The 7 Essential Talents of An Excellent SEO/PPC Employee

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I’m a big fan of the “Now Discover Your Strengths” series of books, including “StrengthsFinder 2.0”, and “First Break All the Rules”.

If you’re not familiar with these books, the big idea is:

It makes more sense to do what you’re really good at, what you’ve always been a natural at, than it does to try to perfect your weaknesses. 

This goes contrary to common business organizational practices.  And that may be one reason why so many businesses are mediocre.

Why Focus on Strengths?

Strengths are

• Things you do naturally do...
• Things you love to do…
• The ways you tend to think, and
• They lead to you perform excellently. 

On the flip side, no matter how good you get at your weaknesses, you’ll never excel by doing them.  You’ll never beat a person who’s natural at those things.

Don’t misunderstand: you can’t be incompetent at certain things, and you should manage around your weaknesses, but you should spend most of your time doing what you do best. 

Enough italics?

Organizationally speaking, there are enough humans with varying talents for you to focus on yours.  Find your spot.

This isn’t just some neat-o-keen idea to sell business books… it’s based upon the Gallup organization’s research on 1.7 million employees at 101 companies in 63 countries.

What Are Your Talents, or “Strengths”?

Gallup discovered 34 strengths or talents… things like: Competition, Relater, Learner, Input, Deliberative, and Ideation.

It takes a while to learn what these strengths all are and identify which ones really are your top strengths.  The first two books I mentioned above each comes with an online test to find them, but as they explain, these tests aren’t perfect, and you really need to understand the definitions and then watch yourself for a while to accurately diagnose.

For example, I would have denied that I was a competitive achiever until I read these books- then the more I watched myself the more those strengths explained stupid things I did like having to pass other cars on the freeway.  It’s stupid, but I think I’m winning and achieving when I do that.  Just so you know: if I pass you on the road, I win!  Deal with it.

Is There Just One Set of Key Strengths for SEO or PPC?

Even more complicated for this particular article: there probably isn’t one set of best strengths for PPC and SEO.  For example, a recent article about SEO’s pointed out the difference between technically-oriented SEO’s and copywriting-oriented SEO’s.  Each requires different talents.  You might have both.

The point of this article is to figure out how to get people who are naturals at the talents required for SEO and PPC.  Some companies hire neophytes and train them from the ground up.  Skills and tasks can be trained but, alas, talents cannot.  Although you could probably train many people to be mediocre SEO’s or PPC’s, my hope is that you’re looking for potentially excellent ones, or wondering if you could be an excellent one.

I’m going to take a stab at which strengths are required.  I assumed that SEO and PPC would require a different set of strengths, but upon review, I found the talents to be quite similar.  Naturally, many talents are required in business, but I’ve tried to include the ones that are most unique to SEO and PPC job functions.

How to Criticize My List of SEO/PPC Strengths

Feel free to discuss and disagree, especially if you’re familiar with the 34 strengths system!  I may have shaped these potentials to fit just our company’s vision- let me know if yours is different and requires something else. 

The other thing to keep in mind is that all strengths look good- it's like looking at some dessert menus- you want everything.  As you read them you may say "of course we should have this, too!"  But everyone can't have every strength- and any job candidate may have a few of these along with others that aren't as critical for SEO and PPC.  So the question to ask of each strength in the list below is "is this talent really essential to excelling at SEO or PPC?"

I tried to put these in order of importance, yet I feel all are indispensable.

The 7 Essential Strengths of An Excellent SEO/PPC Employee

1.    Maximizer – Obsession with making good things excellent.  Optimization.  This one’s a no-brainer for all analytics-based marketing.

2.    Achiever – Relentless need for achievement.  Key for making consistent improvements and getting more and more results.

3.    Focus – Need goals and clear destination.  Filter actions based on effectiveness and efficiency.  Key for getting things done.

4.    Individualization – Tendency to look at how things, people, websites are unique.  Key for dealing with unique niches, varying semantic spaces, and current client’s website situation.  Key for writing ads that are highly relevant to the keywords and landing pages in an AdGroup.

5.    Arranger – Loves complicated challenges.  Productively configures countless variables and factors.  Key for dealing with the number of things that affect search rankings and indexing, and working on all those things at one time.  This is also key for creating tightly focused AdGroups in PPC.

6.    Strategic – Sort through the clutter and find the best route.  Ability to see what would happen if you did this or that.  Key to anticipating possible results of any optimization.  Also important for thinking through the ramifications of interconnected PPC factors like CTR, bid, and quality score.

7.    Analytical – Prove it.  Show me the data.  Key for results-oriented SEO.  Without this you can have lots of fascinating conversations but you need this to get the best results.  However, there’s a lot of mystery in SEO, and if you’re too analytical you might not be able to tolerate that- for this reason, this is probably a better PPC strength than SEO.

Strengths for the SEO Team

Just after publishing this, @DerrickWheeler an SEO at Microsoft told me to check out his comment on this Bruce Clay blog post... it's his summary of the strengths you should have somewhere in your overall SEO team (scroll down to the comments).  I'm reserving my comment for now on the specific strengths he chose until I've had a chance to think about it, but that's another good angle to look at when checking your resources... if you're adding to your team, you can inventory existing members for strengths, find out where your strength gap is, and emphasize your talent search in that direction.