🎙️ Unscripted SEO Podcast
Why Communication Skills Trump Technical Knowledge: Lessons from Josh Squires of Amsive
17 years in SEO, Associate Director at Amsive — what actually gets SEO careers unstuck, and why the best technical SEOs are also the best communicators.
I recently sat down with Josh Squires, Associate Director of SEO at Amsive, for an episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast. With 17 years of experience, Josh has a perspective on the industry that’s hard to argue with: the technical skills are table stakes — the communication skills are what separate the people who get things done from the people who just identify things to do.
“Navigating Multi-Channel Marketing in the Age of LLMs” — Claude Zdanow and Chris Becker of Onar on tracking brand visibility in LLM responses, and why the Google-only SEO era is over.
— Claude Zdanow & Chris Becker, Onar | Listen: Multi-Channel Marketing in the Age of LLMs →
Key Takeaways
- Technical SEO recommendations without stakeholder buy-in go nowhere. The site audit that identifies 40 critical issues is worthless if you can’t prioritize them, communicate their business impact, and get a developer to implement them. Implementation is the job.
- The ability to translate technical to business language is a career accelerator. “Your page speed is 62” means nothing to a CMO. “We’re losing an estimated 15% of mobile conversions because the page loads too slowly” gets budget.
- 17 years teaches you to be humble about what you know. The SEO that Josh practiced in 2007 is unrecognizable compared to today. The practitioners who’ve thrived are the ones who stayed curious and let go of past certainties.
- Agency SEO and in-house SEO require different communication muscles. In-house, you’re building internal political capital. Agency-side, you’re managing expectations and trust across multiple client relationships simultaneously. Both require communication — just different flavors of it.
Why Communication Is the Actual Job
Josh’s core argument: most SEO work is blocked not by a lack of knowledge but by a failure to communicate. The recommendation is made, the ticket is created, the priority is set — and then nothing happens for six months because no one made the business case clearly enough for engineering leadership to deprioritize something else.
The SEOs who get things implemented are the ones who learned to speak the language of the people who control the resources: developers, product managers, CMOs, and CFOs. Each has a different decision framework. Learning to speak each one’s language is a skill, and it’s learnable.
Connect with Josh Squires
- Company: amsive.com
- LinkedIn: Josh Squires
The Unscripted SEO Podcast features candid, unscripted conversations with SEOs and digital marketers. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.
