Expand your skill set

Giulia says: “Invest in expanding your skill set.

We have been put through a time of unprecedented change and investing in your skill set is the one thing that you have control over.

SEO has not only been about search engines for a long time now. It’s been constantly changing. In the last 12 months alone, we’ve had 10 confirmed algorithm updates and the more you accept that you have to run with this change, rather than trying to adapt old patterns and strategies to a new landscape, the more successful and satisfied you can be.”

Has SEO changed more in the last year than over the last 5/10 years?

“Absolutely. Not only have the guidelines become more overt about certain aspects of search, but there have been significant changes in search behaviour as well.

Right now, information is even more immediate and available. We have the rise of AI and AI overviews – and even at a transactional level, the journey to the click is elongated. We have filters and Google is basically becoming an e-commerce platform of its own. Whatever was position 2 last year is not position 2 now, because we have so many results above that in filters and organic panels.

We’ve been through a lot of change, both in the way that we see results and in the way that people adapt to search on Google and other search engines.”

How do you decide on the most important things to learn and stay up-to-date on?

“It starts with us. It starts with what we really want to do and where our priorities lie, not only as individuals but as organisations. SEO is changing so we can’t expect our profession to stay the same. At the same time, organisations can’t expect the same reports.

Based on your role and your goals within the organisation, start prioritising whether you need to develop a new skill, come up with a new strategy altogether, or change the way that you think about learning altogether.

Different mindsets also come into play. Personal and professional mindsets have an impact on the way that we approach our jobs, and the way that we approach new or existing relationships with our clients and colleagues.

It really depends on your priorities. Identify your skills, your strengths, and your natural passions. Your job is 8 hours of your day. You want to be doing something that interests you.

Often, we become procedural and just go with the flow. I was doing that myself for years before I sat down and looked at what I could automate and what was not serving me. Sitting on Excel for 6 hours might seem great because it takes your mind off other things. It doesn’t require much brain power. However, you could free up that time to do something more constructive.

We tend not to learn new skills because we feel like we don’t have the time, but that might be because we are not making the time.”

Do you need to have personal goals for where you want to be in the future and what role you want to have?

“Absolutely. However, I don’t think it’s sustainable to think about where you will be in 5/10 years. Right now, we don’t have the capacity to know what search is going to be because of AI, changes to search behaviour, and the huge advances in technology. It felt much more stable a few years ago. Now, we are more exposed to change.

To start identifying where you want to be, look at what you are good at and where you want to go. It can be scary to analyse this from a constructive perspective because we tend not to think of ourselves as good at something, and we think about other people as the experts. Actually, asking somebody else what they feel your strong points are can give you much more of an idea of what you are good at.

It can also be scary to change because you feel like you spent so much time developing this career. You might have worked for 10 years in SEO, for example, and it feels like there is just one linear path to take. It’s hard to detach yourself from that pre-existing path, but other careers are popping up now.

AI popped up last year, and now there are a lot of roles for prompt engineers. If there’s a role that you’re interested in, and a path that does not currently exist within the avenue you’ve created, you can always deviate and create another path for yourself. Many roles have been created the same way.

The scariest part (which is also the most constructive) is trying to figure out, if you did have the time and you could not fail, what would you be doing? Those are good questions. Thinking that way really helped me.

When I started developing my own career, I was lucky enough to work in an agency that specifically reserved 8 hours a week for professional development. I knew that my interest and background was in neuroscience. I ended up in SEO, and I was interested in exploring the connection between the two. That’s how I created my own niche.

You need to take a good look at your current skill set, and also what your interests are. Think about yourself as a person that has the capacity to learn, but also the power to do so, which is given by the plasticity of the brain. We all have this superpower of neuroplasticity, which is the adaptability of the brain. It’s what makes us able to adapt to change, learn new skills, and adopt new mindsets.

As a function of experience, we change the associations in our brains – even on a structural level. That’s often overlooked. We think that we’re old so we can’t learn something new, which is a massive stereotype. Learning is a lifelong process, and it’s important to foster that.”

Do most SEOs start out wanting to learn more about different roles and then niche down and become more focused as their career grows, hopefully leading to greater success?

“In theory, yes, but the impact of your work can depend on other factors, like where you live. I talk to many people who know the niche that they want to work in and have the financial stability, but they don’t feel like they’re making an impact on the world.

Think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You have primary needs and then you have self-fulfilling needs. The more you progress in your career, the more you are faced with that vertex of self-actualisation.

When you’re a junior, you just want to advance in your career and reach that authority and financial stability. With junior roles, you obviously want to soak up as much as you can, but bear in mind that you can’t excel at everything – and that’s okay.

In our culture, and because we are exposed to a lot of successful people all the time, it’s very easy to fall for this myth that we can only start learning something if we are already good at it, or if we see a path to becoming excellent. Nobody will tell you to pick up horse riding when you’re 30, but why not? The same goes for SEO skills, and any other professional skills.”

Is there a learning style that you prefer?

“I prefer face-to-face learning, and I prefer smaller chunks because my attention span is terrible. It depends on what works for you as an individual. It’s an exercise in self-analysis.

For example, there are resources from SEOs like Marco Giordano – who has a great analytics course and a book as well. Myriam Jessier has a course and leads webinars on BigQuery, and I’ve recently participated in a workshop by Britney Muller on generative AI. I found that super helpful because it was interactive, we could code and, in the short hour that we had, we learned a lot.

There’s Lazarina Stoy for machine learning and automation, and Billie Geena Hyde has a collection of courses called RankSuite, which is perfect for SEOs because it dives into different areas and different learning paths. They’re self-paced and you can pick and choose whatever you’re most interested in.

There are so many choices and alternatives, so it’s important to set a fixed time that you dedicate to learning. In the same way that you would dedicate time to an activity like going to the gym, you need to dedicate that time to learning as well.

It doesn’t need to be massive chunks. Not all of the agencies and organisations have 8 hours a week dedicated to learning for their employees. However, if you can take an hour over your weekend to look at 1 module of a course or a webinar, that’s really important. You can also set checkpoints, and it’s helpful to find an accountability buddy or a mentor who can help you check in with yourself.

Another thing that really helped me comes from a Cirque du Soleil artist, and it’s the concept of training a little above your level. Even if you feel like something is not really accessible to you right now, try to take it on anyway. If there is a certain function within your organisation that you want to cover eventually, but you have no experience, try to shadow the person who’s covering that function.

Take courses in coding, if it’s something that you’re interested in – even if you don’t know anything about it. It’s okay. Start exposing yourself to it. You can always dial back in. We tend to get too comfortable with the notion that, if we’re not currently proficient in something, then we might never be. That’s just self-sabotage.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“This is going to sound counterintuitive because it requires you to carve out a little more time, but it’s a one-off initiative that can free up some time.

Stop working on autopilot and create a list of all of the things you’re doing, all of the things that you wish you were doing if you had the time, and everything that is business-critical for your role.

That list is going to inform what you can drop from your to-dos – that you can either leave, delegate, or automate – and what you should keep doing. That should free up some time for you to start learning a new skill or following a new path.”

Giulia Panozzo is Consultant and Trainer at Neuroscientive, and you can find her over at Neuroscientive.com.