Content Marketing Specialist job description

Content and SEO — Content Marketing Specialist
Plans, writes and optimises content independently against a target.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Search Strategy
- Keyword and Search Intent Research — You can build a keyword list for a new topic from scratch, judge intent from what already ranks, and choose the terms worth targeting over ones that only look big.
- Search Competitor Analysis — You can analyse several ranking competitors for a topic, identify the pattern behind why they rank, and turn that into specific brief requirements.
- Content Strategy and Briefing — You can write a brief for a routine piece from your own research, covering the target keyword, intent, structure and required sources.
- Content Gap Analysis — You can compare your own site coverage of a topic cluster against competitors and search demand, and produce a list of missing subtopics.
- Editorial Calendar Management — You can build and run the calendar for a topic area, balancing writer capacity against publishing goals, and resequence it when priorities shift.

Search Optimisation
- On-Page SEO Optimisation — You can optimise a page for a competitive term by structuring content around genuine search intent rather than keyword density alone.
- SEO Metadata and Title Writing — You can write metadata for a competitive page that improves click-through without prompting, and test variants against results.
- Internal Linking and Architecture — You can add relevant internal links to a piece from your own knowledge of the site's content.
- Technical SEO Auditing — You can identify common technical issues, such as broken links, duplicate titles or missing alt text, on a section of the site.
- Site Speed and Core Web Vitals — You can identify which page elements, such as large images, are hurting a page's speed score.
- Structured Data Markup — You can mark up the common page types on a site, such as articles, products and FAQs, and clear the errors a validator reports. You know which properties a rich result actually needs, not only which ones are allowed.
- Crawl and Indexation Management — You can read a robots.txt file and a sitemap and say which pages they let search engines reach. You make the changes someone specifies for you and confirm the result in Search Console before calling it done.

Editorial Craft
- Long-Form Editorial Writing — You can write long-form content on unfamiliar topics from primary research, and structure it to satisfy the search intent as well as inform the reader.
- Editorial Style Governance — You can apply the style guide to your own writing consistently without checking it each time.
- Copyediting and Proofreading — You can take a full draft to publishable quality on your own, including structure and cuts, not just line-level fixes. You catch the claim that needs a source, not only the comma that needs moving.
- Content Localisation — You can adapt a piece for another market with a translator or native speaker guiding you, replacing examples and references that would not land there. You flag copy that cannot be translated as written.

Digital PR
- Digital PR Campaign Development — You can help gather the data or assets for a PR campaign someone else designed.
- Link Prospecting and Outreach — You can build a prospect list for a given piece of content and write the pitches yourself, tailoring each one to the site. You follow up without becoming a nuisance and you record what came of it.
- Backlink Profile Analysis — You can tell a genuine link from a spam one, sort a profile by quality and topic, and spot links a site has recently lost. You check a suspicious pattern yourself instead of trusting a tool's score.

Performance Analysis
- Content Performance Analysis — You can pull traffic and ranking data for your own content and say whether it hit its goal.
- Search Ranking and Traffic Reporting — You can report on rankings and organic traffic for a set of pages and describe what changed. You separate a real movement from seasonality or a broken tag before you write it up.
- Content Audit and Pruning — You can audit a section of a site and recommend what to update, merge or retire, with the evidence behind each call. You check what a page is for before judging it on traffic alone.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can break a small piece of work into tasks, sequence them, and run it to a date you agreed, escalating risks before they become slips.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own tasks with reasonable accuracy and deliver at a steady enough pace that other people can plan around you.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can pick up a problem that has no obvious owner and make yourself the accountable party for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put the checks in place to prove it, and hold back a release that misses the bar.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into tractable pieces, weigh the options against evidence, and explain the tradeoff you chose.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently across the systems and tools your team uses daily, and you can explain how your work serves the team's goals.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain a complex topic to people with very different backgrounds, adjusting the detail to the audience without talking down to them.
- Collaboration — You can build working relationships beyond your own team and get things done through people who do not report to you.
- Technical Writing — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a runbook, or a decision record, and make the reasoning as clear as the conclusion.
- Stakeholder Management — You can identify who is affected by your work and keep them updated at a level of detail and a cadence that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can identify a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can onboard someone onto your team's work, answer their questions patiently, and give feedback specific enough to act on.
- Strategic Thinking — You can connect your team's work to its goals and question a task that does not appear to serve them.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- HubSpot Content Marketing Certification (required from Content Marketing Specialist)