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.