Selecting A Company To Work For

 

Choosing who you work for has a major impact on every part of your life from success and growth in your career to your mental and emotional health. Being proactive in selecting who you choose to work with can go a long way to avoiding toxic work situations. 

So what factors do I look at when evaluating a company to work for?

1. SEO need
2. Resources to do the work
3. Direct manager/budget manager
4. Company leadership
5. Company Culture
6. Salary
7. Benefits

1. SEO Need

There's a reality every SEO comes to realize; not every company needs SEO. And not every company needs it to the point of hiring an agency on a large monthly retainer or hiring a full-time employee. Unfortunately, many companies aren't great at evaluating that fact before choosing to make a hire, which puts you in the awkward position of attempting to find ways to provide value.

What do I mean by this? Let's illustrate.

A VC-backed business sells a niche product to school districts. Their product category has a small amount of search volume and there are only a handful of top-of-funnel searches relevant to the business. Should the business optimize for those few terms? Absolutely. Do they need someone to work full-time to do it? Probably not. Instead this company should probably choose a go-to-market strategy that relies primarily on events, ABM, demand generation or field marketing rather than inbound.

So how do you evaluate whether a business can benefit from your expertise?

• Check search volume: This doesn't need to be a thorough analysis, but check to see if there are more than a handful of relevant keywords for this business
• Ask about current successful channels: A business that has been able to scale Google Ads, for example, has a large amount of keywords that convert. 
• Ask about growth levers: Will the company be adding additional products or services that will expand the number of keywords the company should rank for? 
• Manage expectations: If the hiring manager seems to have a goal in mind that far exceeds what you believe to be possible based on initial keyword research, consider that a major red flag that needs to be resolved before you sign an offer.

2. Resources To Do The Work

More than any other marketing channel, SEO is dependent on cross-functional collaboration. To get your work done you need access to the CMS, and in general, at least a portion of the web developer's time. To create content, you need access to writers and designers. To build backlinks, you need access to PR and data sources. If you're doing B2B, you need to be able to set up email nurtures and collaborate with the sales team. 

At this stage your essentially looking for two things:

1. Does the company have the personnel and/or budget to allow you to execute on a SEO plan?

2. Will you be able to get SEO work prioritized and completed in a reasonable amount of time?

Some ways to evaluate this include:

• Asking about the current structure of the marketing team
• Asking about how goals and priorities are set
• Asking about budget and where SEO currently sits in the list of priorities
• If the current team doesn't have in-house creative, ask how those resources are typically sourced
• If you have the chance to interview with potential coworkers, ask about what challenges or barriers they face in their role

3. Direct Manager/Budget Manager

Depending on where you work, your direct manager and budget manager may or may not be the same person. So evaluating both is critical. 

Things To Look For In A Direct Manager

If your manager's role is also in SEO, there are some key things you want to look for:

• SEO expertise: Since this industry doesn't have a set educational or certification path, the knowledge and expertise each SEO professional has will vary considerably. Some will have had specialized roles that limited their exposure to different parts of SEO and others will have a title far above their experience level because good SEOs are (still) hard to find. 
• Red Flags: A few red flags to watch for include: inaccurate knowledge/understanding of SEO, lack of awareness around their own weaknesses, unwilling to consider or defer to your expertise, an obsession with shortcuts and manipulating numbers, and too much focus on site speed and core web vitals with no strategy around content or keyword growth.

If your manager's role is not in SEO, check for the following:

• SEO mindset: How do they think about and perceive SEO? Do they understand the full scope of your role, or do they see it a purely technical? Do they think they know how SEO works but actually don't? Will they listen to you when you correct them?
• Focus and priorities: Does the manager view SEO as a critical function? Do they have pet projects and channels or do they advocate for channels equitably? 

Things to look for in any manager:

• Communication skills
• Empathy
• Previous management experience if they are managing a cross-functional team
• Leadership skills over micromanagement
• Goals that are set by the team instead of dictated by management

Things To Look For in a Budget Manager:

Your budget manager may or not also be your direct manager. Typically the person making budget decisions will be VP level or higher. While this person may not be as directly involved in your day-to-day work, they are critical to your success at the company. 

Some things to look for in the budget manger:

• Interest in the growth of organic channels
• Willingness to remove barriers and provide cross-department support
• An understanding of SEO timeframes and order of operations. Results should be projected in months and years and content has to be live on the site before keywords can start to rank.
• An understanding of the resources SEO needs to succeed from dev time to budget for content creation

4. Company Leadership

No matter how great your are at your role, the company's leadership team will have a huge impact on how successful you are. Some things to help you evaluate the skill of the leadership team and overall health of the company include:

• Revenue growth
• Product-market fit
• Tangible future growth levers such as new product features or new products altogether
• Organization/structure
• Expertise

5. Company Culture

Company culture is how the work get done. Companies may try to document this via mission statements or shared values, which can be a good starting point when researching them, but always compare those values with your actual interactions with others.

Green flags of a good company culture

• People are noticeably happy
• Everyone is treated with respect
• No badmouthing
• Ability to acknowledge challenges/weaknesses and how they're being addressed
• You leave the interview feeling good about yourself and excited to work with the people you met

6. Salary

Any company you work for should pay you what you're worth. If they try to lowball you, that will be just the first of many interactions where you and your expertise are devalued or taken for granted. Educate yourself on what the typical salary range is for someone with your many years of experience, so you can ask for an appropriate salary. 

7. Benefits

Benefits are a huge part of your compensation package, so don't take them lightly. In some cases a slightly lower salary with significantly better health insurance coverage will be worth a lot more than a higher salary and poor coverage. Also consider the 401k vesting schedule. Do you vest immediately, after two years or after five years? Are there stock options? How valuable are those stock options? 

A cereal bar will never make up for a bad manager, poor company culture or a bad salary, but calculating the monetary value of the benefits and perks the company offers will help you to make the right decision.

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I'm Starting A Career In SEO; Where Should I Work?

Where you work has a huge impact on the amount you can learn and the amount of hands-on experience you can get. So being deliberate in choosing the right work environment can help you streamline your career path.

My career took the following path:

Agency - 5 Years

Working at an agency is about as close as you can get to a legal internship or medical residency. Since the SEO field doesn't have standardized measures for professional development, finding an environment where you're surrounded by fellow SEOs you can learn from will have a huge impact on how quickly you can learn and grow. While it is possible to join a team of in-house SEOs, your time at an agency will be the only time you work with an entire company of people solely focused on what you do. 

Working at an agency I gained the following:

• Experience across a wide range of business types from eCommerce to B2B.
• Diagnosing a huge range of SEO problems from Black Hat techniques to backend code
• Learning from my co-workers experience on their client's websites not just my own clients.
• Exposure to every SEO tool and analytics platform
• Hands-on link building
• Efficiency and prioritization of tasks that will get client results
• Built an extensive network early in my career

In-House On A Small Team Of Individual Contributors - 4 Years

When you join a small, in-house marketing team, there's generally only one person per speciality. So you will need to have the confidence and the skillset not only to answer SEO questions but to insert yourself and advocate for what you need to reach SEO goals. 

Working on a small, in-house team I gained the following:

• Exposure to every business function from sales ops to customer success
• Additional responsibilities and experiences outside of SEO from webdev to organizing events to managing GoogleAds.
• Deep understanding of how business goals are set and budgets are distributed
• Using keyword research to influence product development and overall business strategy
• Managing agencies and contractors
• Understanding of why branding, security and legal requirements exist
• How to slow down and really develop a well-thought out, long-term strategy
• Developing a well thought out site structure and CMS functionality
• How to accomplish a lot with limited budget and manpower.
• Project management

In-House On A Midsize Team With Direct Reports - Current

Joining a larger team can be magical. Work that used to take a year to complete suddenly gets done in months. With the right business case, you get the budget for anything you need. Best of all, you likely have a VP whose sole focus is advocating for the work that you do and getting you the resources that you need. At the same time, cross functional collaboration can be harder. Every team has a lot that they're working on, so getting an email sent or PR support will take more than a quick meeting or Slack message. (Those teams also probably report to a different VP).

Working on a midsize team I gained the following

• Scale: Setting larger goals, having larger budgets, creating large amounts of content
• Team: The bigger your revenue goal the more you can grow your team to reach that goal
• Systems: Processes and documentation that allow a team to work seamlessly together

So What Career Path Do I Recommend?

Internship- Use this time to develop hard skills you need without the added pressure of being accountable for results

Agency OR direct report to another SEO - Use this time to hone your skillset and learn as much as you possibly can about SEO. While I spent 5 years at an agency, I'd honestly plan to leave after about 2-3 years. If you go in-house instead, be sure you are working directly for someone who can mentor you in SEO. 

In-House - Once you've honed your SEO skillset, moving in-house will expose you to how a full marketing team functions, eliminate barriers to people, budget and information, and frankly reduce a whole lot of stress. 

Ultimately, find a place to work where you have the skillset to succeed but also the capacity and means to grow. 

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Onboarding With A Company

If there's one thing working at an agency will teach you, it's how to onboard with a company quickly and seamlessly. Unlike an in-house role where an employee of 1-2 months will be excused as "new" and "still learning the ropes", at an agency you more than likely already created a strategy and started executing on it by month two. 

Regardless of where you work, taking ownership of your own onboarding will help you to start having an impact faster in your role and will quickly give your boss confidence that you know what you're doing and can be trusted. 

Kickoff Calls

At an agency, the majority of your onboarding takes place in a one-hour kickoff call. Given the amount of information you need to collect in such a short period of time, having a clear checklist of what you need to learn is critical.

A typical kickoff call template would look something like this:

• What are the primary goals you're hoping to achieve?
• What led you to hire an agency?
• Who are your main competitors?
• Who are your buyer personas?
• Do you have documented messaging?
• What are your most important products/services? Which ones do you want us focusing on? (Nearly every company offers more than one product and typically some are more important than others.)
• What work has been done on SEO in the past?
• Who is involved in content approvals?
• Who is a subject matter expert we can leverage? (For technical clients)

Things to request access to

• Google Analytics and any other analytics system the company uses regularly
• Google Search Console
• Design style guide
• Copy style guide

In-House Onboarding

Similar to a kickoff call, your first two weeks at an in-house job is a critical time to gather the information you need to do your job. In addition to the information you need to do SEO, you'll also use this time to get familiar with the company as a whole. 

Unlike an agency situation where a company has already made a business decision to hire an agency to fulfill a pre-identified need, your in-house role will include identifying needs and requesting necessary resources based on a one to two year plan. 

Jumping into a site audit may help you to formulate that plan, but spending the first few weeks making minor dev requests won't have the same impression on company leadership as creating a strategy with expected ROI and budget requests will.

I'd divide your onboarding process in the following often overlapping phases:

Phase 1: Information Gathering

This is the time you focus on getting access to all of the information, people and tools to form a coherent strategy. 

Tools to request access to:

• Google Analytics 
• Every other analytics system the company uses regularly
• Google Search Console
• Ahrefs (Or your preferred tool)
• ScreamingFrog (Or your preferred tool)
• Excel
• Website's backend
• Creative request form
• Legal request form
• Project management tool
• The company's product (For SaaS. Most companies will set you up with a normal user account as well as demo access.)
• Shared Google Drive folders

Information to collect:

• Design style guide
• Copy style guide
• Revenue data segmented by organic channels
• Conversion rate data by first touch organic landing pages
• Messaging docs
• Persona docs
• Product information (In the form of support or sales enablement documents)
• Budget request and management process
• Companies quarterly or annual goals
• Marketing department's quarterly or annual goals
• Previous SEO strategy docs (collect this verbally if there's no documentation)
• PPC keyword and conversion data

People to meet:

A lot of companies will set up meet and greets as part of the onboarding process, but if that's not done for you, be sure to meet and get to know the following groups of people:

• Product marketing
• Content/Copy
• Legal
• Dev
• Creative
• Product manager
• SMEs
• Email
• Paid
• CRO 
• PR
• Social media
• Sales

Use this time to listen and hear their perspective; avoid immediately jumping in with your own ideas. At this point there's a lot you don't know about the company, what's been done in the past and potential roadblocks you may run into. Employees who have been at the company a while can help you to head in the right direction and avoid wasting time on unnecessary tasks.

Phase 2: Research

Now you're ready to dive into actual SEO work. The goal of this phase is to gather the data you need to put together your one year SEO plan.

Complete a site audit and group findings by priority. If the website has more than a handful of pages and a blog, it may also be helpful to create a visual sitemap to help you identify how the site is currently structured and whether the structure needs to be updated.

Identify groups of existing website pages and map them to keywords. Examples of groups might include:

• Product Pages
• Industry/Persona-based pages
• Templates
• Use Cases
• How-To's
• Blog Posts
• Brand Terms (home page, review pages, FAQ page, pricing page)

Complete full keyword research based on competitors. Group keywords by keyword group and keep those secondary keywords in the spreadsheet to use for forecasting later. Combine that research with your mapped pages to identify new pages that need to be created and current pages that need to be optimized. 

Complete an initial link building analysis. Based on competitive research on your core product keywords, about how many links do you need to build? How do you compare at the domain level to your competitors? Would a broader digital PR campaign be helpful? 

Will your answer to these questions change as you start working? Absolutely. The goal of this initial research is to gather enough data to justify budget for link building work. 

Phase 3: Strategy

You're now ready to pull all of that information together into a single strategy document. I recommend a Google Slide or PowerPoint, so it's ready to present to stakeholders. I recommend formatting a strategy doc into the following sections:

• Gaps between the company and its competitors. Keep this high level such as differences in organic traffic volume, domain authority, and links.
• Projected organic traffic and revenue based on increasing current keyword rankings and building new content.
• Summarization of content needs by content types. EX:
• 5 product pages
• 50 blog posts
• 6 templates
• Summarization of link needs
• Budget and other resources needed with expected ROI
• Resources to include:
• Copy (in-house and/or freelance)
• Content (in-house and/or freelance)
• Link budget
• PR (in-house and/or freelance)
• Dev time
• Design work (in-house and/or freelance)
• SEO

Phase 4: Roadshow

Once the strategy is in place, it's time to get buy in from stakeholders, budget decision makers, your boss and supporting co-workers. Unless you work with a team of less than 10, avoid the temptation of meeting with everyone at once. Instead present the plan several times to smaller, logical groups. Each group will have its own areas of interest and questions that will be easier to address with less people in the room. It will also allow you to seek input from each group, so they feel you are working with them instead of steamrolling. 

Phew, ready for the weekend? Yes, this onboarding process is extensive, but I promise if you put the work in upfront it will ensure you don't waste time pursuing the wrong strategy or fighting for resources. 

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