In 2012, the SEO industry in the UK was worth over £500 million annually, growing 18% from 2011 figures. The US SEO industry is even bigger, topping $16 billion in 2010. In a time of general malaise about the economy, this industry is growing rapidly, and the good times look set to continue.

This is great news for any SEO business looking to expand along with companies' search marketing budgets, as there is plenty of work to be done. There is so much, in fact, that most SEO departments, consultancies and agencies are looking to hire new employees to keep up with the demand. This does raise the question, however, of what to look for when hiring new SEOs.

So what do the best and brightest SEOs in the US and the UK look for when they are hiring? Read on to find out. Take note: Their answers may surprise you.

Eric Ward – EricWard.com

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

Not joking. A bit OCD, a bit ADD, and experience in marketing, public relations, and library science. When presented with a long page of source code, do they faint or confidently explain the good, bad, and ugly in it without having to see the page in a browser? Do they spend time online when they are not working? Do they have their own individual presence established online? If they saw Matt Cutts at a conference, would they hide?

Bruce Clay – Bruce Clay.com

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

Someone that has not learned bad habits, and that will be a leader on their projects. They must be a great written and spoken communicator, they need to know what they do not know and endeavor to fix that, and they have to be excited about problem solving. They need to stick to the methodology while seeing opportunities to surpass the competition. Our ideal candidate is fantastic at time management and organization, is service focused, and lives for internet marketing. Their technical background should be (entry-level) basic, and they need to be a quick and accurate student. At a senior level they need a solid foundation across many markets and technologies, without the baggage of learned spam techniques. They should be able to teach, lead, and communicate as the expert on a complex project. Historically we have found great success in training our employees from an intern to expert level (10 years with our firm). And, yes, we have many technical staff that have been with us that long.

Paddy Moogan – Distilled

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

There are two things we look for in all hires at Distilled: smart and gets stuff done. Other stuff is a bonus but if they have these two qualities, we can often teach them the rest! Personally, I also look for someone who actively learns new stuff in their spare time and seems to have a genuine passion for something. For example, I like SEOs who may have set up their own blog or website and have spent a bit of time knowing how it feels to get it ranking and the challenges that can present. It shows initiative and a passion that is hard to teach.

Julie Joyce - Link Fish Media

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

The ideal SEO employee is someone without a huge ego who realizes that he or she is never done learning, will often be wrong, and isn't afraid to try something new and forego old methods that no longer work. It's someone with a brain that's logical and creative, someone with the communication skills to write well or come up with amazing ideas. It's also someone with an obvious passion for the work, as if you don't give a damn about what you're doing, I doubt you'll ever be brilliant at it.

Dave Peiris – SharkSEO

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

This is actually quite a tough question because there's a lot of different types of people who could all be incredible SEOs. SEOs that are analytical often produce great work, especially if they enjoy digging into the data and focus on the story rather than just the numbers to work out why things are how they are. Some of the best SEOs I've ever worked with have been highly technical. They've got a great understanding for how to structure sites so they're ideally suited for search as well as users, and knowing how to code helps them talk to developers better. Having said that, there are other skill sets outside of coding that can lead to an excellent SEO employee, like being able to build relationships with site owners with ease. A great SEO employee is also a good communicator, and can easily explain complex technical issues in ways that non-technical people can understand. But overall I think the best SEOs are the ones who are naturally curious and, when they find a problem, can't help but try to solve it.

Wil Reynolds – Seer Interactive

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

Curiosity, competitiveness, and compassion. Curious because I want to work with people who have that curiosity of "how does this work" to always be there, the desire to seek out answers is key too. Competitiveness because I want to work with people who push me to get better, who want to win, and when they lose it stings!! Those are the folks who leave when the job is done, and it personally messes up their day when something goes bad. Compassion means that they don't let their competitiveness overrun their ability to have compassion for others and to have empathy for other folks.

Oliver Archibald - SEOGadget

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

For any calibre of SEO, whether junior or senior, there couldn't be a better way to learn about this industry than by maintaining your own site. It's all very well reading about SEO (and that's certainly a good thing), but actually doing it enables you to fully understand what you're recommending to clients or your team. This brings me on to my next point, which is creativity and initiative. These attributes in the ideal candidate shouldn't just be applied to cool content ideas, but also to how they handle the technical side of SEO. As many of us know, every site is different, and the correct solution to one site's problem might be vastly different from a similar issue on another site.

Patrick Altoft – Branded3

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

We don't subscribe to the theory that SEO employees have to be good all-rounders because it's actually very useful to have specialist technical people and specialist creative people working on the account. How many great creative people also have great technical skills? Very few. We are a 50-person agency, so we have the resources to have specialist teams working on the individual campaign components rather than trying to have generalists who don't have the detailed skills. We use experienced strategists to run our clients' accounts, and they are the primary point of contact, so they need great SEO skills and great account management skills. Those are probably the key criteria we look at for this role.

Kelvin Newman – Sitevisibility

What makes the ideal SEO employee?

A while back I wrote a free book about Link Building called "How to Become a Clockwork Pirate," and while a lot of that advice was pre-Penguin, there's one area I think I was on the right page: The ideal SEO has two different skills sets, the creative and the methodical. People are going to sit at different places on the spectrum, but the most successful SEOs I've worked with sit somewhere in the middle. They're people prepared to come up with good ideas but accept that a great idea without hard work is useless. Equally, they understand sometimes it's about putting in the hours and follow-up; that's the difference between success and failure. I think Seth Godin summed it up really well: "Real Artists Ship."

Image credit Wordle.net

Conclusion

Each expert answered a single question — What makes the ideal SEO employee? — in incredibly different ways. Some wanted specialists, and some preferred all-rounders. Some liked to build the new employee's knowledge almost from scratch, while others were looking for people with solid knowledge of the industry. Still, time and again the same qualities popped up.

The ideal SEO employee should:

• Be smart.
• Be motivated to learn — even off the clock.
• Be a problem solver.
• Maintain their own site in their off-time.
• Be both logical and creative.
• Be an excellent communicator who is able to build relationships.
• Have a passion for technology and the internet.
• Be willing to try new things.
• Constantly push to improve themselves, their approach to SEO problems, and others.

At the end of the day, few of these qualities have much to do with HTML or information architecture. Instead, they seem to focus on personality traits like leadership, tenacity, curiosity, and self-motivation.

The next time you find yourself searching for the ideal SEO employee, just remember that the ideal SEO employee is someone with the right personality. The technical know-how can be taught.