The 7 traits of highly effective SEO leaders
I was recently helping a company to hire their first director of SEO and they asked me to outline the top traits they should be looking for in that hire.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Profound.
I was recently helping a company hire its first director of SEO, and they asked me to outline the top traits they should be looking for in that hire. At the time they asked, I had just finished reading Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, so while there are many traits of highly effective SEO, I decided to distill those traits down to just 7.
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While most people think of SEO as a tactical effort, if you have read anything I have ever written, I do not. I believe SEO must be strategic, and therefore, my list of what anyone should look for when hiring for SEO (or becoming that great SEO thinker) does not include technical prowess, which can be learned a lot easier than becoming a strategic thinker.
The most effective SEOs think differently. They are not simply marketers or product managers. They are strategic business partners who understand that SEO is both a product and a marketing channel.
They build scalable systems, align their efforts with the entire user journey, and measure success in terms of business impact. They have internalized a set of habits that transform their function from a cost center into a powerful engine for growth.
Think like a product manager
Tactical SEO starts with keywords, while strategic SEO starts with user problems. A product manager’s primary role is to identify and solve a customer’s pain points through the product. A query typed into a search bar is a problem, not a string of keywords. The best SEO approach focuses on building a solution for that problem, not something that artificially meets the query.
Instead of asking, “What keywords can we rank for?” the strategic SEO asks, “What problems are users trying to solve when they search for terms related to our industry?”
This shift in perspective and planning moves the focus from generating clicks to serving and acquiring users. This means that analyzing search intent is not a byproduct of keyword research, but rather it is the keyword research itself.
By deeply understanding the intent, they can influence the direction of SEO so that it genuinely solves those problems, leading to a business outcome rather than just rankings.
Focus on the funnel
Most SEO efforts often stop measuring success at the click; great SEO leaders focus on the entire user journey. They recognize that bringing a user to the website is the first step. The real work is understanding what happens next, even if it doesn’t lead to a conversion. These thinkers realize that their goal is to get a user to the next stage in the funnel, even if that means passing the user on to another team, such as email, social media, or paid media.
The goal isn’t to achieve the most last-click conversions, but to generate the most business value for the company. This means they need to understand the entire journey and funnel to construct the best SEO touchpoints.
Lastly, they don’t think only of that first conversion. They understand the user’s entire lifecycle and can build SEO efforts that impact LTV and even viral growth through referrals. Their SEO reporting and dashboards will reflect the full customer lifecycle, from search to retention.
Programmatic and scale
In the age of AI content production, relying solely on handcrafted, artisanal blog posts is not a scalable strategy for growth. Effective SEOs consider systems and programmatic approaches, but not just because they are programmatic and require minimal effort. They identify opportunities that build on the stages of user journeys and lifecycles, where structured data can be leveraged to create thousands of valuable pages with minimal manual effort.
Product-led SEO identifies these scalable opportunities within the business. It works with engineering to build templates and systems that can target this intent, creating a wide, defensible moat that is impossible to compete with through manual content creation alone.
Align with the full user journey
Too much of SEO is hyper-focused on top-of-funnel acquisition. The best SEO thinkers know that search is a tool customers use at every stage of their lifecycle. They build strategies that serve users not only before they sign up, but also after. Creating content that existing customers will find will decrease churn that might have happened if they landed on a competitor’s site. Similarly, creating content about product features while potentially very low in the funnel will box out affiliate sites that might have otherwise made that content.
Executing on this could mean building a searchable help center, creating a library of advanced tutorials, or optimizing product-adjacent tools and focusing on the full journey. This turns SEO into a tool for increasing user success and lifetime value - even when it can’t be measured in traffic.
Superior communication
The most strategic SEO teams communicate in a language that helps convey their message effectively. When SEO teams report on SEO-only metrics, they lose the room. The goal isn’t to report; it is to gain alignment, score budget, and ship improvements.
They understand that executives and other department heads care about market share, revenue growth, and competitive advantages, not keyword-ranking fluctuations.
When proposing a new initiative, they frame it in terms of expected ROI. When reporting results, they highlight the impact on customer acquisition cost, conversion rates, and revenue. By translating SEO metrics into business outcomes, they elevate the conversation and earn a strategic seat at the table.
Collaboration
SEO cannot succeed alone. Although SEO is a marketing function, it drives acquisition with the support of many other teams. Successful SEO requires actively breaking down the traditional silos between marketing, product, and engineering. Successful SEOs understand that their success is contingent on the work of others, and they build the relationships needed to get things done.
They work with content teams to ensure quality at scale. They partner with product managers to prioritize SEO requirements on the roadmap. They collaborate with engineers to ensure that technical best practices are implemented and to build the programmatic systems necessary for growth. They are not lone wolves; they are a central, collaborative hub that aligns different teams toward the shared goal of user-focused growth.
SEO as a product
Not every SEO manager will be privileged to report to a product leader, but that should not inhibit them from thinking of SEO as a product, not a campaign. SEO products don’t have start and end dates. They require continuous discovery, iteration, and refinement like any other product.
As a product team, they will have roadmaps and prioritization efforts based on impact. They will think in terms of sprints, even if the rest of the marketing team thinks in terms of quarters.
As a product, SEO constantly gathers user (searcher) feedback, analyzes performance data, and adapts to changes in the market and user behavior. By treating SEO as a living, breathing product, effective professionals move away from a reactive, project-based approach and toward a proactive, strategic model of sustained growth.
Hiring for SEO
The person with these traits is a unicorn, but unlike in fantasy worlds, these unicorns do exist. If you are one of these unicorns, know that you are in high demand in these turbulent times. If you are looking for one of these unicorns, please reach out, and I can point you to the SEO unicorns I know.
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It’s amazing how many SEOs are putting so much time and effort into trying to game the system again this time with AIO instead of solving real user problems