Best Resume Writing Tips to Help SEO Specialist Get Hired
First impressions count, as they either open or close access to personal and professional opportunities. A resume facilitates you in casting a favorable first impression on recruiters. It serves like a calling card, personal ad or brochure. To get a better idea, try to to go through some professional resume examples first. If you are an SEO specialist and are getting very few or next to none call interviews, it may be beneficial to have a look at your portfolio. Additionally, for recruiters, having the right sourcing tools can make a significant difference in identifying high-quality candidates like SEO specialists. Here are a few tips that can assist you in creating a stellar and purposeful resume:
Be Precise and Concise
Recruiting agents have to process a load of information quickly because of lack of time. Pages and pages of personal rambling information are unimpressive for people responsible for hiring. Conciseness and being to the point are useful when assembling your job portfolio. It is not a chance to write one’s personal biography and impress recruiters. See your curriculum vitae as a synopsis of what one has studied and learned in life. It is important to be brief, succinct, precise, yet include every pertinent item. Moreover, in today’s competitive job market, the prevalence of AI resume screening makes it crucial to structure your CV with relevant keywords and clarity to ensure it successfully navigates automated screening processes. Some ways to reduce the length of your educational qualification and knowledge without downplaying proficiencies and endeavors are:
- List competencies directly connected to the position in question and not broad ones.
- Mention your degrees and educational institutions but omit details like GPA, major, minor, etc.
- Recent and pertinent accreditations and diplomas should be listed and outdated ones deleted.
- List your most recent and relevant jobs and responsibilities related to the SEO projects you were part of.
Adapt Your Resume to the Requirements in the Job Ad
Fit your resume to the position you are vying for through customization. Show a trail among what you have learned at school or at work and the position. Major portions of one’s job experience or educational profile can be moved on the top and elaborated. In the global job market, it’s crucial to emphasize major aspects of your job history or educational background by strategically placing and elaborating on them. This approach of CV personalization not only showcases your relevant skills but also caters to the diverse cultural norms and expectations of the global workforce.
Show Results
Results and achievement speak for themselves and help you get noticed from the competition. Facilitate the employer in understanding what results you yielded for your previous employers. Result-oriented data assure hirers about performance and outcomes. Solid quantifiable results are immediately noticeable and liked, for example,
“Optimized the site of ABC to increase traffic by 60%.”
“Hosted webinars on wellness for ABC, Inc.”
Focus on Skills, Keywords and Phrases Related to the Industry
Skills are things other than your education and experience that let you get noticed in multitude. For an SEO specialist, these terms are connected:
- HTML coding
- having a command on Excel
- webinar hosting
- SEO campaigns
- Web hosting
- a strong understanding of content
- command on SEO tools
Mention your skills in your employment history rather than listing them haphazardly. Use these skills and phrases as keywords. Screening software retrieves applications and resumes that contain particular keywords. If your resume doesn’t contain these keywords, they are not picked up by search engines and won’t reach recruiters.
Use Action Verbs
Write in an active voice and opt for action verbs. Replace pronouns and passive verbs like ‘I did,’ ‘I was’ with positive, targeted and strong active verbs; for example,
- Conducted
- Consulted
- Contributed
- Coordinated
- Performed
- Managed
- Oversaw
- Supervised
- Accomplished
The best way to find suitable keywords and phrases and action words for your resume is to look at sample resume of other SO specialists. You can find some at Career Live.
Be Organized and Consistent In the Writing Style of Your Resume
A reasonably sound command on the language, the ability to communicate meaning, and sound communication skills are considered prerequisites for most positions, and your resume should display that. Here is how to do this:
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List Information Logically
List your educational profile and work experience in a relevant and logical way, i.e., the reverse chronological order, with recent and current information on top.
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List Information Systematically
Be consistent in the format of listing information. For example, the order should be the same for each job experience: Dates; Company’s Name; Location; Your Role; Your Tasks / Accomplishments. An online Resume builder like Canava and Resume Genius aid you in starting off with a perfect format.
Be Grammatically Correct
Pay attention to grammatical elements of your work. Grammatical issues like homonyms, apostrophes, singulars, plurals, subject-verb agreement, poor sentence structure, tense and verb confusions, etc., may fly through spell checkers undetected. So ask a friend or mentor (with better language skills) to go through your work and give you feedback. Get professional help with resume writing if you don’t want to take any chance with your resume and your chances of success.
Format Properly and Consistently
A consistently written resume gives recruiters readability ease and helps them locate relevant information in a glance.
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Font Style
Don’t experiment with fonts. Go for reader-friendly fonts such as sans-serif (without serifs – curly bits of letters).
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Font Size
Stick to one font size throughout, i.e., 11-12 font sizes to give readability ease. Don’t try to reduce it in order to cramp more information or increase it in order to make your portfolio look fuller.
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Headings in Bold
Make all headings bold in order to make them stand out, such as the Job Title(s); Employer(s) Names; Educational Institute(s) names. However, don’t use italics and underline in your body text for emphasis, and do use bold sparingly.
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An Appropriate File Format
Send your resume in MS Word (.docx) format or PDF. An advantage of transferring your resume into PDF is that the formatting will look consistent on every employer’s desktop, which cannot be ensured with the MS Word format. In order to make sure that your resume looks professional and well-formatted, you can use online tools to convert your resume from Word format to PDF.
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Use Bullets
List information in consistent bulleted points. Bulleted information is shorter and looks more organized and readable than text blocks.
Writing a resume that gets you the desired result can be a challenging task. But giving it meticulous time and attention is so worth it. Go the extra mile; make an effort to compile a portfolio that does justice to your credentials and capabilities; one that makes you stand out from the hundreds of candidates competing for the same job. If your current CV is not getting you anywhere, then it’s time to revamp it or have a professional resume writing service have a look at it.