I have battled with this question from the very first day I decided to scale up my business.

When I started e-channel in 1999 I was armed with an entrepreneurial spirit and an associate diploma in mechanical engineering. In the early days search engine marketing was source code and Meta tags, and as odd as my background sounds it suited search engine optimisation (SEO) nicely. When Overture (now YSM) launched paid search - the landscape began to shift. Suddenly my skills were not enough and I knew it. My technical skills were still suited to SEO but I had to learn to deal with ad budgets, copywriting and data analysis. I enrolled in a Masters of Marketing at the University of South Australia and that was the turning point for me and e-channel. I learnt about the science of marketing and was instantly able to apply it to search. When Google came along with AdWords and took Overtures model to a whole new level I was ready to handle the technical and marketing aspects of search. The only problem was that my unique combinations of skill sets were not easy to find - So when I went about employing people I found the task of finding search engine marketing talent quite a challenge. I soon realised that I needed great software engineers and great marketers in my team to deal with the increasingly complex needs of my customers.

I now have a great team of search engine marketers and engineers around me. Here are some of the things I look for when recruiting a new team member.

(if you are looking for a job have a look at our careers section)

1. You have to be completely hooked on the internet. I use Google all day long and as they come up with more tools I can see myself using them more and more. I would not consider buying a second-hand item without checking it on ebay. I have a linkedin and facebook profile. I blog and Digg - and if my first life wasn’t so busy I would have a secondlife. If you don’t know the landscape you never going to be able to market to it. I even force myself to spend time on myspace and youtube - I personally don’t love these sites but millions of others do. Simply put if your want, to be able to market to the online community you have to learn as much as you can about it and the best way to do that is to become a part of that community.
2. You must never be satisfied with your results. I never over celebrate a first place organic search ranking or meeting / exceeding a paid search key performance metric. First of all that is what we are paid to do but the reason I don’t over celebrate a victory is that there is always something you can do to improve. Until I have achieved 100% click through and 100% conversion and a number one organic listing for every keyword we are targeting I will not stop trying to improve. Is that realistic? Probably not but the first thing we do at e-channel straight after a high 5 is set out to get an even better result.
3. Be an absolute optimist with a “can-do” attitude. Some things are all but impossible to do but that shouldn’t stop you trying. Other than saying “NO WAY ON EARTH” (before running away as fast as I could) to customer with a lotus notes domino website and a small budget (the small budget being the bigger problem) I have never run away from a challenge. As a search engine marketer you are constantly asked to meet KPI’s that appear to be unachievable. Rather than get frustrated by that it should motivate you to find a way to meet them. There is so much room for creativity and ingenuity but unless you are prepared to try you will never stand out as a great search engine marketer.
4. Be a lover of technology if you are a marketer and a lover of marketing if you are an engineer. If you have ever seen the look on the face of a software engineer when asked to cold call a customer you will know that finding a brilliant engineer that can sell is like finding hens teeth. You get the same look on a marketers face when you tell them that you want them to do a feasibility report on connecting multiple suppliers API’s to our internal systems. Engineers and marketers generally have different personality types and it’s unlikely that you will find one person that is exceptionally good at both disciplines. The reality is that a search engine marketing company needs both disciplines to operate and the marketers and the engineers must be able to understand each other - so a little cross pollination of disinclines is critical.
5. A Marketer needs the following skills. Communications. Public relations, Qualitative and Quantitative ability, be accountable, master of excel, Know HTML, CSS, be absolutely hooked on the internet and understand that engineers cannot be disturbed when they are knee deep in code.
6. An engineer needs the following skills. PHP, JSP, ASP, MYSQL, AJAX, know what Web 2.0 means, know what Web 3.0 is going to mean, love working in a rapid development environment, have an understanding of marketing communications, be absolutely hooked on the internet and accept that a marketer will never want to know the details finer details of your algorithms.

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Tags: SEO SEM Jobs, SEO SEM skill Shortage

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Search Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.