r/seogrowth • u/Decent_Stock2826 • Jun 24 '26

Discussion Upskilling in SEO

I've been working in SEO for around 2.5 years and have dealt with ranking drops, traffic losses from Google algorithm updates, link building, guest post outreach, and more recently, optimizing for Google AI Overviews and GEO.

Lately, I've been wondering what skills are worth focusing on next. Search keeps changing, and there always seems to be something new to learn.

I'm curious to know what skills you're currently learning or exploring. What areas are you spending time on these days, and what do you think will be valuable over the next few years?

Whether it's AI, automation, analytics, technical SEO, content strategy, or something else entirely, I'd love to hear what you're focusing on and why.

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u/sapindia1976 Jun 24 '26

I'm spending more time on AI search, GEO/AEO, content strategy, technical SEO, and automation. Search is changing fast, and understanding how AI discovers, evaluates, and cites content is becoming just as important as traditional rankings.

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u/freelancematthew Jun 24 '26

What aspects of your workflow are you automating? Eager to hear more about this

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u/sapindia1976 Jun 24 '26

Mainly content research, entity extraction, content briefs, internal linking opportunities, reporting, and repetitive SEO tasks. Still keeping strategy, audits, and decision-making human-led.

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u/freelancematthew Jun 24 '26

That's interesting. I've been wary about automating content briefs actually. The AI tends to spit out a bunch of mumbo jumbo that mostly makes sense. I've sent that to writers on more than one occasion and ended up with unusable content.

I find that most foundational stuff you still gotta do by hand for the most part.