SilverDisc Guide For Marketing Managers: Building Your SEO Skillset

In this blog series, we’ve already looked at how you can build on your content and paid search skillsets as a marketing manager. Next up, we’re tackling SEO and providing some great resources for increasing yours and your team’s knowledge in this important area of digital marketing.

As always, you can find lots of information around SEO on the SilverDisc blog. Here are a few articles to get you started:

• SEO - What is it Good For? Absolutely Everything
• How to Align Your SEO Content with User Intent
• 12 Ways To Make Your Blog Posts More SEO Friendly
• How To Improve Your SEO With Fresh Website Content
• Understanding Ethical SEO and How It Can Benefit Your Company Website
• Five SEO Tasks You Can Complete Before Building Your Website
• SEO Best Practices for Retail Product Pages
• How Important is Your Google Organic Search Position?
• When Will My Website Rank At The Top of Google?

There are many places where you can go to get great information on SEO best practices and latest news. One of my favourites is Moz – Moz is a huge authority on SEO and you can't really go wrong by heading to their learning centre or blog. They also have a beginner's guide to SEO which can be a good starting point for new marketers, as well as something to dip in and out of at a later date.

There are three parts to SEO - architecture, content and links. Here, I have broken these down further here to explore all the many elements of SEO, so you can look to increase your knowledge across the board.

Architecture

The structure of a website, the navigation, speed, and other technical aspects all come under the umbrella of architecture. Although marketers may not necessarily need to know all the nuts and bolts of web development, it's good to have a rough understanding of how things work, why these elements are important for SEO, and when they may need to be improved. Here are some elements of technical architecture and resources for learning more about them:

• Page speed
• Robots.txt files
• Good website structure
• Mobile-first design
• Site maps
• Structured data / schema markup

Content

From keyword research to meta descriptions to regular blogging, content is a huge part of SEO. In fact, there are so many great resources for improving your SEO content that I struggled to decide which link to share with you, so here is one article on page content from Yoast and here is another from WordStream. Plus, this handy guide from Moz explains how Google’s algorithm evaluates fresh content and why new content is so important for SEO.

Moz offers some useful articles on conducting keyword research and writing page titles, meta descriptions, H1s. image alt tags (links to each of these are on the left of the linked page). As always, I’d recommend Hubspot for all things blogging – here is a comprehensive article on blogging for SEO.

Links

We’re back at Moz to talk about the third pillar of SEO – links. If you’re using Moz as an SEO tool, you’ll want to make sure you understand their domain authority grading system. Take a look at their articles on Internal linking and external linking, and make sure you can determine the usefulness of each link pointing to your website by reading up on link equity and the important distinction between nofollow and dofollow links. All of this will play a part in your link building strategy, where of course, Moz also has you covered with this guide.

On-SERP SEO

Of course, it’s not just on-page SEO we need to think about – the rise in zero-click searches means it’s important to take up as much SERP real estate as possible. You can do this through working on areas such as local SEO and featured snippets.

Using SEO Tools

A final area to focus your efforts is on getting the most out of the SEO tools you use. Moz offers a course on using its tools, and there are also helpful articles on using Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

We hope this has given you a useful overview of the knowledge resources available for developing your SEO marketing skillset. If you would like help with improving your website’s SEO, get in touch with SilverDisc.