To score more sales and conversions in the current digital landscape, businesses must invest in online visibility. With 5.56 billion internet users nowadays, your customers are mostly online. Search engines and social media are their primary touchpoints. That’s where SEO experts come in.
If you want to boost your online presence, then consider hiring an SEO expert. However, before you begin the hiring process, it is essential to understand their roles and responsibilities. In this article, you will gain an understanding of the SEO expert’s responsibilities, the skills they need to have, and where to find them.
Key Takeaways
- The core responsibilities of an SEO expert include website audits, keyword research, content optimisation, technical SEO, link building, content marketing strategy, UX optimisation, SEO analytics and reporting, and staying updated with the latest SEO trends.
- Before hiring an SEO expert, you should verify their track record, expertise with SEO tools, technical knowledge, and communication skills.
- You can find qualified SEO experts on platforms like LinkedIn, Clutch, Glints, etc.
What Is an SEO Expert?
Image source: International Institute of Digital Marketing Certifications
Also known as an SEO specialist, an SEO expert is a digital marketing professional whose main task is to improve a website’s search engine rankings. Their core goal is to drive and increase organic traffic through on-page content optimisation, off-page or technical performance improvements, and backlink building.
The aggregate of the SEO expert’s efforts must result in increased brand discoverability, improved user experience, and achieved conversion goals. These also complement other marketing functions, such as paid advertising, social media, and content marketing, ensuring that your customers can discover your brand at every touchpoint.
There are several types of SEO experts businesses can engage with or hire:
| Type of SEO Expert | Description |
| In-house SEO | These are professionals who are teamed up to focus solely on the brand’s SEO goals. |
| Freelance SEO experts | These are professionals who are under flexible contracts. Oftentimes, they offer specialised services on a project basis only. These professionals may also handle multiple clients simultaneously. |
| SEO agencies | These are groups of professionals that offer a wide range of services. Think of it as an SEO one-stop shop. They can offer specialised and general solutions, ranging from branding to strategy to content and even handling the technical aspects. |
You can choose anyone among these three types of SEO experts. However, you need to factor in your budget, goals, and the complexity of your project or needs. Therefore, you need to understand the scope of their responsibilities so you can determine which one can best satisfy your needs. That will be discussed in the next section.
Core SEO Expert Responsibilities
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) does not stop with content optimisation. Various facets constitute SEO, and an expert must be well-versed in each one. Here are the core responsibilities of an SEO expert that define their role:
Website Audits
Image source: SEMrush
A comprehensive website audit is the very first step an SEO expert must take. An audit is an analysis of the website’s status quo in terms of SEO performance. The expert must perform a SWOT analysis, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the website, as well as opportunities for growth and any potential threats. This audit marks the beginning of the entire SEO strategy, serving as a roadmap for improving the website.
The SEO expert can use the following tools: Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Search Console, and Sitebulb. The professional must audit the following key areas:
| Audit Area | Focus Point |
| Technical SEO | Crawlability, broken links, duplicate content, indexing errors |
| On-page SEO | Title tags, meta descriptions, headers, keyword usage |
| Mobile Responsiveness | Ensuring the site performs well on mobile devices |
| Page Speed | Identifying elements slowing load time, such as uncompressed images and heavy JavaScript |
Aside from pinpointing which part of the website needs improvement, website audits streamline the optimisation by prioritising tasks that will have the most significant impact on SERP rankings.
Keyword Research
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Keyword research is the starting point of an SEO campaign as it identifies how to attract the right audience. It involves finding out the words, phrases, and questions users use to search for whatever they need, may it be products or services, on the search engine.
Keyword research goes beyond knowing the exact terms. It uncovers user intent, search volume, keyword difficulty, and competitive gaps. Through keyword research, you can answer the queries of your target audience, therefore boosting your online visibility, serving your potential customers, and increasing your revenue in the long run.
Tools Used: Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, SEMrush, AnswerThePublic
Core Activities:
- Intent-based Targeting: Identifying keywords based on user intent: informational, navigational, transactional
- Competitor Analysis: Studying what keywords competitors rank for and discovering opportunities they’ve missed
- Long-tail Keywords: Targeting lower-competition keywords with high conversion potential
Content Optimisation
Image source: Britopian
Content optimisation is not just about adding keywords to your articles or other content types. It ensures that your website pages are aligned with both user intent and search engine requirements. Content optimisation is also about structuring content to be both readable and rankable.
Best Practices:
- On-Page SEO: Optimising meta tags, title tags, and headers (H1 to H3)
- Keyword Placement: Naturally integrating keywords into content without stuffing
- Image SEO: Adding alt text and compressing images for speed
- Internal Linking: Building contextual links between related pages to improve crawlability
- Structured Data: Implementing schema markup to enhance search listings
The most crucial aspect of content optimisation is matching the search intent to your content. This ensures that you can answer what users are looking for, thereby providing a better user experience and encouraging them to stay longer on your website.
Technical SEO
Image source: Skillfloor
No matter how well you create and optimise your content, if the search engine does not discover it, all your efforts are in vain. Hence, technical SEO is one of the most critical components because it ensures that search engines can effectively crawl, index, and understand your website.
Key Elements:
- Crawlability: Optimising robots.txt and XML sitemaps
- Indexing: Ensuring important pages are indexable and avoiding duplication
- Site Architecture: Using a logical hierarchy and URL structure
- Core Web Vitals: Enhancing page experience by improving load speed, interactivity, and visual stability
- Mobile-Friendliness: Ensuring the site is fully responsive
- Canonicalisation: Preventing duplicate content issues
- Schema Markup: Adding structured data for better rich snippet eligibility
Link Building
Image source: Stan Ventures
More than having good content, a website’s authority is one of the most important ranking factors. Here, link building comes in. It involves acquiring backlinks from reputable websites in your industry, therefore boosting your site’s authority.
Why It Matters: Backlinks are a key ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Quality links signal that your content is trustworthy and valuable.
Common Strategies:
- Guest Posting: Publishing content on reputable third-party sites
- Digital PR: Creating newsworthy content to attract media coverage
- Broken Link Building: Replacing outdated or broken links with your relevant content
- Competitor Backlink Analysis: Identifying where competitors earn links and replicating their strategies
Content Marketing Strategy
Image source: Geeks for Geeks
A key part of an SEO expert’s core responsibilities is contributing to a brand’s content marketing strategy. They help in creating valuable and optimised content that drives traffic and conversions.
Key Responsibilities:
- Evergreen Content: Creating content that is high-value and relevant during any season and for a long period of time
- Trending Topics: Being always on top of trends and publishing fresh and time-sensitive content to target short-term traffic
- Pillar Pages and Clusters: Structuring content to cover broad topics and support internal linking
- Content Calendars: Planning blog posts, videos, and other media in advance
SEO and content marketing work hand-in-hand. While content attracts users, SEO ensures it gets seen.
UX (User Experience) Optimisation
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Major search engines, such as Google, consider user experience signals, including bounce rate, time on site, and page interactions, as ranking factors. The better the user experience is, the better the SEO performance of your website.
UX Best Practices:
- Navigation: Creating clear, intuitive menus and CTAs
- Layout: Using readable fonts, logical structure, and visual hierarchy
- Mobile-First Design: Optimizing for touchscreens, smaller screens, and mobile page speed
- Accessibility: Ensuring the site is usable for all visitors, including those with disabilities
Good UX enhances engagement, reduces bounce rates, and contributes to improved rankings.
SEO Analytics and Reporting
Image source: Agency Analytics
You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Therefore, analytics and reporting are essential in SEO. Hence, an SEO expert must be able to generate and interpret data to make informed decisions, optimise strategies, and improve ROI.
Key Metrics Tracked:
- Organic Traffic: Visitors coming from search engines
- Keyword Rankings: Monitoring performance across targeted keywords
- Conversions and Goals: Measuring lead forms, purchases, or other business objectives
Tools Used: Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio), Ahrefs, SEMrush
Reporting:
- Weekly or monthly performance reports
- Dashboards with visual KPIs
- Actionable insights and next steps
Without proper analytics, SEO becomes a matter of guesswork.
Staying Up-to-Date with SEO Trends
What makes SEO hard is that it is constantly evolving. Algorithms are always evolving, user behaviour changes and new tools and technologies emerge, which may mean that the best practices of today are outdated. Therefore, an SEO expert must stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends.
Staying Current Involves:
- Following Industry Blogs: Moz, Search Engine Journal, Google Search Central
- Participating in Forums: Reddit (r/SEO), WebmasterWorld, niche Facebook groups
- Taking Courses and Certifications: Google, HubSpot, Semrush Academy
- Experimentation: Testing new tactics and monitoring performance
Major updates, such as Google’s Core Updates or the Helpful Content Update, can have a significant impact on rankings. A great SEO expert adapts quickly and aligns strategies with what’s working now. These core responsibilities define the day-to-day and strategic duties of an SEO expert. Mastery of these areas ensures not only better rankings but sustainable, long-term digital growth.
Additional Responsibilities Based on Business Type or Scope
While the core responsibilities apply to general SEO projects, the scope of work varies depending on the business type. An SEO expert must be able to customise their strategies to meet the specific needs of each business model with its unique audience.
Local SEO
Local SEO is ideal for brick-and-mortar businesses, such as clinics, local restaurants, and small retail stores. The SEO expert must focus on the following:
- Optimising Google Business Profiles
- Managing local citations and directories
- Ensuring NAP consistency
- Creating location-based content
- Target local keywords
E-commerce SEO
E-commerce SEO is a series of efforts to optimise your website to facilitate online shopping and ultimately lead the customer to a checkout. To achieve this, the SEO expert must focus on the following:
- Optimising product pages and category structures
- Address duplicate content from filters and dynamic URLs
- Implement schema markup for products, reviews, and availability
- Enhance site speed and mobile user experience
International SEO
International SEO is an aggregate of efforts to boost your website’s ranking and online visibility across multiple countries. The SEO expert must always keep in mind that the audience comes from diverse backgrounds, including individuals of different languages, cultures, and ethnicities. To do this, the SEO expert must focus on the following:
- Using hreflang tags for multilingual targeting
- Optimising for local search engines such as Baidu and Yandex
- Adapting content to local cultures and languages
Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO involves optimisation across thousands of pages or within an enterprise or a large-scale company. To do this, the SEO expert must focus on the following:
- Coordinating SEO across large-scale websites or business units
- Working with cross-functional teams such as developers, content, and marketing
- Automating reporting and managing crawl budgets
- Establishing governance and scalable processes
By adapting strategies to business scale and audience, SEO experts ensure that optimisations deliver meaningful and measurable results across any digital landscape.
Skills Every SEO Expert Should Have
As you can see, an SEO expert has multiple responsibilities. They wear various hats; therefore, they must possess diverse skills. To be a successful professional in this field, an SEO expert must have these skills:
| Skill Area | Description |
| Analytical thinking | Ability to read and interpret data from tools like Google Analytics and Search Console. The SEO expert must be able to spot trends, solve issues, and decide based on data |
| Copywriting and Content Strategy | Ability to create keyword-optimised, user-intent-aligned content that ranks high and engages audiences. Content formats can be blogs, product pages, and/or landing pages. |
| Technical Proficiency | Ability to be familiar with HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript to address SEO issues right away. With this technical knowledge, the SEO expert must be able to communicate with developers and manage technical elements like site structure and speed |
| Communication and Collaboration | Ability to work with other teams, like marketing and being able to communicate technical SEO insights into actions aligned with the business goals |
Hiring an SEO Expert: What to Look For
The SEO expert, the action man of your strategy, can make or break your online growth. Therefore, you must ensure that you hire the best candidate to fit your business goals. Here are some key considerations and best practices to keep in mind when hiring an SEO professional.
Key Traits to Look For:
- Proven Results: An SEO professional must have a proven track record of success. Ask for case studies or portfolios that display the work they have done to increase traffic, keyword ranking improvement, and better conversions. Through this, you can assess whether the SEO expert is truly an expert.
- Transparency: Expect to communicate frequently with the SEO expert. Therefore, the expert must be transparent about their strategy, timeline, and expected outcomes. Be cautious of excessive jargon use or any hint of secrecy. A professional must be able to communicate transparently and effectively.
- Tools Proficiency: Upon the hiring process, ask the professional if they are familiar with these commonly-used SEO tools:
- Google Analytics & Search Console
- Ahrefs or SEMrush
- Screaming Frog
- Looker Studio (Data Studio)
- Google Analytics & Search Console
These tools form a standard arsenal for tackling search engine optimisation. You may gauge the depth of their knowledge based on how well-versed they are with these tools.
- Clear Communication: As a business owner, you may not be familiar with the intricacies of search engine optimisation. The SEO expert must be able to explain complicated technical concepts in a way that anyone involved in the project can understand.
- Adaptability: The SEO expert must be aware that search engine algorithms change without notice. Therefore, they must stay informed about any updates or trends.
Red Flags to Avoid:
- Vague Promises: Achieving a page-one ranking cannot be done overnight. SEO is a long-term process. If the SEO expert claims to rank #1 in 7 days without a clear plan, you may think twice about hiring them.
- No Reporting: In any project, transparency is crucial. If the SEO expert refuses to provide regular performance updates or does not give you access to analytics, there is likely something amiss.
- Black-Hat Tactics: Search engines often penalise black-hat tactics. If the SEO expert suggests that you use keyword stuffing, link buying, or cloaking, hiring them may harm your ranking.
Hiring the right SEO expert means aligning skills and strategy with your business goals ethically and sustainably.
Where to Find SEO Experts
Are you finally ready to hire? Whether you are a startup looking for a part-time freelancer or a large-scale brand that opts to work with an agency, here are the platforms where you can find SEO experts in Singapore and abroad.
Platforms to Find SEO Experts
| Platform | Best For | Pros |
| Mid- to senior-level SEO professionals | Verified work history, endorsements, B2B-friendly | |
| Upwork | Freelancers and contract-based SEOs | Transparent reviews, vast talent pool, flexible engagements |
| Clutch.co | SEO agencies and B2B service providers | Verified client testimonials, agency portfolios |
| Mediacorp Buzz/Glints/MyCareersFuture | Entry- to mid-level hires | Popular local job boards with employer branding tools |
| Fiverr Pro | Specialised freelancers (micro-projects) | Fast turnaround, ideal for small tasks |
| Local SEO Agencies (e.g. MediaOne, OOm, First Page) | Full-service SEO solutions | Local market expertise, and face-to-face support are available |
Platform Overviews and Hiring Considerations
LinkedIn: If you want to build your in-house SEO team, LinkedIn can be a good place to start. On the platform, you can see detailed professional histories, certifications, and endorsements. You can also tap into various filters, such as location, to tailor your search to Singaporean professionals or a foreign outsourced workforce.
Image source: LinkedIn
Upwork: If you want to hire an SEO freelancer, Upwork has a vast pool of talent. In addition to their past work, you can view reviews about the candidate and their success rates on projects. Singaporean startups often prefer Upwork for hiring talents due to its flexibility and cost efficiency.
Image source: Upwork
Clutch.co: Clutch is a directory of top-rated B2B marketing agencies, including SEO specialists. Each agency profile includes detailed case studies, services, minimum project sizes, and client testimonials. It’s beneficial for SMEs and enterprises seeking comprehensive SEO services with proven results.
Local Job Boards: Glints, MyCareersFuture, and Mediacorp Buzz
If you want to hire full-time SEO talents in Singapore, Glints, MyCareersFuture, and Mediacorp Buzz are some of the local job boards you can explore. Glints is ideal for startups; MyCareersFuture is a government-backed portal for corporate hiring; and Mediacorp Buzz also has many creative professionals.
Image source: Glints
Fiverr Pro: If you want to accomplish a specialised task, such as metadata optimisation or fixing technical issues, Fiverr Pro may be the right choice for you. To tap into quality professionals, ensure you are hiring from the “Pro” tier.
Local SEO Agencies: Singapore’s top agencies, such as MediaOne, First Page, OOm, and Heroes of Digital, can provide you with access to a team of specialists who understand Singapore’s search behaviour, local SERP trends, and multilingual requirements. Having an agency on your side can give you the whole SEO package, from content to technical and monthly reporting.
SEO Salary Range in Singapore (2025 Estimate)
| Role Level | Monthly Salary Range (SGD) |
| Junior SEO Executive | S$2,800 – S$3,800 |
| SEO Specialist/Consultant | S$4,000 – S$6,000 |
| Senior SEO Manager/Lead | S$6,500 – S$9,000+ |
Salaries vary depending on years of experience, proficiency with tools, and whether the role involves technical, strategic, or team leadership responsibilities.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the daily tasks of an SEO expert?
An SEO expert wears multiple hats and performs various tasks to improve a website’s ranking, including:
- Keyword tracking: Monitoring keyword rankings to assess performance over time.
- Site audits: Identifying and fixing SEO issues that may affect crawlability, speed, or indexing.
- Content updates: Refreshing outdated pages and optimising content for relevance and intent.
- Backlink analysis: Reviewing new and lost backlinks to maintain link health and authority.
These tasks ensure that a website remains optimised and competitive in search engine results pages (SERPs).
How do SEO experts improve rankings?
SEO experts improve rankings through a combination of efforts such as on-page, off-page, and technical tactics, including:
- Optimising content and metadata: Ensuring that keywords are strategically placed in titles, headers, and descriptions to match search intent.
- Fixing technical issues: Resolving crawl errors, improving site speed, and ensuring mobile-friendliness.
- Building high-quality backlinks: Acquiring links from authoritative websites to boost domain trust and visibility.
All these elements contribute to better organic visibility and higher rankings in search engines like Google.
Is hiring an SEO expert worth it for small businesses?
Yes, hiring an SEO expert is a good investment for small businesses because of the following:
- Long-term growth: SEO builds sustainable traffic without ongoing ad spend.
- Level playing field: Small businesses can outrank larger competitors by targeting the right keywords and local audiences.
- ROI-focused: Every optimisation made by an expert contributes to brand visibility, leads, and conversions.
SEO is a cost-effective digital marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes.
How long does SEO take to show results?
SEO is a long-term investment, but the results are cumulative and durable over time. On average, SEO takes 3 to 6 months to produce noticeable results, depending on:
- Competition level: High-competition industries may take longer to rank.
- Website health: Newer or poorly optimised sites require more work upfront.
- Strategy and execution: Consistent implementation of best practices accelerates progress.
