Finding qualified SEO Managers to add to your team is no small feat! From writing the job description to creating a training program, it’s a big time investment on top of your already-busy schedule. How can you make sure you hire the right people and equip them with everything they need to hit the ground running?
As with most things, it’s easier with a guide. That’s why we put together our best resources to get your agency started.
In this guide, you’ll get:
Tips for finding and hiring the right person
Steps for setting objectives and outlining responsibilities
A training schedule that’ll equip your new hire with the knowledge they need to get started
An index full of resources you can use to supplement your SEO training
This actionable guide is filled with example worksheets and checklists designed to streamline your hiring and onboarding process, protecting one of your agency’s scarcest resources: time.
With the right person and the right training, both your team and your clients will benefit.
Ready to find your next SEO superstar?
Let’s get to it!
Need to hire an agency?
Did you find this guide in search of hiring an SEO company? If you're looking for an agency to help out with your business or website, we've got a Whiteboard Friday to help with that.
Your agency likely already has a template they like to use for job descriptions that address your company’s overview, employee perks, and benefits, but they’ll likely rely on you as the SEO lead to fill in the portions specific to the role. Use the SEO-specific prompts below to craft that portion of your job description so you get the right kind of candidates.
Find the right candidates for your team
SEO is a hot topic with all of our clients and finding the right SEO manager is crucial to running a successful digital agency. We find the best candidates are frenzied about tech. Since SEO is always changing, we search out candidates who are adaptable and inquisitive. They’re wildly curious about future technology and how to push boundaries for what exists now. They also must be humble in admitting when they don’t know the answer but coupled with the right amount of tenacity to go find it.
Job Title: Use a clear job title that accurately represents the role and avoid “fluffing” with non-standard or potentially confusing descriptors (ex: “SEO Manager” or “Local SEO Manager,” not “SEO Unicorn.”)
What are you looking for? A brief, 3–5 sentence summary of who you’d like to hire for this role (ex: “We are looking for an experienced SEO Manager to help our digital marketing agency grow organic rankings and traffic for clients in the hospitality, travel, and restaurant industries.”)
Describe tasks and responsibilities: Describe what the day-to-day of this role will look like so the candidate knows what to expect. Since SEO is a broad field, be specific (ex: “This person will be primarily responsible for overseeing technical SEO projects, such as site speed optimizations and schema.”)
Requirements: What qualifications do you want your new hire to have? (ex: “This person should have at least 2 years of experience in an agency setting, experience working on e-commerce sites, and knowledge of how Google crawls and indexes faceted navigations.”)
Tips for writing your SEO Manager job description
Avoid jargon unless you’re trying to attract an industry insider who would be familiar with that language.
Don’t be afraid to list soft skills! This can include traits like problem-solving abilities, being self-motivated, and strong written and verbal communication.
In addition to posting your ad on the standard job boards, tap your existing network of SEOs for referrals. Your coworkers, SEO meetup groups, LinkedIn, and Twitter are great places to inquire!
Prepare a realistic interview
Finding good talent with a solid foundation of SEO best practices, technical abilities, and critical thinking skills necessary to turn clients’ goals into results is tough! You can help yourself by preparing interview questions and exercises that reflect the day-to-day challenges your SEO teams face. Try to limit the time spent talking about resumes and spend more of the interview diving into real-world problems to understand their true knowledge and thought process. - Phil Dinovo, Solutions Team Manager, AdPearance
Interviewing SEO Manager candidates
These SEO-specific interview questions can help you get the insight you need to make the best decision when it comes to adding a new SEO Manager to your agency’s team.
Tell me about a time that you (insert SEO task/responsibility). If you’re looking for an experienced candidate, you’ll want to know that they’ve handled tasks and responsibilities similar to what you’re expecting your new hire to handle.
What are some of your favorite SEO tools and how do you use them? Experienced SEOs will likely have go-to solutions in their toolkit. If they can’t name any SEO tools, this could indicate inexperience.
Where do you go to learn about / stay up-to-date with SEO? There’s no teacher quite like experience, but seasoned SEOs will likely follow industry publications and thought leaders to stay current on the latest developments.
Are you familiar with and do you adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines? See if they can provide a few examples from the guidelines and explain why Google doesn’t condone certain “SEO” activities.
How would you handle (insert common scenario they’d face)? Give your candidate an example scenario — one they’d commonly face in this role — to gauge their problem solving and ability to tackle the common challenges of the job.
What SEO achievement are you most proud of? Their proudest moment in SEO will likely be the one of the most challenging problems they’ve solved, so the candidate’s answer to this question will help you gauge their experience level.
You’re chatting with an executive who says they don’t believe that SEO works and it’s not worth their time or money. How would you convince them otherwise? It’s important for agency SEOs to be able to tie SEO metrics to real business impact, so this question will help you gauge how well your candidate understands the big picture.
You encounter someone who says they don’t understand how search engines work. They’re not technically savvy but are genuinely curious. If you only had a minute to help them understand, what would you tell them? As the adage goes, “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t know it well enough.” This will not only help you assess your candidate’s knowledge of search engines, but will also provide insight into how ready they are to speak about SEO to your clients.
What are your thoughts on ranking signals? The most important ones, how you use them to optimize websites, etc. You’re looking for someone who understands ranking signals holistically — that they are weighted differently depending on query intent.
What role (if any) does user experience play in SEO? You’re looking for someone who understands that SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines. The best SEOs understand that Google’s goal in ranking websites is to provide an exceptional user experience. Bonus points if they mention recent updates or algorithmic changes, such as Core Web Vitals.
Consider having them perform a test project*, such as a page experience audit or content gap analysis, to help you better assess their skills. *You may want to consider paying the candidate for their time on this test project.
Download our free PDF of this worksheet to print and fill out the next time you're interviewing an SEO candidate!
Create your own SEO skills test
We have a mini guide to designing your own SEO quiz for prospective managers — check it out!
While this outlines SEO-specific questions to ask your potential new hire, don’t forget to ask questions about their work experience, soft skills, and why they want to work with your agency. Depending on the structure of your agency, these more generic questions may be handled by an HR manager.
New SEO onboarding
Two of the most important things you can do within your new hire’s first week are outlining responsibilities and setting objectives.
Make your hiring plans early
At Directive, we’ve learned the hard way about the importance of capacity planning. If you need a candidate right away, you’re already starting off on the wrong foot. The easiest way to onboard someone is to hire them long before you need them. Through proper planning that looks at quarterly and seasonal trends, you can hire in advance and allow new team members ample time to go through your training process. Training by fire is not training at all! - Garrett Mehrguth, CEO at Directive Consulting
Outline SEO Specialist responsibilities
What tasks are they responsible for? It’s a good idea to communicate responsibilities to your new hire in as much detail as possible so they’ll know exactly what’s expected of them.
Choose from the following common responsibilities.
General SEO
Technical SEO
Local SEO
On-page SEO such as title tags, meta descriptions, and content optimization
Finding and fixing crawlability or indexing issues
Google My Business optimization
Keyword research
Page speed optimizations
Utilizing GMB features such as Posts and Q&A
Internal linking
Schema.org / semantic markup
Reputation / review management
Site architecture / page hierarchy
International SEO including hreflang and ccTLDs
Maintaining NAP consistency
Off-page SEO, such as link building strategies & backlink analysis
Diagnosing SEO and JavaScript conflicts
Management of directories (manually or via a listings tool like Moz)
Reporting on rankings, traffic, and organic conversions
Managing technical site migrations
Reporting on GMB Insights
How do those roles and responsibilities fit in with other members of the team? Explain how their work will impact other members of the team, who they’ll need to collaborate with, and clearly define the line between their responsibilities and those of other team members.
Example divisions of labor:
A technical SEO may be responsible for diagnosing crawlability issues, while a web developer may be responsible for executing fixes.
An SEO generalist may be responsible for keyword research, but content execution belongs to a team of writers.
A content-focused SEO might be responsible for content creation, but an outreach specialist may be responsible for building links to that piece.
Where do your new hire’s responsibilities start and end? Who will they need to work with?
Set SEO objectives
Client objectives One of the most important things you can do is help your new hire understand how each of their clients will measure success. For example, it might be a good idea to tell them:
Each client’s priority pages (ex: a high-value product the client wants to sell more of)
Each client’s conversion goals (ex: targeted # of monthly leads or purchases)
Any priority metrics for each client (ex: organic views of a particular page)
How will their personal success be measured? What qualitative and/or quantitative measures do you use to evaluate each SEO Manager’s success? (ex: ranking and traffic metrics, task accuracy, improved knowledge of the subject matter, etc.)
Pro tip!
At the end of the day, your clients will judge your agency on the results you’re able to get them, so it follows that the ultimate measure of success for your SEO Manager is how well they were able to secure those results.
Training your new SEO hire
Once you’ve made sure your new hire knows what they’re supposed to be doing, give them the knowledge and tools they need to do it properly.
Start with a solid training foundation
Every agency has their own approach to SEO, so even an experienced SEO hire needs a solid training plan to make sure they understand our SEO philosophy. Training is also a great way for the new SEO hire to meet the entire agency team through training from their peers and from team members in other departments. - Noah Brimhall, Director of Services at Obility
Assess their SEO skill level
Before you develop a training plan for your new hire, it’s a good idea to gauge their current skills and uncover the biggest knowledge gaps.
Give them tasks to complete. Give them a few tasks that will be common in their day-to-day work (ex: “find the top organic landing pages in Google Analytics.”) Shadow them to see what they’re able to do on their own and what they need your help with.
Task 1: ________________________________________________________ Did they need help completing this task? [Y/N]
Task 2: ________________________________________________________ Did they need help completing this task? [Y/N]
Task 3: ________________________________________________________ Did they need help completing this task? [Y/N]
Give them a problem to solve. Instead of giving them a specific task, give them a common problem they’ll need to solve and see what steps they would take to handle it (ex: “the wrong version of this URL is being indexed.”)
Problem 1: ________________________________________________________ Were they able to diagnose and solve the problem? [Y/N]
Problem 2: ________________________________________________________ Were they able to diagnose and solve the problem? [Y/N]
Problem 3: ________________________________________________________ Were they able to diagnose and solve the problem? [Y/N]
Once you have a better idea of what your new hire needs to learn, you can start plotting out a training timeline.
Develop your training activities
Use these tips to develop a plan that matches your new hire’s unique training needs.
Strategic pairings After assessing their current skill set, you’ll know in what areas they need the most training, so try pairing them up with SEOs who are strong in those areas.
Read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO If your new hire is new to SEO, have them read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s long, so consider breaking up their reading to correspond with topic-focused training sessions.
Tool training In addition to training your new SEO Manager on concepts, you’ll also want to train them on how to use your tools. Set up training sessions that walk your new hire through how to use SEO tools for specific applications. For example, you could set up a training session on “How to Use Moz Keyword Explorer to Improve Content Optimization.”
Client training Your new hire might not be an SEO novice, but they’ll definitely be new to your clients. Take the time to help them understand each of their clients’ goals, priorities, personalities, and industries.
Break up large goals Break bigger goals into bite-sized steps that your new hire can build on week by week.
Rotate trainers Rotate your new hire between different trainers on your team. This has the benefit of giving your new hire a multitude of perspectives as well as alleviating the time burden of one person doing all the training.
Manager-led training Delegate some of the training to your employees, but reserve some time for manager-led training as well. This builds rapport and ensures that your new hire is learning what you need them to learn.
Job shadowing Try different forms of job shadowing. Let your new hire shadow veteran SEOs so they can learn from them, but also let the veteran SEOs shadow the new hire so they can observe their work.
Let them get their feet wet Experience is the best teacher, so once you feel comfortable with their skillset, let your new hire try a project on their own and then assess it after they’re done.
Cross-departmental training If you work at a full-service agency, allow your new hire to sit with employees in other disciplines such as PPC and web development. This helps them understand how their work fits into the larger whole.
Develop your training timeline
Set weekly goals, plans to achieve those goals, and outline how you’ll measure whether the training goal was met. We suggest filling these out one week at a time. That way, if your new hire needs a bit more time to learn a skill, you can carry it over to the next week.
Training Example
During your new hire’s assessment, you learned that they were unable to figure out why the wrong version of a URL was being indexed. This might prompt you to set a week 1 goal of:
By the end of week 1, my new hire should be able to diagnose why the wrong version of a URL might be indexed.
Next, think through your own process for solving this problem. Detail what steps you took to get there, and set up training sessions for each. For example:
Canonical tag training: What they are, how to check them, and how to use them properly
Google Search Console training: How to use the index coverage report and URL inspection tool
Internal links training: How to check for internal links to a particular URL
Redirects training: What redirects are, what types, and when to use them
Finally, decide how you will assess whether the training was successful. For example:
Give them another assignment to diagnose why an incorrect URL version is being indexed and see if they can walk you through their process unassisted.
If they’re still struggling with some aspect of the training, carry it over into the next week. If they’ve mastered that skill, move onto another skill you’ve identified they need to work on.
The first month
During the first month, it’s a good idea to be hands-on with lengthier training sessions and weekly check-ins to go over their progress.
Week 1
Start with small, attainable goals. Use week 1 to lay the groundwork for all future trainings.
[Goal] By the end of week 1, the new hire should be able to:
Example: Identify high-value link building targets for a campaign.
[Plan] Here’s how they will be trained to do that:
[Assess] Here’s how we’ll measure success. Review progress in an end-of-week check-in:
Example: Compile a list of likely link targets and review together.
Week 2
Build upon last week’s training, diving deeper into existing topics and introducing new ones.
[Goal] By the end of week 2, the new hire should be able to:
Example: Perform quality, effective outreach to the identified link targets.
[Plan] Here’s how they will be trained to do that:
Example: We'll provide examples of both past successful outreach and outreach that fell flat, along with existing link building metrics to set benchmarks.
[Assess] Here’s how we'll measure success. Review progress in an end-of-week check-in:
Example: Go over templates and email metrics for outreach, setting benchmarks and discussing goals.
Week 3
Build upon last week’s training, diving deeper into existing topics and introducing new ones.
[Goal] By the end of week 3, the new hire should be able to:
Example: Assess our website for critical crawl issues and make recommendations.
[Plan] Here’s how they will be trained to do that:
Example: Obtain a technical SEO certification and walked through the tools our agency uses to surface technical errors.
[Assess] Here’s how we'll measure success. Review progress in an end-of-week check-in:
Example: Sit down with training manager and discuss uncovered issues and recommendations, including a plan for implementation.
Week 4
Build upon last week’s training, diving deeper into existing topics and introducing new ones.
[Goal] By the end of week 4, the new hire should be able to:
Example: Report on SEO efforts to date and share recommendations, iterations, and plans for the coming month.
[Plan] Here’s how they will be trained to do that:
Example: Offer full access to all analytics and reporting tools. Ensure trainee is equipped with useful reporting templates and resources.
[Assess] Here’s how we’ll measure success. Review progress in an end-of-week check-in:
Example: Review any generated reports or presentations ahead of a wider share with the team.
Month two
By month two, your new hire should be fairly up to speed with the day-to-day of their new job. Based on what they’ve learned already, outline tasks you feel comfortable with them handling.
I have determined that the new hire is now competent in these areas, and can start handling these tasks on their own:
Example: Outreach and link building, site assessment and analysis, making recommendations, reporting.
By the end of month two, the new hire should be able to handle these additional tasks:
Example: Researching and creating new benchmarks for our SEO metrics.
Here’s how they’ll be trained to perform those additional tasks:
Example: Provide examples of past benchmarks, discuss new goals and any changes in the interim, offer ad hoc review as they're developed.
Here’s how we’ll measure success. Review progress with an end-of-month check-in:
Example: Discuss how the hire arrived at new benchmarks and what their ideas are for hitting them.
Month three
By month three, your new hire should be getting comfortable with their new role and taking ownership over tasks and projects. Based on what they’ve learned already, outline tasks you feel comfortable with them handling.
I have determined that the new hire is now competent in these areas, and can start handling these tasks on their own:
Example: Identify other areas we can improve and outline a plan for those improvements.
By the end of month three, the new hire should be able to handle these additional tasks:
Example: Running and reporting on SEO tests.
Here’s how they’ll be trained to perform those additional tasks:
Example: Mentorship under an existing employee or an industry influencer.
Here’s how we’ll measure success. Review progress with an end-of-month check-in:
Example: Hold 1:1 discussing how the first 90 days have gone: areas of strength, areas that could use coaching, additional training to schedule, ideas for the future, etc.
Beyond the first 90 days
The first 90 days tends to determine the employee’s success or failure in their new role. If you’ve been consistent with your training and reviews up to this point, you’ve already done most of the heavy lifting! At this point, it’s a good idea to do a 90-day review to determine if your new SEO Manager is happy, communicate feedback, and gauge what they need moving forward.
Depending on your organization’s unique set-up, your HR manager might be the one to ask more generalized questions such as “How do you feel about the job so far?” and “Is this role what you expected?”
Going beyond these questions, you may want to start a more pointed dialogue about their SEO maturity. Consider addressing:
The areas of SEO in which they’ve improved the most
The areas of SEO you feel they have the strongest grasp of
What SEO tasks you feel they need to work on improving
What SEO tasks or concepts they feel they need more help with
We hope that this guide helps your agency streamline your SEO hiring and training process, and by doing so, ensure that each new SEO Manager can hit the ground running with campaigns that help your clients succeed!
SEO training resources index
Use these resources to supplement your training initiatives.
