How to Hire & Train SEO Managers

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!

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.

How to write your SEO job description

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!

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!

Two of the most important things you can do within your new hire’s first week are outlining responsibilities and setting objectives.

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.

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)

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.

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:

• [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:

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:

• [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:

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:

• [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:

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:

• [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:

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:

By the end of month two, the new hire should be able to handle these additional tasks:

Here’s how they’ll be trained to perform those additional tasks:

Here’s how we’ll measure success. Review progress with an end-of-month check-in:

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:

By the end of month three, the new hire should be able to handle these additional tasks:

Here’s how they’ll be trained to perform those additional tasks:

Here’s how we’ll measure success. Review progress with an end-of-month check-in:

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

Use these resources to supplement your training initiatives.

Search Basics

1. How Search Works [Guide]

2. How Search Works [Video]

SEO Basics

1. The Beginner's Guide to SEO [Guide]

2. SEO Fundamentals [Video Course]

3. Google’s SEO Starter Guide [Guide]

Algorithms

1. How Search Algorithms Work [Guide]

2. Google Algorithm Change History [Guide]

Keyword Research

1. Keyword Research [Video Course]

2. The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide [Guide]

3. Keywords & Keyword Research [Articles]

4. Keyword Explorer [Tool]

On-Page SEO

1. Page Optimization [Video Course]

2. On-Site SEO [Articles]

3. Google Quality Guidelines [Guides]

Links

1. Backlink Basics [Video Course]

2. Links & Link Building [Articles]

3. The Beginner's Guide to Link Building [Guide]

4. Google Quality Guidelines on Link Schemes [Guide]

5. Link Explorer [Tool]

Local SEO

1. Local SEO Fundamentals [Video Course]

2. Local SEO [Articles]

3. The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide [Guide]

4. Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google [Guide]

Technical SEO

1. Crawling & Site Audits [Guides]

2. Site Crawl [Tool]

3. Web Fundamentals [Guides]

4. The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet [Free PDF]

Reporting

1. Reporting on SEO [Video Course]

2. The Mini Guide to SEO Reporting [Guide]

3. About Google Search Console [Guide]

4. Google Analytics Academy [Video Courses]