What Does an SEO Strategist Need to Know?

SEO Strategist - Magnifying glass over words Given the title, you might think an SEO strategist simply needs to know SEO. As intuitive as that might be, it is actually no longer the case. While the strategist must be a master of SEO, he or she needs to be a jack of many other trades to be at the highest level of SEO work and understanding.

What the SEO strategist Needs to Know

Before you can call yourself an SEO strategist or specialist, you need to have a solid and undeniable understanding of the ever-changing world of SEO. While SEO work is highly measurable, the results can change on a day-to-day basis. An SEO strategist will find this part of the challenge enjoyable rather than something that is frustrating and hard to control.

Social Media

SEO Strategist - parts of seo Increasingly over the years, it has become evident that Google likes businesses that have a presence on social media. Not only that, your SEO can be influenced depending on how engaged you are on those social media platforms. Additionally, an effective social media marketing campaign can help boost a business, while SEO gets started, as Facebook and LinkedIn will often outrank a company website.
An SEO strategist may not need to come up with the social media marketing strategy or implementation, but he or she needs to be able to track the impact social media is having and separate that from the SEO results.

Google My Business

Google My Business (Google Business Profile) is a separate Google product that is particularly important for local SEO. SEO experts are increasingly pressing on the importance of bringing a level of expertise in this area to SEO work. Business profiles have their own complexities but for the most part they are easy to learn and easy to maintain.

Video

seo strategist - person typing on a computer Video has proven to be an invaluable tool for the SEO strategist. There are several reasons for this. First, Google owns YouTube, so it looks kindly on any videos posted to that platform. Second, YouTube captions, if they are infused with keywords, can help companies show up in a high position on Google.
YouTube’s size and credibility also means any links from YouTube back to a website create strong SEO referring links. Finally, if videos are added as part of a website’s content, it encourages visitors to elongate their stay and interact more, which can also help a website’s performance in SEO.

Again, while the SEO strategist does not need to be involved in a video production strategy or implementation, they definitely need to be able to optimize YouTube descriptions and measure how videos are impacting SEO performance.

As you can see, while an SEO strategist’s primary focus is SEO, SEO now encapsulates many different marketing tactics. While the strategist does not need to be responsible for everything, they need to be “in the loop” for monitoring and SEO quality purposes. In order to pick the ideal strategist, therefore, it is beneficial to choose someone with a full marketing background/education versus someone only experienced in SEO work.