There’s a lot more to creating great content than writing a good blog post or putting together a whitepaper. And for in-house content teams, the list of skills they’re expected to have keeps growing.

Alongside strong writing skills, content creators now need to understand search intent, structure pages effectively, apply SEO principles, work with subject experts and make good use of AI tools. They also need to think about how their content might be discovered through AI-assisted search.

That’s a lot to ask of any team, particularly when there’s still the day-to-day work to get through.

The good news is that not every writer needs to become an SEO specialist or AI expert. Upskilling your content team is about helping people build the right skills, work more confidently and develop a shared understanding of what good content looks like.

Why in-house content skills need updating

The way we create and discover content is changing, and it’s not always easy for marketing teams to keep up.

It’s a challenge facing businesses across many industries.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 63% of employers surveyed identified skills gaps as a major barrier to organisational transformation, while 85% planned to prioritise workforce upskilling.

Within marketing, that pressure is particularly visible around AI. Marketing Week’s 2026 Career & Salary Survey found that 66.5% of its respondents had identified an AI skills gap within their team over the previous year.

Of course, knowing your team needs to develop new skills and finding the time to do something about it are two very different things.

Research from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) published in 2026 found that only 31% of marketers felt their organisation invested enough in their professional development, while 78% said workload was the main barrier to improving their skills.

For in-house content teams, this can mean trying to keep up with changing search behaviour and new technologies, as well as higher expectations.

The key to effective upskilling is knowing where to focus your efforts. By recognising your team’s existing strengths and identifying where additional support is needed, you can make training more relevant and worthwhile.

The skills modern content creators need

SEO and AI search have added to the content role, but they haven’t removed the fundamentals of the craft.

Good content creators still need to understand an audience, explain information clearly and make sound editorial decisions, but the difference is that they now need to apply those skills within a more complicated discovery environment.

A capable in-house team now needs to understand:

  • Audience need and search intent – What somebody is trying to understand, compare or do.
  • SEO fundamentals – How keywords, page topics, internal links, titles and search visibility fit together.
  • Page structure – How to organise information so people can scan and understand it easily.
  • Web writing: How to make complex information clear without stripping out useful detail.
  • Evidence and expertise – How to use subject knowledge, first-hand experience, data and reliable external sources.
  • AI-assisted search – How search experiences are changing without chasing unproven optimisation tactics.
  • Responsible AI use – Where generative AI can support research or drafting and where human review is essential.
  • Content workflows – How briefs, subject experts, writers, SEO reviewers and approvers work together.
  • Measurement – How to use performance data to decide what needs improving.

Google’s current guidance reinforces the overlap between established SEO and AI-assisted search. It says its generative AI Search features remain grounded in its core Search ranking and quality systems and advises site owners to focus on valuable, original, well-organised content rather than rewriting pages specifically for AI systems.

This means the challenge content teams face is less about learning a completely new form of content marketing and more about applying these skills consistently.

Read our practical guide to writing for AI and search.

Signs your team has an SEO or AI search skills gap

Skills gaps don’t always appear as an obvious lack of knowledge, but they often show up through the work the team produces.

Skill gap Symptom Training treatment
Search intent Pages rank for irrelevant searches or attract the wrong visitors Intent research and content briefing
SEO fundamentals Keywords are either ignored or heavily repeated Practical SEO training for writers
Page structure Long pages are difficult to navigate or repeat themselves Content planning and information structure
Evidence and expertise Content sounds similar to competitor pages Subject-expert interviewing and evidence use
AI search understanding Team follows conflicting AEO/GEO advice Evidence-led AI search training
AI tool use Output is generic, inconsistent or poorly checked AI workflow and quality-control training
Workflow SEO or expert feedback arrives after the draft is finished Briefing, review and governance
Measurement Pages are published and rarely revisited Content measurement and optimisation

Another sign can be inconsistency between writers.

Some team members may create detailed briefs before they start writing, while others work from little more than a keyword and a blank page. Some may rely heavily on AI for research, while others avoid it altogether. And even those who understand search intent may struggle to turn that knowledge into a well-structured page.

These differences matter because the output of the team then becomes difficult to predict and review, making consistent quality difficult to achieve.

How to assess your current content capability

Before booking training, try to establish where the gaps in your content team’s skills are. A useful assessment doesn’t need to become a large competency project, but an ideal place to start would be with the work the team already produces.

Review a representative group of articles, service pages, product pages or guides and ask:

  • Does the content satisfy the intended search or audience need?
  • Are pages structured clearly before they are written?
  • Do writers understand why particular keywords matter?
  • Is specialist knowledge visible in the final content?
  • Are claims supported where appropriate?
  • Is AI-generated material being checked properly?
  • Are SEO, editorial and subject reviews happening at the right stage?
  • Does the team use performance data after publication?

Then speak to the content team to find out where the gaps could be. These insights can help to guide you towards the most relevant, effective training options.

A simple team skills matrix

To make these findings easier to understand and act on, you can organise them into a simple skills matrix like this:

Skill Writer 1 Writer 2 Content Manager Priority
Search intent Confident Developing Confident Medium
SEO fundamentals Developing Beginner Confident High
Page structure Confident Developing Confident Medium
Evidence and sourcing Developing Developing Confident High
AI tool use Beginner Beginner Developing High
AI search Confident Developing Developing Medium
Measurement Beginner Beginner Developing High

The purpose isn’t to score individuals for performance management. However, by identifying shared gaps and specialist strengths you could work out the areas where coaching may be more appropriate than whole-team training.

Beginner, developing or confident?

Capability levels also help make training more specific. A beginner will understand the concept, but needs guidance to apply it to a real page. Those who are developing a skill can usually apply their learnings, but still needs review or support in more complex situations. A team member who is confident in a skill can apply the skill independently, explain their decisions and help review other people’s work.

However, when considering capability, you should avoid assuming that years of experience automatically equal confidence across every area.

An experienced copywriter may be strong at structure and tone, but relatively new to SEO measurement. A technically strong SEO may understand rankings, but need more training in writing or interviewing subject experts. The right plan for your team should reflect those differences.

What should you train first?

Trying to cover everything at once can make training difficult to apply, so one approach could be to prioritise the skills that influence the rest of the content process.

1. Intent

Start with why the page exists. If the team doesn’t understand the user need behind a search or piece of content, improvements to headings, keywords or AI formatting won’t solve the underlying problem.

Writers should be able to identify who a page is for, what that person needs and what they should understand or do next.

2. Structure

Plan the structure of the work before drafting it. This can help to create a logical order and flow, reduce repetition, make expert input easier to collect and give reviewers something useful to assess before time is spent polishing copy.

3. Writing

Once the purpose and structure are right, focus on clarity. Training should cover introductions, paragraphs, headings, examples, summaries and CTAs. It can be useful to do this in the context of real website pages.

4. Evidence and expertise

This is increasingly important as generic information becomes easier to produce. Google’s 2026 guidance recommends creating valuable, non-commodity content based on genuine knowledge, experience and original viewpoints rather than simply recycling material already available online.

If you regularly cite trusted sources in your content, your content could be viewed as more trustworthy by search engines and AI tools as a result.

Writers can learn to recognise when expert input is needed, ask specialists the right questions and distinguish factual claims from marketing statements that lack supporting evidence.

5. Workflows

Finally, establish clear processes and responsibilities that everyone can follow. Decide who creates the brief, when SEO input is needed, who checks factual accuracy, how AI should be used and who gives final approval.

With clear processes in place, training can strengthen individual skills while improving the quality and consistency of the team’s content.

Learn more with our guide on how to write website content that AI search tools can understand.

Group training or 1-2-1 coaching?

Group training works well when the issue is consistency. If writers, marketers, SEO specialists and reviewers are applying different standards across a single piece or strategy, training them together can create a shared process and vocabulary. It’s particularly useful for areas such as search intent and AI usage policies.

If specific team members need to develop particular skills, 1-2-1 training may be more effective. For example, a subject expert who regularly contributes content might benefit from guidance on making technical information more accessible to online audiences.

The two approaches can also be combined: group training establishes the common standard, while individual coaching deals with specific training gaps.

How to make content training stick

A well-planned training workshop can give your content team the knowledge, skills and confidence to improve how they work. The key is making sure they have opportunities to put what they’ve learned into practice afterwards.

One way to support this is by introducing practical resources that make everyday tasks easier. Content brief templates, AI-use guidelines, review checklists and page-planning frameworks can all help save time, build confidence and encourage greater consistency across the content creation process.

Managers also have an important role to play in reinforcing what people have learned. For example, if someone has been trained to plan a page before writing, they could be encouraged to make that part of their regular workflow. The more closely training is connected to the team’s day-to-day work, the more likely it is to lead to lasting improvements.

Build a scalable way of producing content

Upskilling is particularly valuable for smaller content teams, where time and resources are often stretched.

In the Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 B2B survey, only 35% of North American B2B marketers surveyed said they had a scalable model for creating content. It’s a challenge many in-house teams will recognise: how do you maintain quality and consistency while keeping up with growing demands?

Having clear processes and shared standards makes it easier to produce quality content consistently, without relying too heavily on individual team members or external support.

Training can help by building knowledge, improving collaboration and giving everyone a clearer understanding of what’s expected. It can also help teams handle more everyday decisions independently, leaving external specialists to focus on areas where their expertise adds the most value.

How to measure whether training has worked

Training success shouldn’t only be measured by whether attendees enjoyed the session. Look for evidence that behaviour and output have changed, which might include:

  • Consistency – Are briefs, structures and final pages following a clearer shared standard?
  • Efficiency – Are fewer drafts going through unnecessary rounds of revision?
  • Quality – Are pages clearer, better evidenced and more useful?
  • Confidence – Can writers explain why they have structured or optimised a page in a particular way?
  • Independence – Does the team need less external support for routine SEO and content decisions?
  • Performance – Are relevant search visibility, engagement, conversions or other page-specific measures improving?

Remember, not every change will appear immediately in analytics. A stronger briefing process may first result in fewer rewrites; better subject-expert input may improve quality before it affects search performance; greater SEO confidence may reduce the number of routine questions sent to an agency.

It can be best to use both operational and performance measures to create a full picture.

Learn about our performance marketing and analytics services.

Build capability around the work your team actually does

A confident, capable content team can make better decisions, produce more consistent work and adapt as search continues to evolve. With the right training and support, your team can build on its existing strengths and take greater ownership of content quality and performance.

At Submerge, we provide bespoke SEO, AI search and content training tailored to your team’s needs. Using your own content and workflows, we deliver practical training that helps your team develop skills they can put to work straight away.

Book a free consultation with us today for a chat about how we can help your business.