Content Marketing Specialist job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Explain why competitors rank for a topic and turn the biggest gaps in your coverage into briefs.
- 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.
- Write a brief for a routine piece from your own research, covering the target keyword, intent, structure and required sources.
- Build and run the calendar for a topic area, balancing writer capacity against publishing goals, and resequence it when priorities shift.
- Structure a page for a competitive term around what searchers need, and keep the wording natural instead of repeating the keyword.
- Write metadata for a competitive page that improves click-through without prompting, and test variants against results.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Content Executive level (level 1 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds HubSpot Content Marketing Certification

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.
- Competitor and Content Gap Analysis — You can explain why competitors rank for a topic and turn the biggest gaps in your coverage into briefs.
- 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.
- 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 Optimization
- On-Page SEO Optimization — You can structure a page for a competitive term around what searchers need, and keep the wording natural instead of repeating the keyword.
- 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 find common technical issues on a section of the site, such as broken links, duplicate titles, missing alt text or content absent from the mobile version.
- 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 common page types such as articles and products with every property the rich result needs, and clear the validator's errors.
- 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 an unfamiliar topic from primary research, in plain language, structured for the search intent.
- 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, cutting and restructuring it into plain language with accessible headings and link text.
- Content Localization — You can adapt a piece for another market with a translator's guidance, replacing examples and references that would not land there.
- Content Quality and Trust — You can add the sources, author byline and first-hand details a brief calls for, and flag any claim you cannot support.
- Content Management and Publishing Operations — You can set up and run the publishing workflow for a topic area, including templates, roles, review steps and scheduled publication.

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 piece of content and write a tailored pitch for each site, without paying for or trading links.
- Backlink Profile Analysis — You can tell a genuine link from a spam one, including paid and exchanged links, and sort a profile by quality and topic.

Performance Analysis
- Organic Performance Analysis and Reporting — You can pull traffic and ranking data for your own pages, including the Generative AI performance report in Search Console, and say whether each hit its goal.
- 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 organize a small piece of work into steps, put them in a sensible order, and finish it by the date you agreed, raising problems before they cause a delay.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own work with reasonable accuracy and keep 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 accountable for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put checks in place to show it has been met, and hold work back when it falls short.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into pieces and weigh the options for each against the evidence.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently with the tools and methods 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.
- Writing & Documentation — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a policy, a report, 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 frequency that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can spot a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can help someone new settle into 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)