The SEO landscape requires a heavy focus on a variety of hard skills. To be successful today, you need to be:
- Proficient in multiple SEO practices like technical, local, content strategy, and more.
- Capable with a laundry list of tools and data analysis from those tools.
- Comfortable with AI, prompt engineering, and automation.
- Knowledgeable on how different channels like paid, social, or UX impacts organic traffic.
However, businesses don’t always speak in bounce rates, custom GPTs, and Core Web Vitals. They need stories, empathy, and clarity.
To thrive, SEOs need more than technical prowess.
Yes, master the tools and stay up to date on the industry’s latest developments, but don’t neglect the soft skills that turn good work into sticky relationships.
Despite the increasing demand for the hard skills needed to be an SEO in 2025, these three soft skills are becoming just as essential today.
1. Storytelling
Today, every SEO has more data than they know what to do with.
Technical advances have given us an abundance of tools, platforms, and data points to leverage.
However, the need for synthesizing this flood of information and communicating it clearly is at an all-time high.
Reporting in SEO 10+ years ago was fairly straightforward.
Businesses primarily wanted to see keyword rankings and basic first-party data like sessions, clicks, or conversions.
Now, that type of data is table stakes. SEO reporting can include far more, like:
- Custom event tracking.
- Funnel visualizations.
- AI insights.
- And more.
All this new data allows us to tell richer stories, but if not presented succinctly, it can undermine your message or even work against you.
Your audience can disengage, the message can get lost and things may be misinterpreted.
The sign of a strong SEO in 2025 is having the ability to:
- Sift through all the noise.
- Pull out the pieces of information that are truly important.
- Communicate the key points both concisely and persuasively.
That’s a lot!
You have about 10 minutes to get your point across before people start tuning out, research shows.
Distilling a complex topic, solution, and pitch into a tightly wrapped package can take surprisingly little time.
And these skills don’t just apply when providing consulting services to a business, but also internally to your own team or leadership.
The takeaway: It’s not enough to have good data or even analyze that data well. A clear and convincing story needs to accompany it.
Dig deeper: 12 skills every SEO specialist must master by 2026
2. Empathy
SEOs know the value of understanding an audience.
It’s because knowing how to package a message for those listening is at the heart of a message’s reception.
There are a handful of ways to do this in a business setting, like DiSC or Enneagram.
Regardless of what you use, in practice, the idea is to assess your audience and determine the best way to tailor or present your information.
SEOs often present the same idea to multiple people, but they may not all synthesize information in the same way.
For example, the way an idea is presented to a C-suite executive and a developer who is tasked with implementing the recommendation are likely completely different.
Chances are, most executives will be quick and decisive.
They’ll want the key points, estimated costs, and impacts packaged in a short presentation with an executive summary and a few supporting examples.
The developer, on the other hand, will likely be slower and more calculated.
They will want all the technical details in spreadsheet form with a thorough step-by-step process.
Giving the spreadsheet to the executive and the presentation to the developer is likely to cause the recommendations to fall flat.
Even if the data and story are solid, knowing your audience and formatting your message correctly are critical to ensuring that the information is absorbed.
Dig deeper: How to become exceptional at SEO
3. Adaptability
Because technical advances in SEO are growing at such a rapid pace, keeping up with the times has never been more challenging or important.
Seemingly every week, something new promises to revolutionize the industry.
While every new development in AI may not fulfill the promise of revolution, SEOs must have the curiosity to explore and adapt.
That may sound easy, but in practice, it isn’t.
It can be time-consuming to read every LinkedIn post and newsletter and keep your finger on the pulse of an ever-changing industry.
Conversely, it is also easy to get stuck in a routine, tune out all the noise, and stick to what is most comfortable.
While I don’t believe that AI will replace humans (yet), people who adapt will replace other humans who don’t.
The need for adaptability doesn’t stop at advances in technology.
Cross-channel collaboration is another example of adaptability being at a premium today.
It is becoming increasingly challenging for SEOs to operate only within their own organic silo. Changes in SERPs are forcing marketers to think more holistically.
For example, sites like Reddit or YouTube, which have historically been seen as completely separate from traditional search, are taking up more SERP real estate than ever before.
And with the lines between social channels and organic rapidly blurring, ruling out these platforms from your strategy is a mistake.
This isn’t to say that omnichannel marketing is a new concept, but adapting to the constantly evolving definition of SEO is just as important as being curious to try new SEO tools and processes.
Dig deeper: 8 tips to craft clear and impactful client communication
Being well-rounded will be rewarded
One of the first things that attracted me to SEO was the wide range of skills needed to be successful on a daily basis. You must be:
- Good with both letters and numbers.
- Analytical but also able to communicate with a variety of personalities.
- Able to dig into the small details while maintaining sight of the big picture.
Despite the industry’s heavy emphasis on technical skills, being well-rounded will be just as important moving forward.
As the industry changes and scales start to tip towards more industry-specific technical skills, remember not to leave your soft skills behind.