Working in SEO

As SEOs, our work touches almost every team in an organization. You can expect to talk extensively with your web developers over technical recommendations you'll make. Content may need to be reviewed by legal, or you may need to partner with writers and content marketers to set strategy. Your social media marketing team will inevitably be involved in your promotion plans, and any data-driven strategy will require the help of an analyst.

SEO doesn't — and shouldn't — exist in a vacuum. It touches almost every part of marketing and is inextricable from the technical side of the website. A good SEO will use every resource at hand to understand their target audience so they can deliver what that audience needs (and what the business needs to rank for) — and that means getting to know the brand and company very well. Rest assured that if you haven't met someone on most teams across the organization after starting a new role as an SEO, it's time to connect the dots and fill in those missing puzzle pieces.

In this chapter, we're going to discuss what it means to work in SEO, from what skills you need and the sort of SEO jobs you can eventually land, to the tools you can use and how to get buy-in for your work.

SEOs today generally have three paths when it comes to a career: in-house, agency, or freelance. The type of work you do and the environment in which you work will be heavily influenced by the type of workplace you choose.

In-house SEOs

An in-house SEO is a direct employee of a business. If you're a full-time employee of Moz doing SEO for the Moz website, you're an in-house SEO. All the work you do will be focused on helping that site and business increase visibility, traffic, and conversions via SEO.

This may be an ideal situation if you want to be more of a generalist. In-house SEOs, broadly speaking, are not accompanied by a large marketing team, therefore requiring them to wear many hats. You may be in charge of executing changes to the website, building out the content strategy, and doing link building.

This may be an ideal situation for someone who likes to learn new skills on the go. And speaking of learning, get ready to absorb some industry knowledge — you're going to get to know the industry of your employer inside and out!

As an in-house SEO, you may be granted the privilege of very little red tape. Ideally, you'll work closely with other marketers on your team, leaving the majority of “approvals” to higher-ups.

All of that being said, if you'd rather focus on leveling up into a niche like technical SEO or content marketing, in-house work may not be the most fulfilling career path for you. And if you get bored easily, in-house work may not be the best option — creativity fatigue is real, and you may end up feeling a bit siloed as the only SEO expert around.

Agency SEOs

When people think of working in marketing, more often than not they think of marketing agencies. A marketing agency only offers marketing services, but typically offers those services to multiple businesses, unless they specialize in particular verticals.

Agencies vary in size. There are small boutique agencies that may have less than 20 employees, and there are large agencies with hundreds of people. No matter the size of your agency, the benefit is that you'll be surrounded by like-minded marketers and experts, with plenty of disparate challenges rising daily.

As a member of an agency, you'll likely be juggling multiple projects at once. Rest assured you'll never get bored of your work, as you're constantly being pushed to learn and work efficiently. With tight deadlines and no shortage of work, project management skills are a must for agency SEOs.

One of the major appeals of being an agency marketer is that you have a large and always-expanding network to work with. Even smaller agencies have multiple clients, as well as access to the teams each of those clients work with.

Working at an agency also allows you to focus on mastering your skills and becoming a better SEO. Copywriting, web design, analytics — you name it and there's probably a subject matter expert doing it. Remember though that for every person or team that touches a project, there's always the opportunity for red tape.

Being part of an external team hired specifically to handle one task or problem can be focused and exhilarating, but it can also lead to a constant effort to get buy-in from your clients. You'll almost surely be fighting to be seen as a priority at some point, and proving ROI over and over again can be exhausting. There's also the fact that, unless you have a more senior title, you may not have a say in which clients you take on, which can be a deal-breaker for some.

Freelance SEOs

Setting your own hours and choosing your own clients — sounds dreamy, right? With the rise of the gig economy, freelance SEOs are more and more common. Working for yourself, determining your own business and clients, and maintaining multiple contracts means you have full control of your fate.

Self-employment can have some drawbacks, though. Employer benefits are limited to what you can provide for yourself in some countries like the US — you may miss out on better healthcare options, a 401k, paid time off, and more, unless you provide for it out of pocket. Perks aren't the only things you'll have to pay for — there's no higher marketing budget to cover the tools you need to do your work.

All that said, there are a ton of bonuses to doing freelance SEO. You can accept and decline work on a whim, and you can define your own scope and scale. If you only want to focus on on-page SEO work, that's your prerogative!

More often than not, freelance SEOs will take on a few clients, charge them decently, and focus fully on those clients. This allows for a nice balance between agency-style projects and in-house-style project management.

Finding your niche in SEO

It’s no secret that the riches are in the niches. Each marketing job will likely lead an SEO to a certain niche, or specialization, in either skill or industry. In the coming chapters, we will talk extensively about some of the more common niches for SEOs to work in:

• Enterprise SEO

• E-commerce SEO

• Publisher SEO

• SEO for New Websites & Startups

• Local SEO

A seasoned SEO will bring their hard skills to any interview, and the interviewer will expect candidates for an advanced position to be well-grounded in Google’s guidelines, research, analysis, and reporting of the kind we’ll cover in this chapter and in this guide. However, when seeking to prove yourself qualified for a senior SEO role, you will be well-served by remembering to emphasize your soft skills as well, including:

Tell a compelling experience narrative

Organize the most persuasive facts about your past work history and be able to summarize them into a clear, impressive story. How many clients have you helped? What categories did they fall into (small, medium, enterprise, brick-and-mortar, e-commerce, etc.). What were the best gains you helped these clients achieve and what strategies did you implement to achieve this growth? How long have you been working in SEO and do you have other past experience, such as running your own small business, freelance or agency gigs, or work in other areas of marketing that brought you into this industry with useful added skills?

Be an expert at prioritizing workflows

An in-depth SEO audit will typically turn up dozens, or even hundreds, of tasks that need to be accomplished to begin moving a client forward. For example, an investigation may turn up technical, structural, textual, and reputational challenges. A senior-level SEO will interview the client to determine what their chief goals are and, from that research, be able to turn an unwieldy list of problems into a strategic, prioritized to-do workflow.

Be a strong communicator, regardless of audience

Advanced SEOs should envision themselves as educators who are keen to share what they know. Be ready to explain the fundamentals and curious intricacies of SEO and SEM to clients at all knowledge levels, to co-workers, to bosses, and to shareholders. You will be an extra appealing candidate if, in your educational capacity, you are also regularly presenting to the public via social media, blogging, podcasting, conference speaking, and being quoted by others in industry publications and general media. Remember that the person interviewing you may not be an SEO. Before your interview, research this individual if you can and try to fine-tune your responses to respect their level of knowledge. Avoid acronyms and lean on real-world examples and terminology that can be immediately understood by almost anyone.

Mentally acknowledge imposter syndrome if you experience it, but try to let it flow past you

“People who struggle with imposter syndrome believe that they are undeserving of their achievements and the high esteem in which they are, in fact, generally held. They feel that they aren’t as competent or intelligent as others might think—and that soon enough, people will discover the truth about them.” - Psychology Today

The social profiles of SEO industry workers are all the proof anyone needs to demonstrate the prevalence of imposter syndrome. Pay attention to Twitter and you’ll regularly see peers you have likely always thought of as very accomplished and proficient confessing that they are troubled by this dilemma of not feeling qualified or deserving. If your search for a next-level job is accompanied by these kinds of uncomfortable misgivings, do acknowledge them to yourself but then try to put them on a mental river, like a fallen leaf, and let them flow by you.

Reality is that all forms of SEO are a grand experiment, and therefore, everything you have done and everything you will do in this industry is ongoing trial and error, and you simply can’t fail at that. If one tactic doesn’t yield the result you hoped for, you try another. Good employers and clients should be educated to understand that SEOs don’t control the search engines or user behavior; we simply ideate, implement, measure results, and make adjustments. Be gentle with yourself and believe that, when it comes to search engine optimization, everyone is equally welcome to participate in this exploration we call our work.

Marketing today is very different from the marketing of yesteryear. Marketing teams manage websites, keep social media accounts engaging, work with major search engines, place ads, attribute their efforts using analytics, and create more collateral than ever. And that’s just on the digital side.

SEO touches almost every one of these efforts.

What do you say when someone asks about your job?

Most SEOs will say something along the lines of "helping businesses show up on Google."

Yes, and...

What goes into appearing in coveted positions on the SERPs is far beyond simply "showing up on Google." It's building brand authority that can compete with the likes of your competition, sometimes as intimidating as Wikipedia or Amazon or Google itself. It's educating team members on how their work touches and affects the SEO process. It's advocating for the idea that SEO isn't a one-and-done task for a business — it's a mindset, an active strategy that grows and thrives alongside your business, with needs that change and scale along with that business, as well.

SEO in the marketing org

In making the case for your role and describing what you do, you'd be best served saying something like this:

As an SEO, I help businesses ensure their offerings appear in front of people at the right place and the right time for easy conversion.

There's so much work and marketing crossover embedded in that statement, you'll leave no doubt that what you do is integral to the bottom line.

An SEO may report to the CMO, the head of marketing, marketing acquisition and growth, or even marketing operations. Sometimes SEOs work in technical departments or teams and their interaction with marketing is more of a consultation. If you're an agency SEO or freelance contractor, you may only have a single point of contact. Regardless, the decisions being made — for your role's continued existence, the budget you require, and the tools you use — will usually roll up to someone with a more executive title. And that means you need to know how to make the case for the value you bring to the table.

Words matter. If all we're doing is saying we get websites to show up on Google, how are stakeholders supposed to glean the business value of SEO?

The dollar value of SEO

SEOs have long struggled with getting buy-in from leadership teams. When we minimize what we do (and fail to tie it to the ever-important business priority of money), we do ourselves a disservice.

Buy-in should make you think of one thing: dollar signs. When you're working to get an investment from anyone, whether it’s a team or a potential client, you have to be able to prove there will be a return on that investment.

As you pitch the value of SEO, there are a few things to consider.

• What is the current conversion rate of your organic traffic?

  • How much more revenue/leads would you have if you could increase traffic by 1%?

  • How much more revenue/leads would you have if you could increase the conversion rate by .5%?

• What's the current site speed?

  • For every second you can shed from that (0–5), the conversion rate could increase by 4.42%. What would that do to your revenue/lead gen?

If you need help proving the value of SEO as it pertains to dollars, any MozCon talk from Wil Reynolds since 2018 is a great place to start.

Getting your team on board

Unfortunately, buy-in doesn’t end with the decision-makers. From time to time, you have to get buy-in from the other players on your team. A web developer may not understand why you’re so interested in how pixels are installed on the site. Colleague education is key to your success here — you'll need to help people understand why you make your asks, how they affect your work, and what role those people play in SEO's success. For instance, here, improperly installed pixels can decrease site speed. Slower sites are worse for users, meaning Google won't be a fan, your site may lose rankings, and fewer people will see the site your web dev worked so hard on.

At the end of the day, being a good teammate in any situation goes back to empathy. Try to understand the goals and roadblocks of your teammates, then determine how you may help them reach their goals and/or overcome roadblocks — and vice versa.

Much like finding a workplace, the type of work you want to do will determine the types of tools you use on a day-to-day basis. We've pulled together a few tools many SEOs use on a daily basis to talk about here.

First up, we've got good ol’ Excel (or a spreadsheet program of some kind — Google Sheets can do the job nicely as well). Whether you're tracking citation management, sorting keywords into groups, manipulating keyword data, or keeping track of backlinks, you’ll likely find yourself in a spreadsheet platform. It’s important that you get some of the basics of this program down as soon as possible. It will make your life much easier.

Another thing that will make your life easier as an SEO is being able to attribute dollars to the traffic you drive from your efforts. The most common way to do this is via a platform like Google Analytics. You can track site traffic, where that traffic comes from, and whether or not it’s leading to conversions. Proving ROI with Google Analytics is going to be of the utmost importance no matter what kind of SEO you become.

Other than these general tools, there are some other industry-specific tools you’ll want to be familiar with:

Keyword research

No matter what SEO niche you find yourself in, keyword research will be an integral part of the work you do. Luckily, there are many tools that can be used to conduct keyword research depending on how you’re wanting to get the job done.

If you want to do keyword research as you browse the SERPs, it’s worth looking into the Chrome Extension Keyword Surfer. Keyword Surfer is a free extension that brings keyword data into SERPs on Google, Bing, YouTube, and other sites.

One of the sites Keyword Surfer is compatible with is Answer the Public. Answer the Public scrapes all of the autogenerated searches from Google and other search engines and presents the data in an easy-to-understand way. Combining this freemium site and Keyword Surfer allows for some powerful keyword research.

If you want to take things a step further, you can use Moz’s freemium tool Keyword Explorer. This tool not only tells you keyword information such as volume, competition, and trends, but it also reports on SERP features and related keywords.

Rank tracking

Along with keyword research, you’re going to want to track your progress. With SEO, one of the first indicators of success (or failure) is position changes. Thankfully, Google and Bing have free tools that allow you to track your performance on their platforms. Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console will both allow you to see what queries you are ranking for and how the positions for those queries change over time.

However, if you really want to focus in on certain keywords and your visibility (compared to your competitors) for those keywords over time, you’ll have to invest in a tool. Unsurprisingly, we're big fans of Moz Pro — and with good reason. Moz Pro allows you to track SEO campaigns for multiple sites and competitors with tons of opportunity to slice and dice the data down to what you need. Read more about Moz Pro's rank tracking here.

Link research

Much like keyword research, link research can be done with Chrome Extensions in some instances. Extensions like Check My Links can help you find broken and redirected links on-page for your competitors and potential content that could link to you. Other extensions like our own MozBar can give you information on the number of links and linking domains sites and pages have, both on-page and in the SERPs.

To track link research or do bulk link analysis, you can also use Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. However, your best bet at in-depth analysis will always be a paid tool. Most link research tools will be able to alert you when links are won and lost, as well as what links would be beneficial for your page to win. Learn more about Moz's link research tool, Link Explorer, here.

Site auditors & crawlers

Perhaps one of the most commonly sought-after and used tools in SEO are auditing and crawling tools. Screaming Frog is a freemium desktop-based crawler that scrapes all of the necessary information from your site and generates an Excel-type workbook. This makes it easy to see all of the info you need to make recommendations for changes.

As far as tracking your success and running audits go, this is really where Moz Pro shines. We provide recommendations, track any changes on your site, and show you your optimization progress. From on-demand crawls for a quicker glance or to double-check changes to regularly scheduled full crawls of your site, Moz Pro can highlight critical issues and warnings that you'll want to fix ASAP for optimum site health. Read more about it here.

Citation tracking

Any SEOs that work with a brick-and-mortar location are going to spend a lot of time looking at and working on their citations. Tracking all of that information can be tough, and sometimes it’s easier to use a tool to track it all and find new opportunities. Moz Local helps you manage and sync your citation and listing information, as well as helping with adjacent tasks like reputation management. Read more about Moz Local's capabilities here.

Working in SEO look different if you're working in-house vs agency side or if you're building a business as a freelance SEO. You may find yourself growing as an SEO consultant, or specializing as your career grows into a T-shaped practitioner. Regardless of where you sit organizationally, some things remain critical: alignment on company goals and how to impact them, clarity on your businesses target audience, and a toolkit that works with you to inform and track your progress.

We hope that Moz's Professional's Guide to SEO becomes an essential part of your reference materials as you progress your SEO career.

This chapter on Working in SEO was written by Brie Anderson and Miriam Ellis, Local SEO Subject Matter Expert at Moz.