In 2015, Your Job As An SEO Isn’t Actually SEO

Columnist Erin Everhart explains how the role of the search engine optimization (SEO) professional is undergoing a major transformation.

OK, I’ll admit right now I wrote that title just to get clicks. It’s not my proudest moment, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t done it before.
Regardless, the title is accurate – in a sense. Yes, you are still responsible for driving organic traffic. That isn’t going anywhere. But because the way to drive organic traffic isn’t anything like the way we used to drive organic traffic, SEOs have to become more cross-functional. These days, when you say you “do SEO,” you really do about a million other things that historically aren’t considered SEO.
If that’s the case, then what else is in our job description?

Content Developer

This part of an SEO’s job should not come as a surprise to you given how ingrained “content is king” has become in our heads.
There is no way you can rank well in search engines without good content, and I see more copywriters being directly integrated into the SEO team rather than living on a different team. In many cases, the requirements of being a non-technical SEO now include content writing.
Quality content can be hard to create; it’s not exactly something you can teach. There’s no formula you can follow (although Nate Dame does have a pretty good list of what makes quality content), and it does take a lot of time (I’ve spent 15 minutes on one Facebook post), so don’t assume that good content is something we just have lying around.

User Experience Advocate

SEO and user experience (UX) got off on the wrong foot, and I blame SEO. The spammy things we were doing years ago to manipulate the algorithm were the furthest thing from a good user experience, so it’s no wonder UX professionals hated us.
Things are totally different now. Search engines want to see what users want to see.
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