Hire Your SEO Virtual Assistant: The Why’s and How’s

Professionals in SEO come from all backgrounds. There is no universal list of required SEO abilities, but I look for a few things in every candidate based on their degree of expertise and position.

Critical Reasoning

This isn’t easy to assess, but SEO professionals must have analytical minds capable of distinguishing between correlation and causation.

You need a VA who can help you analyze existing data and identify what happened, why it happened, and what potential steps you can take to improve the situation. If you’re already working with an SEO consultant or SEO coach, your SEO VA can help implement the consultant’s recommendations.

You can ask the candidate about the most significant challenge they addressed before, how they recognized what needed to be done, how they began to solve the problem, and how they evaluated if they succeeded or not.

All these steps require critical reasoning skills.

An SEO VA is no different from any other SEO professional. They might not have all the skills related to SEO, but they still belong to the roster of global SEO professionals. Ideally, the perfect candidate for the job should comprehend fundamental SEO issues from various perspectives. In addition, they should be able to formulate solutions based on evidence or data.

Speaking & Writing Abilities

A virtual assistant that can research keywords and write compelling content is highly beneficial.

Communication skills are paramount. Suppose the VA is going to help you with strategy. In that case, they should be able to condense complicated ideas and concepts so that non-SEO individuals can comprehend them easily.

Data and Analytics Competencies

If the VA knows how to use Google Analytics 4 and retrieve their data, they will save you a great deal of time. Fundamental knowledge of company KPIs is also necessary for an effective SEO strategy. Having your VA certified is an option if you want long-term, upskilled staff. And even if your VA is not pulling analytics data, the ability to understand what’s going on is essential to success.

If you can’t extract and segment data, you’re probably losing out on some valuable insights. On the other hand, a VA with comprehensive skills may be called an SEO specialist, primarily if they can design dashboards in a data studio, leverage multiple APIs to get more data, and understand databases well enough to do creative things with that data.