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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