Change and disruption have been constants in SEO since I started in the industry, but in recent years, they have accelerated. Which skills will still be relevant 5, 10, or even 20 years from now?

Let’s have a look at SEO skills that help businesses connect with customers, make informed decisions, and build systems that work, even as the goalposts keep moving.

TL;DR

If you’re in a rush, here’s the short version:

• Understanding user intent: Even when websites disappear completely, users will still express their needs in AI conversations or in other ways, and businesses will need specialists who understand what users want and how to provide it to them.
• Optimising business information: SEOs already optimise business information in many places, and although the ways in which we do it will change, the skills that it requires will still be needed.
• Interpreting analytics data: SEOs are data experts, and businesses will always need people who are able to make decisions based on messy, incomplete and ambiguous data.
• Cross-functional communication: If you’ve been working successfully in SEO, you have credibility with developers, marketers, business leaders and other teams.
• A humble learning attitude: As SEO practitioners, we are used to disruption, and we are always willing to change our minds and adapt to new realities.

Now, for those of you who want more details, we’ll dive right into the whole piece:

Understanding user intent

Let’s envision a not-so-distant future where users do not visit websites anymore: If you want to buy a new pair of shoes, you tell the AI of your choice what you need. It asks you some additional questions and then shows you options to choose from. Once you’ve decided, the entire checkout process is handled directly in the AI chat.

E-commerce retailers will show up in these discussions if they provide relevant product data and additional information about their business directly to the AI platform (e.g. via product feeds) and if they’re also present in the form of external recommendations and positive reviews on third-party platforms.

Other types of businesses will work in a similar way: They might not provide product feeds if they are not e-commerce businesses, but detailed catalogues of their services, and lead forms that are directly integrated into AI chats.

In order to identify which aspects of a product or service potential customers care about, and how they search for or ask about this information, businesses will still need specialists who are able to understand and interpret user intent and provide the required information in the correct format and places.

Optimising business information

Right now, SEO practitioners are already optimising business information in many places:

• Directly on websites, mainly in the form of text content
• Product feeds (for e-commerce businesses)
• Structured data (schema markup)
• Presence on third-party platforms (Digital PR, link building, etc.)
• Emerging formats, like llms.txt files

We do not have to make an assumption as dystopian as in the previous section (where websites disappear entirely) to see that with the rise of AI, there is a shift happening from “content” to “information”.

Content has always transported information, but now that we have super-intelligent systems consuming all of the content in the world and providing summaries to users, the information itself is a lot more important than the form it is delivered in.

At the same time, the form is more and more reduced to just the “pure” information. Product feeds, structured data, llms.txt files and similar formats are created for machine consumption first. They do not have to be wrapped in fancy prose, but they need to be accurate, correctly implemented, and most importantly: contain all information that is relevant to potential customers who are about to make a purchasing decision.

In the future, SEO specialists will use their existing experience and skills in the area of optimising business information to provide the right facts in the right formats to the right machines, always with user behaviours, needs and intents in mind.

Interpreting analytics data

People who work in SEO already spend a lot of time analysing and interpreting data, such as: Google Search Console, website crawls, log files, web analytics, rank tracking tools, or (more recently) AI visibility monitoring tools.

The data from these sources is often messy, incomplete and ambiguous, and making the right decisions based on it requires deep experience and an understanding of digital business that goes beyond just SEO.

People who work in SEO have also witnessed dramatic disruptions in the data that has been available to them, like the shift from organic keyword data to (not provided) in 2011, the Google Search Console relaunch in 2018/19, the end of Universal Analytics in 2023, or stricter tracking regulations and privacy features in recent years.

With this background, SEO specialists are well-equipped to adjust to the new data sources that will become available and necessary in the future, and to continue to help businesses make the right decisions in vague situations.

Cross-functional communication

In my role as an SEO consultant, I usually sit between marketing and web development, but also regularly work with other teams. Successful SEO practitioners are able to communicate with different business divisions in credible ways. One morning, you might have to write a technically detailed ticket for the dev team, and later that day hold a polished presentation for the board of directors.

Both require good communication skills, but real credibility comes from actually knowing what you’re talking about: As SEOs, we have to understand web development, IT infrastructure, business goals and impact, general marketing, sales, brand, product, and the legal implications of our work.

This multi-disciplinary knowledge and the communication skills that are required to gain the trust of all of the teams involved put SEO specialists in a future-proof position, as businesses will always need people who can connect teams and turn shared goals into action.

A humble learning attitude

SEOs are used to change, not just in the data that is available to them, or the external factors that change the importance or perception of SEO as a discipline, but also because SEO itself has always been constantly changing.

Over the years, I myself have learned to question even the strongest beliefs that my experience has formed. Recently, one of my clients managed to escape the negative impact of an algorithm update by simply switching to a new domain and redirecting all URLs from the old domain to the new one.

Their old domain, that hosted several country versions, got hit by an update, and all of the country versions saw significant losses. One of the country versions was then moved to a new domain, and swiftly recovered. Because of this success, we decided to repeat the process with another country version, and we achieved the same positive result.

This observation goes against several well-established SEO best practices and also some of my own beliefs, which are based on my experience from many projects:

Switching to a new domain normally means that you have to “start from zero” with that domain. Redirecting URLs from one domain to another normally means that penalties or negative signals are transferred from the old domain to the new one. And grouping several country versions on one international domain normally helps all of them perform better.

Yet, this isolated case shows that none of the above assumptions are universally true, even if many SEOs would probably agree with them.

Why am I telling this story? Because it is a nice example of how even experienced SEOs can be surprised again and again and nothing in SEO is set in stone. If you live and breathe this attitude, as most SEOs do, you are perfectly armed for adapting to change and disruption, no matter how overwhelming or significant it might be.

Wrapping it up

None of the skills that make SEO practitioners successful today depend on SEO staying exactly as it is.

Whatever SEO evolves into, the ability to understand users, make good decisions based on data, and translate them into action will remain valuable.

What do you think? I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!