspaper. It’s a great plan. It was a good class.

I was looking through my old journal the other day, and I came across this line dated from September 23, 2014, just into the beginning of my freshman year of high school. “I want to be a journalist.” 

Photo: A journal entry that reads, “I want to be a journalist.” 

My sophomore year of high school, I take Journalism 2 and join the paper. I’m kind of terrified because there are a bunch of people I don’t know and now I’ll actually have to go out and report and talk to people ... but we do some really fun team-building, and people seem to like me, and I relax. I feel, just a little, like a really belong. 

And I had felt that way before, during band, and with some of my friends, but this thing, this journalism thing, I’m actually good at it. And there’s this one moment that sticks out to me still. 

It’s probably 7:20 a.m. I’m trudging up the steps to Spanish class, and I do not want to be there. It’s not that I don’t like school, or I don’t like my classes, because I do. But I’m tired, and it’s not what I want to be doing. I think, if I could spend the entirety of my day in my journalism class, I would be happy. 

To this day, as a college student, I am jealous of the people who get to spend their whole days doing journalism. 

I’ve found more than a home. I’ve found a place where, for what feels like the first time, I can speak my mind. I can be sarcastic, I can make a pun and I can also point out when there’s a bad typo somewhere and have that be appreciated. 

Halfway through my first year writing for the paper, I’m given extra responsibilities and get to start copy editing articles from the students in the J1 class, and I start to learn how to redesign/maintain our Wordpress site. I go on a class trip to Los Angeles, an amazing feat of independence for me, and I feel valued. And then, I’m award the position of Copy Editor for the next school year! It’s amazing. 

I learn my junior year that the freshmen whose articles I edited were afraid of me. Afraid, of me! (For reference, I am five feet tall). But once they met me, they were like ‘Woah, Serena’s not scary!” and now we’re good friends. I’ve since learned to be less harsh/blunt in my editing. 

My senior year, I was Editor-in-Chief. That was something I dreamed about as a freshman, but wouldn’t let myself actually fathom. And even though I felt like I could have done a much better job, and I had a lot of personal sh*t to do with too, by the end of the year, I knew that I was leaving behind a strong legacy. 

It’s really something special when people you love give you a speech, crying, telling you how much you welcomed them, how much you made them feel like they had a place to grow, to be, and how much you’ve inspired them. 

Because journalism, especially student journalism, is about so much more than the news. It’s about a community. It’s community with your fellow reporters and editors, it’s comradery while kicking ass, it’s creating a community with your readers and your peers, it’s learning about the community you live in and sharing the ups and downs of life. 

Photo: A screenshot from my Instagram account of my high school journalism family, taken at our end of the year picture my junior year of high school. We had this running joke that I was going to be a world-dominator type person (because I’m so tiny and quiet) and my teacher said, “Okay, Serena now push Katie over” because I was taking over as EIC. Photo credit goes to my teacher (not going to post his name here). 

(line break)  

I have a lot of setbacks, too. I have anxiety. Like, a lot. Of anxiety. I haven’t been formally diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder, but I think I should be. 

I used to think I was just shy. And that was partially the case. But I grew from it, in large part because of journalism. I went from not sitting in my designated seat at the beginning of class because there were older kids in the way my freshman year, to leading the entire class three days a week my senior year. I liked high school journalism because I could get away with asking my friends for quotes, or just not really quoting anyone at all. 

I spent one quarter at the University of Denver last year, and it was somewhat the same thing. They didn’t have any strict standards on a number of sources, and I wrote articles that didn’t require speaking to a lot of people. But then, I took over nine months off from school in what should have been my freshman year of college, and thus took nine months off from journalism and reporting. So starting at The Collegian was a challenge. 

I am still damn proud of myself for getting up the courage, on the second day of classes at CSU, to go down to the newsroom and ask about reporting. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t, and I love where I am today. 

To think that wasn’t even a year ago ... 

Photo: Here I am, remote copy editing for The Collegian, the week after Spring Break. Photo cred to my dad. 

When I started at CSU, I felt good. I was nervous, but transferring was a really good decision, and I’m from Fort Collins, so I felt more comfortable. And at first, my reporting felt really good.

But then I got too stressed with school and work, and that stress led over to increases social anxiety when I was reporting. I went to this community meeting and tried to talk to people there, but I felt helpless and quiet and I left and cried to myself. I then conducted my interviews over the phone. 

I even had to take a break for a few months last semester, because I had a panic attack with the mere thought of approaching people I didn’t know. 

But I worked through it. Aided by Xanax and peer support, I interviewed a bunch of people at the Eva Schloss event and felt really good about it. I also saw my high school journalism advisor, because his wife works at CSU Hillel, and talking to someone who knew my struggle felt good. 

For a long time I’ve doubted if journalism, if news reporting, is something I’ll actually be able to do. It’s the only real thing that makes me feel like I have a purpose, the only thing that makes me not feel depressed about life, but I am still so worried I’ll hold myself back in some way. 

That hasn’t happened yet. 

(line break) 

It’s the summer before my junior year of high school, and I am about to go meet up with the other members of the new leadership team, Katie and Kathleen, at Starbucks. I’ve recently got my license and it feels really good to be driving myself around. 

I go to Target and buy a fancy looking notebook with the last $15 I have to my name, because I don’t have a job yet. I go to Starbucks and discover I like drinking tea. I talk with Katie and Kathleen and we brainstorm what we want the journalism class to look like next year. What we want to change, how we’re going to get students to know that we exist. 

It’s the summer before my senior year, and I bring this same notebook to a meeting at Dazbog that I have with our leadership team to get ready for the school year. I’m in charge. It’s weird, but in a good way. There are a lot more people there, and I fill pages upon pages of ideas, and agendas I want to start the first weeks with. 

So much had changed in a year. My parents got divorced, I started working a lot, I was looking more seriously into college. But so much was the same. The same people, the same work, the same purpose. It was good. 

It’s the second semester of my first year at CSU, my sophomore year of college. I’m at home, cleaning my room, procrastinating because I don’t want to write my final essay. I get a text from Laura, asking if I’ve heard back about the editorial board yet. I had shut my phone off because I was checking my email so obsessively. 

And there it is. I am going to be the 2020-2021 News Editor for The Rocky Mountain Collegian. I still don’t fully feel like I know what I’m doing, even though I have all this experience. News is happening, but it’s summer. Do I write about it? Do I ask other people to write about it? Can I express the authority and knowledge I know I have, to people who have more experience at the paper than I do? It’s still early. 

The day I get the news, I pull out an old, blue notebook that’s barely filled. It’s the perfect place to start brainstorming the things I want to change on the desk and the things I think are super important for Laura and me to talk about. 

I forgot that I had notes from my Editor-in-Chief days in there. 

Photo: The notebook!

It feels like I’ve completed a circle. Like all the highs and lows of my last few years have led me to here, right back to where I’m supposed to be. Where I’ve always known I would be. 

I know who I am; I know where I belong; I know my place and my purpose in this world. 

Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series brought me to writing, and writing brought me to journalism. In my obsession with those books, the unofficial motto of the CIA really resonated with me. “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” 

Community and truth, that’s journalism. 

I want to be a journalist.

I am a student journalist.

I am a journalist. 

[buzzdixonwriter]

You Don’t Say

For me, one of the unforeseen benefits of Facebook and other social media is that it gives me a chance to do rough drafts of ideas, assembling my thoughts and getting feedback before committing to more permanent form.

And sometimes, like asteroids colliding in space, two separate ideas / posts slam into one another and either create something new and unexpected, or else shatter themselves and reveal interesting aspects of their nature heretofore hidden from view.

That happened recently with a pair of Facebook posts I made on Dennis Prager and Harlan Ellison.

Let’s get the turd out of our mouth first.

. . .

Dennis Prager is a purveyor of herpetology lubricants admired by many on the right-leaning-nazi side of the spectrum, primarily because he keeps his mouth closed when chewing.  Half of what he says is repackaged self-evident truths of the “Don’t eat the yellow snow” variety, a quarter is opinions that if not startling original are at least not genuinely harmful, and the remain quarter is egregious bullshit for which he deserves a public pants down spanking.

Hmm, what?  Oh, yes; purely metaphorically, of course.

I long since wrote off Prager as a. utterer of inanities, but recently his turdmongering was forced on my attention by someone who posted a link to Prager’s argument that the “left” (i.e., basically anybody who thinks Auschwitz was a Bad Idea) is inflicting harm on both the American body politic and the universe at large by denying people like Prager the right to drop the N-bomb whenever they feel like it.

As some of you no doubt already knew, Prager is a member of what polite bigots used to refer to as “those of the Hebrew persuasion”.

That a person from an ethnicity that historically suffered hatred so vicious and specifically targeted that a special word had to be created for it (“anti-Semitism” because the original word -- “Jew-hatred” -- was too damned ugly even for bigots to use) now has his knickers in a twist because he’s “not allowed” to use the only other word of equal or greater impact -- also coined specifically by oppressors for expressing unrestrained hate and contempt against those oppressed -- is so rich in irony that all I can do is swipe a phrase from Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station and say Dennis Prager has “all the self-awareness of a dog licking its own asshole in the middle of the street”.

First off, he’s lying: Neither the “left” nor American law prevents him from dropping the N-bomb whenever he feels like it and I invite him to go down to the intersection of Normandie and Florence in South Central and drop it at the top of his lungs for as long as he is able and please make sure to take plenty of video recorders along because I really wanna see what happens next.

Second, why the fuck would you want to say that? Seriously, other than in an evidentiary context (a cop giving testimony in court, a journalist reporting what some bigoted politician says, etc.), who today gains anything from repeating the word other than inflicting unjustified distress on people who have done nothing to deserve it?

(This is the point where a bunch of alt-right trolls are gonna jump up and say “but whatabout all the times when black people say it?” and to those trolls I’m gonna say STFU & STFD; if you can’t grasp the difference in context then you’re too damned stupid to be allowed out in public except at the end of a leash and with a ball gag in your mouth.)

It’s a word specifically created and designed to be used to brutally oppress people who did nothing to deserve that brutal oppression.  Why would anybody outside that group use it except to participate in that brutal oppression?

. . .

Least there sit any in the cheap seats who presume the above rant was targeted at Dennis Prager simply because he was Jewish, guess again, ya yutzes.

Few writers enjoyed as brilliant and as incendiary a career as Harlan Ellison, and I count myself privileged to have been one of his friends.

Ellison, as many of you know, also was Jewish, a damned tough little bastard, singled out for hatred and abuse as the only Jewish child in his backwater Ohio school, growing up with nerves & balls of chromium, a bona fide Army Ranger, and a writer so honest and fearless that when he wrote about juvenile delinquency in the 1950s he did so by infiltrating and joining a street gang to get first hand experience and insight on the kids who ran in that crowd (and as icing on the cake, James Caan played him in the TV version!).

Top that, Dennis.

Harlan’s electric eclectic career features many highpoints, but the one I want to focus on is his brief 4-year run as TV critic for the legendary Los Angeles Free Press (a.k.a. The Freep) from 1968 to 1972.  

What’s interesting is that Harlan did this while at the same time at the height of his demand as a TV writer.

You got any idea how hard it is to make a living while you’re gnawing on the hand that feeds you?

Harlan may have been crazy, but damn it, he was honest.

Back to the issue at hand.

Recently I’ve been re-reading his TV criticism columns, collected in two volumes, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat.

The depressing thing is that all the evil we see today was in place back in those days, and the same smug pious frauds and their dimbulb marks kept congratulating themselves how wonderful they were as things continued to spiral out of control.

Oh, we've had good moments when we made changes that improved the lot of people who'd previously been marginalized, but the core cancer is still there. Harlan was no cock-eyed sentimentalist -- he was often filled with anger and could vent it spectacularly at deserving targets -- but he did have hope that somehow we could keep nudging the ball further towards the goal lines.

The columns make fascinating reading; they are nowhere near as dated as one might suspect. Sometimes they offer diamond-like brilliant dissections of a particular instant in the cultural gestalt, other times they examine the unseen (well, to most audiences, that is) tides of Hollywood that shape our media, sometimes he turns his attention to bear on seemingly insignificant and forgotten local programming only to show with McLuhan-esque clarity how that tiny piece of seemingly insignificant fluff is symptomatic of a much wider, much vaster, and far more serious problem.

One entry caught my eye in particular, the March 7, 1969 column on a failed ABC pilot called Those Were The Days.

Harlan sat in the studio audience watching the taping of that pilot, and his column praised the courage and insight of producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, the brilliant performances of Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, and the raw honesty of the pilot’s sharp comedy and writing.

Those of you not in the cheap seats have already realized this was the second failed pilot for what would eventually become All In The Family over at CBS (there was an even earlier original pilot called Justice For All back when Archie and Edith’s last name was Justice, not Bunker.)

I remember the hoopla when All In The Family finally aired in January of 1971 as a mid-season replacement.

You might count Archie Bunker as the white Dolemite insofar as the comedy sprang from the shock of all the crude and vulgar things he said.

Lear and Yorkin were mocking that mindset, belittling bigotry, exposing the Babbittry of millions of “good” Americans who lacked either the self-awareness or the courage to take a long introspective look at themselves and realize how badly they were failing as citizens of this country.

Audiences weren’t supposed to like Archie Bunker.

And that’s where Lear and Yorkin made their fatal mistake.

No, audiences didn’t like Archie.

They loved him.

. . .

Asteroids collide, and sometimes they form new planets, and sometimes they shatter and expose what lies beneath.

Prager’s modern day Babbittry crashed into Harlan’s half-century old anti-Babbittry, and from the explosion a stark truth revealed itself.

It’s almost impossible to make an outlaw a villain in popular media.

No matter how many banks they rob, stages they hold up, sheriffs they shoot, the mere fact that somebody wrote a song / dime novel / movie about ‘em makes them into heroes.

Demi-gods.

People to be admired.

Emulated.

Professional wrestling knows this.

You can never be so big a heel that you won’t have a legion of followers.

And you can turn a heel into a baby face in the blink of an eye and none of the fans will remember the despicable acts the wrassler did just last week.

You put an Archie Bunker on TV, you do not get millions of people to recognize themselves in his hateful / hurtful behavior and change their ways.

Oh, hell no; you get millions of people to applaud him for saying and doing what they say and do in private.

And now that it’s all big and bold and brassy on TV, why it becomes even easier to say it in the privacy of your own home, then over the fence with the neighbors, then in the bar down the street, then on the street itself, and then against people who have done you no harm, who have committed no sin other than the heinous crime of not being exactly like you.

I remember watching and liking All In The Family when it first came on because I, like millions of other Americans, got the joke:  Archie was no hero.

But it wasn’t long before the voices cheering Archie began to drown out the voices laughing at him.

Lear and Yorkin tried undoing their damage with Maude and The Jeffersons and Good Times and other spinoff shows, but the bigot was out of the bottle.

Archie Bunker, even though written in a way to ridicule his use of bigotry and stereotypes, became a champion and defender of those who clung to said bigotry and stereotypes.

So tell me again why you want to drop that N-bomb, Dennis.

Explain to me -- even while you talk out of both sides of your mouth and claim even if everybody can use they word maybe they shouldn’t use the word -- how that does anything to help anybody…

…other than bigots and hate mongers.

Your argument is as circular as the thumb and forefinger gesture white supremacists use to signal one another, a gesture deliberately chosen because it lets them transgress openly by lying about the truth meaning of their gesture.

And Harlan, you were right about Those Were The Days as it began evolving into All In The Family.  Absolutely brilliant -- but absolutely deadly.

Not airing All In The Family wouldn’t have eliminated racial / ethnic / sexual prejudice in the United States…

…but it would have denied those ideas a voice.

The narcissist always proclaims, “I don’t care what they say about me so long as they spell my name right.”

Well, that’s what we got with Archie Bunker.

None of the bigots cared if we made fun of their ideas…

…just so long as they got their ideas out there.

Because ideas are made legitimate by their presence.

Now clearly, this is a bade that cuts both ways.

Ideas once unthinkable -- liberty and justice for all in the form of racial and gender equality, f’r instance -- need to be championed in public.

But we need to shout down and stamp out the bad ideas.

The United States took their foot off the neck of the defeated white racists after the end of the Civil War, and as a result jim crow came roaring back, and things did not change for millions of Americans for another entire century.

We allowed bigots and hate mongers and slavers to be whitewashed and glorified and forgiven for their crimes against humanity…

…and in the process we allowed them to continue victimizing African-Americans more and more.

Every song about the Ol’ South, every novel glorifying plantation life, every movie showing happy field hands, every statue commemorating murderous traitors as men of honor and principle, every single iteration of that idea made millions of people’s suffering not just possible but inevitable.

. . .

Now this is the point where the alt-right trolls are gonna jump up and ask “did you ever drop the N-word?”

Not in casual conversation, no.

I was born and raised in the South (Appalachia, mostly); my father’s side of the family were almost all Southerners.

Almost all.

My paternal grandmother was born and raised in New Jersey and met my grandfather when both served in the U.S. Army medical corps in WWI.  When my grandfather died in his 40s, my grandmother originally moved back to New Jersey, but her three children (dad and two aunts) felt heartbroken at having to leave their Southern cousins and friends behind so even though she carried no particular love for the South, my grandmother moved her family back and stayed there for the most of her life (she and one of my aunts moved out to California to be near us, but that’s another story for another post).

One thing my grandmother absolutely refused to tolerate was use of the N-bomb anywhere near her, especially under her roof or in the homes of her children.

This included both the -er and -ra variants, because Southern racists who didn’t want to appear as uncultured and as boorish and as bigoted as their backwoods cousins preferred the second pronunciation because they could claim they were actually speaking respectfully about “colored people”.

So I grew up in the rare white Southern home where the N-bomb merely wasn’t used, it was actually denounced as wrong.

Now, don’t go thinking my grandmother was some great paragon of virtue; she wasn’t (she was hell on wheels, in fact, but that’s another story for another post).

But she did recognize there was something wrong with the use of the N-bomb, and whether she demanded her children never use it in any form to keep them from appearing to be boorish, bigoted louts, or whether she just thought it was simple good manners of the golden rule variety not to use it, I dunno.

But I do know we never used it, and when my parents heard our neighbors or schoolmates use it, we were reminded in no uncertain terms that we were never to use it.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t used it.

A couple of decades ago I wrote a screenplay based on the life of Robert Smalls, in particular his incredible escape from Civil War Charleston by hijacking a Confederate gunboat and sailing it right past Ft. Sumter to join the Union fleet, bringing his wife and several other escaping African-Americans with him.

As a skilled harbor pilot, Smalls enjoyed certain privileges other enslaved African-Americans didn’t.

For example, he was allowed to go about the streets of Charleston unescorted…

…provided he wore a big diamond shaped brass tag around his neck.

Like a dog.

The tag indicated to slave catcher patrols that he was one of the “good” ones, that he could be trusted because he was helping his masters in their struggle against the Union by guiding blockade runners into the safety of Charleston harbor.

But knowing Southerners the way I do, and knowing the kind of low class good ol’ boy types they recruited for such jobs, I couldn’t imagine the slave catcher patrols being particularly courteous to him, even when they knew they had to let him pass because clearly he had the protection of some high positioned muckamuck.  

And I could easily imagine them flinging the N-bomb at him with great glee, taunting him, daring him to act “uppity” so they could beat the crap out of him and teach him some manners and remind him of his place.

So I used the word in their dialog in my script.

Would I use that word today?

Probably not.

It’s not that crucial to the story, and if the viewer doesn’t grasp the concept that these are bigoted bully scum from their actions and attitude, then I’ve failed my job as a writer.

Have I ever quoted people who dropped the N-bomb?

Yeah, I have, in the past.

I’ve quoted Richard Pryor and Blazing Saddles and Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

I would excuse it then as the aforementioned evidentiary context but ya know what?  I don’t quote those lines anymore.

I still think Pryor is hilarious and will recommend his routines to anyone I think might be interested, but he as a member of the African-American community at large (because like any other ethnic group, African-Americans have numerous sub-cultures and sub-communities among them), he could say things in a way neither I nor any other white person could say them.

(And, yeah, there’s a big debate going on to this very day among African-Americans about the appropriateness of that word and you know what?  Whatever decision African-Americans reach for themselves is their business and should not involve any input whatsoever from we white folk; we not only can’t use the word, we can’t even comment on how they choose to use it.  Period.  Full stop.)

Blazing Saddles when it came out used the N-bomb to be deliberately transgressive, to make a sympathetic point re how unfairly African-Americans were treated.

All well and good.

But nine years earlier there had been a movie called A Patch Of Blue and while it wasn’t a raucous comedy like Blazing Saddles it tried making a point about race relations in America and it was a really. Really good movie and it made some important points but today is virtually unwatchable not because of any flaws in it but because the times have changed.

Ditto Blazing Saddles.

We don’t need to approach the problem that way any more.

Quentin Tarantino?  I really like what he does as a director and a screenwriter but his use of the N-bomb to show us how transgressive his characters are is really shallow.  I have a strong feeling his movies are going to be considered embarrassingly passé’ in a generation or two, much the same way as benign-yet-stereotypical characters in 1940s movies render many of them passé’ today.  

Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction lose nothing by changing the N-word to something else.  

Maybe an argument could be made for its use in Django Unchained or The Hateful 8 but even there I think substituting another word wouldn’t significantly change the tenor or tone of either movie.

So I stop quoting those lines from Tarantino’s films, at least not fully.

I can admire his skill / talent / craft without signing off on his problematic elements.

Let me offer an analogy: If a creator can get the same dramatic effect by pretending to shoot somebody but not actually blasting them with a gun, then they can get the same dramatic effect by using something evocative of the N-bomb without actually dropping it.

(By the way, for those who may be curious, my mother was from Naples and a bona fide card carrying member of Mussolini’s Fascist Youth Brigade, but that’s another story for another post.)

. . .

We are plunging into a new cultural conflict -- and while I think there will be violence, I don’t see it being violence on the scale or level of political organization as the Civil War -- and we can only win by refusing to let the bigots and the hate mongers spew their bullshit in the marketplace of ideas.

There is no compromise with an oppressor.

Stand up to it every time you encounter it.

Make it unthinkable, never acceptable. 

  © Buzz Dixon

[eroticcannibal]

Please stop telling people to “just do CBT”

CBT, like medication, can be valuable and life-changing to an individual. And like medication, it can also be devastating if it’s not the right treatment to you. It seems a lot of people seem to think that because it’s accessible and you can get free PDFs online, that it’s safe to just hop on any post and tell complete strangers to try it.

That is dangerous and irresponsible behavior. 

CBT is suited to those who are having trouble specifically with their thought patterns around things that do not justify those kinds of thought patterns, to the point where it impacts their life. CBT is not suited to just anyone having problems with their mood or anxiety or their thought patterns. And yet it is frequently pushed on people by strangers, by doctors (because it is relatively quick and cheap, thanks capitalism!), even forced on patients who aren’t suited to the treatment, causing worsening situations, even trauma. 

I can’t link to any of the wonderful conversations I’ve witnessed in private groups by those harmed by CBT, unfortunately. To summarise, I have seen fair comparisons to ABA, gaslighting, victim blaming, brainwashing, neglectful parenting that dismisses the feelings of the child (have fun with that one if that’s the source of your problems), grooming the patient to be receptive to coercion and institutional abuses, But from my own perspective as someone who had to stop CBT before I killed myself as a result of it, HERE is some highlights of the more damaging parts of a typical CBT workbook (and there's some great contributions in the notes). For those with issues caused by abuse or oppression or other situational factors, CBT becomes gaslighting. CBT is routinely weaponized against the oppressed and the abused, when our understandable reactions make others uncomfortable. CBT is used to make us into “good victims”, who don’t hurt or cry or complain or blame anyone. CBT is a therapy that can sever the connection between a person and themselves, it can be compassionless and cold. Not to mention that CBT inherently shifts the blame for feelings and behaviors entirely onto the individual rather than acknowledging the true role of triggers. 

In addition to this, CBT and how it is implemented is not only criticized by those harmed directly by it, but by professionals too. 

“this model appears to confuse the symptoms (i.e., negative self concepts) of depression with its cognitive causes...  In many cases, clients' appraisals and reports of their negative or distressful experiences are quite rational, realistic, and accurate. For example, their experiences of sexual or physical abuse at the hands of another or the tragedies of their loved ones have left enormous scars in their life. In such circumstances, cognitive-restructuring exercises, with their emphasis on reframing reality and not on changing it, do not deal with the true problem...  research has shown that positive self-evaluations may be dysfunctional and maladaptive...  the self-focused cognitive model puts a strong emphasis on examining the association between negative thoughts and mental dysfunction, but it has not answered the question of why individuals choose to focus on their negative attributes when the positive evaluation of the self is more accurate. “

“ Opponents have frequently argued that the approach is too mechanistic and fails to address the concerns of the “whole” patient...   the specific cognitive components of CBT often fail to outperform “stripped-down” versions of the treatment that contain only the more basic behavioral strategies... patients with major depression improved just as much following a treatment that contained only the behavioral strategies and explicitly excluded techniques designed to directly modify distorted cognitions... “

“Some critics argue that because CBT only addresses current problems and focuses on specific issues, it does not address the possible underlying causes of mental health conditions, such as an unhappy childhood...  CBT focuses on the individual’s capacity to change themselves (their thoughts, feelings and behaviours), and does not address wider problems in systems or families that often have a significant impact on an individual’s health and wellbeing. “

“ Seek a therapy referral on the NHS today, and you’re much more likely to end up, not in anything resembling psychoanalysis, but in a short series of highly structured meetings with a CBT practitioner, or perhaps learning methods to interrupt your “catastrophising” thinking via a PowerPoint presentation, or online...   CBT doesn’t exactly claim that happiness is easy, but it does imply that it’s relatively simple: your distress is caused by your irrational beliefs, and it’s within your power to seize hold of those beliefs and change them...    Our conscious minds are tiny iceberg-tips on the dark ocean of the unconscious – and you can’t truly explore that ocean by means of CBT’s simple, standardised, science-tested steps...  Examining scores of earlier experimental trials, two researchers from Norway concluded that its effect size – a technical measure of its usefulness – had fallen by half since 1977...  For the most severely depressed, it concluded, 18 months of analysis worked far better – and with much longer-lasting effects – than “treatment as usual” on the NHS, which included some CBT. Two years after the various treatments ended, 44% of analysis patients no longer met the criteria for major depression, compared to one-tenth of the others. Around the same time, the Swedish press reported a finding from government auditors there: that a multimillion pound scheme to reorient mental healthcare towards CBT had proved completely ineffective in meeting its goals...

 A few years ago, after CBT had started to dominate taxpayer-funded therapy in Britain, a woman I’ll call Rachel, from Oxfordshire, sought therapy on the NHS for depression, following the birth of her first child. She was sent first to sit through a group PowerPoint presentation, promising five steps to “improve your mood”; then she received CBT from a therapist and, in between sessions, via computer. “I don’t think anything has ever made me feel as lonely and isolated as having a computer program ask me how I felt on a scale of one to five, and – after I’d clicked the sad emoticon on the screen – telling me it was ‘sorry to hear that’ in a prerecorded voice,” Rachel recalled. Completing CBT worksheets under a human therapist’s guidance wasn’t much better. “With postnatal depression,” she said, “you’ve gone from a situation in which you’ve been working, earning your own money, doing interesting things – and suddenly you’re at home on your own, mostly covered in sick, with no adult to talk to.” What she needed, she sees now, was real connection: that fundamental if hard-to-express sense of being held in the mind of another person, even if only for a short period each week.“I may be mentally ill,” Rachel said, “but I do know that a computer does not feel bad for me.”...    

In the NHS study conducted at the Tavistock clinic last year, chronically depressed patients receiving psychoanalytic therapy stood a 40% better chance of going into partial remission, during every six-month period of the research, than those receiving other treatments...  Alongside this growing body of evidence, scholars have begun to ask pointed questions about the studies that first fuelled CBT’s ascendancy. In a provocative 2004 paper, the Atlanta-based psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues showed how researchers – motivated by the desire for an experiment with clearly interpretable results – had often excluded up to two-thirds of potential participants, typically because they had multiple psychological problems...  Moreover, some studies have sometimes seemed to unfairly stack the deck, as when CBT has been compared with “psychodynamic therapy” delivered by graduate students who’d received only a few days’ cursory training in it, from other students...  But the most incendiary charge against cognitive approaches, from the torchbearers of psychoanalysis, is that they might actually make things worse: that finding ways to manage your depressed or anxious thoughts, for example, may simply postpone the point at which you’re driven to take the plunge into self-understanding and lasting change. CBT’s implied promise is that there’s a relatively simple, step-by-step way to gain mastery over suffering. But perhaps there’s more to be gained from acknowledging how little control – over our lives, our emotions, and other people’s actions – we really have?...        

Many neuroscience experiments have indicated that the brain processes information much faster than conscious awareness can keep track of it, so that countless mental operations run, in the neuroscientist David Eagleman’s phrase, “under the hood” – unseen by the conscious mind in the driving-seat. For that reason, as Louis Cozolino writes in Why Therapy Works, “by the time we become consciously aware of an experience, it has already been processed many times, activated memories, and initiated complex patterns of behaviour.”...  This doesn’t mesh well with a basic assumption of CBT – that, with training, we can learn to catch most of our unhelpful mental responses in the act. Rather, it seems to confirm the psychoanalytic intuition that the unconscious is huge, and largely in control; and that we live, unavoidably, through lenses created in the past, which we can only hope to modify partially, slowly and with great effort.  “

“ after completing low-intensity CBT, more than one in two service users had relapsed within 12 months.”

“ the overwhelming majority of CBT still operates through Becksian principles of normalisation, fitting a governmental agenda of producing good, quiet, working subjects who contribute to the economy and shut up. “

“To make this analysis, let’s imagine you are a therapist who is given the task of providing therapy for Ariel Castro (the recent accused kidnapper and rapist) to help him deal with suicidal thoughts over being universally hated and most likely condemned to a life sentence or the death penalty. Now think about the absurdity of doing CBT in this situation; that is, analyzing his negative thought patterns to help him deal with his one-sided thinking so he can better adjust himself to his (not so nice) life conditions.

Even better, imagine you’re given the task of providing therapy for Dr. Joseph Biederman (the key promoter of children’s Bipolar diagnoses) who perhaps is dealing with a severe depression related to negative public opinion regarding the enormous damage his work has done to tens of thousands of children (unfortunately his depression is a made-up scenario). Again you have the assigned responsibility to use CBT to help him see beyond the “negatives” in his thought patterns to find the “positives” in his career in order to help relieve his depression so he can get on with his work with great enthusiasm.

And even more controversial, let’s say you have the task of providing therapy using CBT for President George Bush several months after he launched the Iraq war; imagine for a moment that he has become quite depressed related to the growing mass demonstrations and the grief displayed by the parents of dead American soldiers coming home in coffins on a daily basis. Your job is to help him overcome his depression so he can get back to being The Commander In Chief...

CBT, being part of the “idealist” school of thought, tends to sever the relationship between the specific nature of the material conditions in the environment that gives rise to a person’s thoughts, and leaves it up to the interpretation of the listener (often a therapist) to determine whether or not the environmental source of those thoughts was actually traumatic or oppressive or more positive and humane. “

[Let me be clear, this is not me saying that CBT is bad, should never be used, or that it can’t be helpful to you. If it works for you, use it. It is the attitude that damn near everyone has, laypeople and professionals alike, that it’s a magic fix it that works for everyone, that I am challenging here. I’ve had issues with professionals not believing me recently when I expressed that I was unwilling to go through CBT again because it is a danger to me, because “oh it’s just changing how you think, that can’t be dangerous!”. Recommending particular treatments without a complete understanding of someone’s situation and without the proper clinical knowledge is dangerous, and when it comes to CBT it happens all the time. Recommending CBT without considering situational factors is dangerous, and it happens all the time.]

[sahuanjana795]

Data Science Career Opportunities: Your Guide To Unlocking Top Data Scientist Jobs

In a world that generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, a professional who can organize this large amount of data to deliver business solutions is truly a leader! There is a lot of talk about why Big Data continues here and why Big Data Analytics is the best business venture. Based on what has already been written and said, we can discuss Data science career opportunities and why ‘Data Scientist’ is an attractive career title for the 21st century.

Data Science Career Opportunities

According to a data scientist at the Harvard Business Review, “Big Data is a highly professional professional with the training and passion to make discoveries in the world.” So it is not surprising that data scientists are experts in the fields of Big Data Analytics and IT.

While experts predict that there will be 40 gigabytes of data (source) by 2020, data science career opportunities will only be filmed through the roof! The shortage of skilled professionals in the world who are increasingly turning to decision-making data has led to a huge demand for data scientists in startups and well-established companies.

A McKinsey Global Institute study predicts that by 2018, the United States alone will face a shortage of approximately 190,000 experts with in-depth analytical skills. While the big data wave shows no signs of slowing down, data companies around the world should be hired to manage their business-sensitive big data.

Data Scientist Salary Trends

The Glass door report reveals that data scientists are vying for the best jobs in the United States. According to a report, the average salary of a data scientist in the United States is $ 91,470 and $ 622,162, and more than 2,300 jobs are published on the site.

According to Indeed.com, the average data scientist salary for job vacancies in the United States up to May 2019 is 80% higher than the average salary for all job posts nationwide.

Data Scientist Job Roles

A data scientist wears several hats in his workplace. Data scientists are involved not only in business analysis, but also in the creation of data products and software platforms, as well as visualization and machine learning methods.

Some Important Data Scientist Job Topics :

Data / Analysis Manager

Business Intelligence Manager

Data Analyst

Business Analyst

Data Manager

Data Scientist

Data Architect

Hot Data Science Skills

Combining coding skills with statistical knowledge and the ability to think critically creates the arsenal of a successful data scientist. Some Data Scientist Skills Needed to Get the Best Career Opportunities in Data Science :

Proficiency in Deep Learning Frameworks: TensorFlow,     Keras, Pytorch

Creative Thinking & Industry Knowledge

Databases: SQL and NoSQL

Machine Learning and Neural Networks

Programming Languages: R/Python/Java

Statistics and Applied Mathematics

Working Knowledge of Hadoop and Spark

How to Become a Data Scientist (Step-By-Step) in 2021

Data science is currently the most exciting field and is in serious demand by data scientists. For good reason – data scientists do everything from creating self-driving cars to captioning pictures automatically. Considering all the interesting applications, data science means the most demanding job.

Question Everything

The appeal of data science is that you have to answer interesting questions with real data and code. These questions are “Can I predict if any flight will arrive on time?” “How much does America spend on education per student?”. You need to develop an analytical mindset to ask and answer these questions.

The best way to cultivate this mindset is to start it with news articles. Find articles like these that make you better and find out if sugar is really bad for you. Think :

How to draw their conclusions based on the data they     discuss

How to design a study to explore further

Questions you would like to ask if access to basic data     is possible

Learn The Basics

Python is a programming language with standard syntax that is recommended for beginners. Fortunately, it provides the skills to do tasks related to more complex data science and machine learning, such as in-depth study.

Many people worry about choosing a language, but the important things to keep in mind are :

Data science is not about tools, it is about answering     questions and running business value.

Learning ideas is more important than learning syntax.

You create projects and share them in a real data     science role, learning this way will give you a start.

Build Projects

As you learn the basics of coding, you should start developing programs that answer interesting questions and demonstrate your data science skills. Plans do not have to be complicated.

For example, you can analyze Super Bowl winners to find patterns. It’s important to find interesting datasets, ask questions about the data, and then code those questions with the answers. If you need help finding databases, check out this post for a list of good places to find them.

When making plans, keep this in mind :

Data cleaning is the mainstay of most data science     jobs.

Linear regression is the most common machine learning     technique.

It all starts somewhere. Even if you think what you are     doing is not enjoyable, you need to do it.

Share Your Work

Once you’ve created a few projects, you need to share them with others! It’s a good idea to upload them to GitHub for others to see. You can read a good post here about uploading projects on Git Hub, and learn more about linking to a portfolio. Uploading projects:

Motivate yourself to think about how to best present     them, which you will do in a data science role

Allow your colleagues to see and comment on your plans

Allow employers to see your plans

Learn From Others

Once you’ve started creating an online presence, it’s a good idea to start interacting with other data scientists. You can do this in person or in online communities. Some good online communities:

Datascience

Data science slack

Kaggle

Quora

Personally when I was studying I was very active in Kaggle and Quora, which helped me a lot. The best way to do this is to engage in online communities:

Find others to learn from

Improve your profile and find opportunities

Strengthen your knowledge by learning from others

With meetups you can interact with people in person.     Individual interventions will help you meet and study experienced data     scientists in your area.

Push Your Boundaries

Now Companies want to hire data scientists who can find key statistics that save money or make customers happy.

You should use the same process for learning – look for     new questions to answer, answer difficult and complex questions.

If you do not look back at your plans a month or two     ago and feel ashamed of something you did, your boundaries will not move     forward enough.

You need to make strong progress each month that will     be reflected in your work.

Data scientist qualifications

Must have a strong command of technical expertise     related to working data scientists, including Python or R programming,     writing questions in SQL, building and improving machine learning models     in their language, and some “workflow” skills such as kit and command     line.

Data scientists need strong problem solving, data     visualization, and communication skills. When a data analyst is often asked a question to answer, a data     scientist is expected to explore the data and find relevant questions and     business opportunities that others may be missing out on.

Although it is possible to find a job as a data     scientist with no prior experience, working as a data analyst before     becoming a data scientist is the most common path for interested data     scientists with no relevant professional experience.

Data Scientist Educational Requirements

Most Data Scientist roles require at least a Bachelor’s degree. Degrees in     technical fields may be preferred, as are advanced degrees such as PhDs     and masters, but advanced degrees are usually not strictly required (even     when they claim to be job postings).

What employers pay the most attention to is your     ability. Applicants with minimal advanced or technical related degrees can     fill this gap with an excellent project portfolio, which demonstrates     their advanced skills and experience in performing related data science     tasks.

What skills are required to become a data scientist ?

Specific requirements vary slightly from job to job, and more specific roles develop as the industry matures. However, in general, the following capabilities are expected for any data science role :

SQL

Data Visualization

Communication

Programming in Python or R

Building and Optimizing Machine Learning Models

Solid Understanding of Probability and Statistics

Most of the time, machine learning will focus on a role in a specific subdomain. Each data scientist is expected to be familiar with the basics, but one role may require more in-depth experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP), while another may focus on developing a product-ready prediction algorithm.

Is it hard to become a data scientist ?

You should expect that you will be challenged in your     journey to become a data scientist.     Achieving this role requires extensive programming skills and statistics     in addition to strong communication skills.

Anyone can learn all these skills, but you need strong     motivation to move yourself through difficult moments.

Choosing the right site and approach to learning can     make the process easier.

How many years does it take to become a data scientist ?

This will be different for each person. In DataQuest,     most of our students report that they have achieved their learning goals     within a year or less. How long the learning process will take depends on     how much time you allow.

Likewise, the length of the job search process will     vary depending on the projects you have built, your other qualifications,     your professional background and more.

Is data science a good career choice ?

The demand for data scientists is huge, and the world     is generating so much (increasingly) data every day.

We are not saying there is a crystal ball or we do not     know what the future holds, but data science is a fast growing field with     high demand and high salaries.

What is the data scientist career path ?

Many data scientists actually start their data careers as data analysts and move into data science roles     through internal promotion or job changes.

From there, more experienced data scientists can search     for senior data scientist roles.

Experienced data scientists with management skills can     move on to the roles of Director of Data Science and similar director and     management level roles.

What salaries do data scientists make ?

Salary varies greatly depending on the applicant’s     location and experience. However, on average, data scientists pay very     comfortable salaries.

The average data scientist salary in the United States     will exceed $ 120,000 per year by 2020.

[thanhtuandoan89]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

[drummcarpentry]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

[lakelandseo]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

[kjt-lawyers]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

[xaydungtruonggia]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

[epackingvietnam]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

[nutrifami]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

[camerasieunhovn]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.

[ductrungnguyen87]

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities).

While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert.

With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes!

An overview of the SEO knowledge tree

There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is: everything on a website that you have control over from keyword optimization to internal linking. Other elements include title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, URL structure, and the quality of the content. While this type of SEO is most often the star of the show, a well-designed SEO strategy also includes the next two elements.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO has more to do with how popular your website is. Think back to high school for a moment… if you were someone who had a lot of friends, you may have been considered “popular”. The same goes for off-page SEO — the more websites that know and link back to your website, the higher the chances of ranking on search engines. However, this is only true if the links are high quality and the sources are credible. Aside from backlinks, other contributing factors include website age, domain name, and how many of your social networks link to your website.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a bit more complex. To put it simply, a website that has optimized specific features allows it to be crawled easier by search engine spiders, which in return ranks your site more efficiently. This might mean that your site is mobile-friendly, has quick loading times, and/or has an XML sitemap (like a roadmap but for search engine spiders). All these items work in unison to ensure a website has the highest probability of ranking. When it comes to the detailed elements, there is a lot of overlap between on-page and technical SEO, so I don’t recommend viewing these as entirely separate.

Top skills today’s in-house SEOs must have

You might think, “Isn’t SEO only about the technical side of digital marketing?” However, the reality is that emotional intelligence and logic are integral skills that an SEO specialist needs to succeed. The top candidate will have a balance of these top skills.

#1 Empathy

One might argue if we all had a bit more empathy, the world would be a better place. But that’s a topic for another day. For the context of this article, let’s think back to 2020 in its entirety. Brands that lacked empathy and failed to adapt to the COVID crisis or the Black Lives Matter movement lost customers.

You see, at the very core, SEO experts put themselves in the shoes of the reader. They might ask, “would my reader care about this?” or “would my reader search for this topic?” To back it up even further, an empathetic SEO specialist would first fully understand the target audience as a whole.

An SEO expert is not just in tune with SEO, oh no. They’re aware of how copy evokes emotions in your readers, how it makes them think, inspires them, and urges them to take action. This person guides you in understanding how tweaking your copy can result in ripples of success for your business.

So, how do you know if a candidate has empathy? During the interview, observe the following:

How are their listening skills? Candidates that genuinely listen instead of formulating a response while you’re still talking have high levels of empathy.

How much effort do they make in trying to understand you and your target audience? Do they ask questions about the company’s business goals during the interview? Do they share suggestions on how to engage with your target audience? Do they make an effort to explain how SEO is not just about numbers, but it involves the human side, too?

The next one on this list goes hand in hand with empathy: critical thinking.

#2 Critical thinking

An SEO expert has essential critical thinking skills. This quality is needed to go from following a template, to looking at your business from a holistic standpoint and understanding how to take action accordingly.

Digital marketing is a forever-changing industry and SEOs must adapt by actively searching for solutions. Give your potential hire an SEO problem on the spot and see how effectively they can propose a solution to you (I emphasize that this is a fair question, because it is truly what experienced SEOs do every day). If they struggle to come up with suggestions, they may not be the best candidate.

#3 Data analysis

Using data to drive decisions is another crucial skill for an SEO expert.

Consider this: SEO is the makeup of a trial, error, analyze, readjust, and relaunch cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. All SEOs are learning as we go. Those who learn more than others and have the ability to better understand how data drives strategic decision-making are able to come up with better solutions.

To put it simply, being able to gather and analyze marketing data gives you the competitive advantage to quickly iterate and optimize your SEO strategy.

You might consider compiling some of your SEO data and asking your interviewee what they think about it. Ask them what they notice and what they’d change in the next campaign to get more attractive results. This is a surefire way to get a pulse on their data analysis skills.

#4 T-shaped marketing expertise

The term “T-shaped marketer” refers to someone competent in many marketing disciplines, and an expert in one or two specific niches. We’re often told to find our niche or specialize in one area, but the truth is that having broad knowledge in the many different areas of marketing cultivates more connections.

How? Let’s say, for example, the potential hire knows about copywriting, email marketing, and social media marketing. With all this information, they’d be more likely to enhance all these areas using their overlapping insights of SEO.

Look for this element by asking hypothetical questions like:

What role does SEO play in a social media strategy?

How can we use SEO to drive lead generation and conversions?

Their answers will provide valuable information to find out how they plan to leverage SEO to grow the business as a whole.

#5 Strategic planning

You know the saying, knowledge is power? Well, it’s partially true. The true power lies in the combination of knowledge and action. A strategic plan is the key to propelling your business forward, and without it, you’ll be left in the dust. Strategizing involves assessing the data, understanding the goals, and curating a detailed plan to make progress.

The ability to tend to the details while also acknowledging long-term goals is a large piece of the SEO puzzle. And considering SEO efforts take months to get results anyways, your next in-house SEO hire should be comfortable with short-term and long-term strategic planning.

To test for this ability, tell the interviewee your goals, share some insights, and see what sort of plan they present to you. If they’ve listened to your needs and prioritized key factors, they’re a winner!

#6 Technology skills

Even our grandparents are on Facebook these days, so the phrase “tech-savvy” has become watered down. Technology skills expand far beyond using Google Docs, navigating through Facebook, or hosting a Zoom call. Experienced SEO experts should be familiar with some helpful tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console or be willing to learn these platforms.

These tools should be used in appropriate ways to derive the right data and make relevant strategic decisions, as well as compile reports. Here’s how to test for it:

Ask them to find the top keywords on a certain topic in your niche

Ask them to provide an outline of the content with those top keywords

Ask them how they’d track the results from that content once it’s live

It’s crucial to gain an overall sense of where your in-house SEO hire is before onboarding them. To truly gauge this, keep reading for a couple of considerations to keep in mind.

How to screen and test in-house SEO hires

Because SEO efforts only truly started in the early 2000s, the concept is still relatively new in the grand scheme of the internet. So when testing your potential hire, test them, but also be fair. Below are a few factors to think about.

#1 Be clear on what you need

First, understand what your company needs specifically. Review the previous sections and break down the areas of your business that you’ll need to focus your SEO efforts on. Then, write it down for yourself and in the job description. If you don’t take the time to investigate this, it may be difficult to distinguish if this person is a good fit.

Important note: I’ve seen many job descriptions that list the job title as something like “SEO Manager” but then also include that this person is responsible for a bazillion other types of marketing. So when formulating your job description, consider a balance of the most important elements you need this person to accomplish — don’t go overboard. If you’re unsure about what to include, check with another SEO or someone in your marketing department to make sure the job description is accurate and fair.

#2 Look for someone with proven results

Ask for a portfolio. Their portfolio may include strategy work and/or optimized content (depending on the type of SEO they specialize in). However, it can be the case that company data is restricted, so if they’re unable to provide this, a trial test (see #4) will clarify their skills.

You want someone with a good balance of experience in your industry and other industries, as they are most likely to find creative solutions and approach SEO strategies more holistically. If they can explain to you how they’ve guided another business towards success using the SEO strategy they developed, then keep them in mind when you make your final decision.

#3 Assess SEO know-how during an interview

Assess their knowledge of SEO using the questions mentioned earlier. Other important questions I’d recommend asking are:

What are the top SEO KPIs to track on a monthly basis?

How do you know when content needs to be optimized after it’s already published?

How do you know when your SEO strategy is working vs. not working?

Someone quick on their feet with well-thought answers will tell you a great deal about their ability to adapt and help your business grow.

#4 Give them a trial test to check their strategic planning skills

As I noted before, knowledge doesn’t do much without action. To determine if a candidate for an SEO position is a match for your needs, they should be able to create a mock strategic plan. One of the best testing methods is to ask candidates to do a mini SEO audit to see how they approach combining data with strategic insights. In combination with their SEO knowledge, their process will tell you everything you need to know to make your choice.

Hiring an in-house SEO is one of the best decisions you’ll make for the longevity of your business

Ultimately, putting in the work upfront to fully vet your next in-house SEO position will pay dividends in the long term. SEO can skyrocket your business efforts to a whole new level, but only with assistance from the right person and with the right strategy.

Without these ingredients, missed opportunities could prevail. To avoid this, be sure to first understand what your marketing team needs and make sure this aligns with the candidate’s particular skill set.

At the end of the day, the most important skill is the ability to keep on learning and improving, because, like SEO, we must all continually optimize.