I have been working in digital marketing, specifically SEO, since the very start of my career in 2015. Within that time I have worked in a variety of environments. From your typical digital marketing agency in a city close to where I live, followed by in-house positions in various company sizes and types, and now I am firmly embedded in house at Land of Rugs, one of the UK’s leading online rug retailers.

One thing that has always been front and centre within my mind, ever since starting my career, is career progression. I am not a person that is happy being mediocre. Wherever I go, I want to ensure I am excelling in my positions and moving up the ladder as quickly as possible. One issue I have, especially working in house compared to agency work, is it seems to be a lot harder to move up within in-house than it is compared to someone working within an agency.

There are a number of different reasons for this, but I want to focus on the number one reason SEO professionals working in house struggle to move up. The way SEO is seen within businesses.

In this article, I am going to run through the top three issues in-house SEOs see in their day to day work, essentially the three main pillars to career progression. I am also going to give you some actionable advice as to what you can do to solve these issues. I’m also going to use the end of the article to talk about something I’m incredibly passionate about, evangelising SEO within all businesses.

Issue Number 1: Lack of Knowledge

The main issue within SEO career progression in house is the way SEO is seen compared to agency side. When you work for an agency your peers, direct reports and employers know the value SEO brings to the table. It doesn’t matter whether organic traffic is the main driver of your business, or it brings in a smaller amount compared to other channels. Your employers will be able to see the value you bring. When working in house, it is sometimes a struggle for your employers to see what you are really doing. Of course, they can see the numbers of traffic you are bringing in with a quick check-in Google Analytics, but considering the average salary for an SEO professional in the UK is £42,500, it can be difficult for them to see why they are paying you this amount of money. 

Sometimes, employers can struggle to see what you do in a day. They may not understand the amount of keyword research, intent analysis, link building, meta title and description changes and, of course, the inhuman amount of A/B tests you are running at any one time.

We, as SEO professionals, know the amount of work it takes to rank keywords highly in Google. But your employers? They may not understand this as much! For them, it may be seen as simple as publishing a new page on the site and building some links. It takes a lot more work than this.

Not only this, but whenever you talk to employers about career progression, they are going to focus on the fact that, generally, you are also going to be asking for a pay rise, potentially asking for more resources or a direct report to bring into the business, and this takes away from their bottom line.

Solving the Lack of Knowledge Issue

There are some simple things you can do to tackle the lack of knowledge around SEO within the business you work in. Perhaps the easiest one, and the one that is going to get the easiest sign off is running workshops within your business about how different aspects of the business’ operation impact SEO.

Run talks with your developers and explain how different website changes can impact the performance of that website in the rankings. Speak to your CRO team and mention how intrusive ads cause issues with on-page metrics such as bounce rate, pages per session and dwell time. A little bonus fact, intrusive ads also cause an issue with your CWV (Core Web Vitals) scores, but I won’t go into this as it’s a whole separate article which Billie has already covered so well!

Another thing you can do to tackle the lack of knowledge within SEO is to sign the executive team within the business up to your favourite SEO newsletters. There are so many amazing newsletters out there that do not spam your mailbox, do not take much time at all to read and can ensure your executive team are staying up to date on all things SEO! Some great examples are Rich Snippets from Traffic Think Tank, Brian Dean’s amazing newsletter and Search Engine Journal’s newsletter. None of these emails will cause any issues with spam, and only ever put out what is valuable information.

Of course, as the in-house specialist, you need to understand that no member of your executive team are going to be SEO experts and that’s ok. As harsh as it sounds, it is literally your job to understand how SEO works, keep up to date with the latest changes with Google’s algorithms and ensuring your business is doing the best work it can online. 

How This Helps

There is a simple reason why ensuring your executive team and peers within other departments are up to speed on SEO, and it’s all about creating understanding and sympathy for what you do on a day to day basis. When the people that work with you daily understand how hard you (and your team, if you are that far in your career) work to rank content on their website, they are going to be a lot easier to convince when it comes to hiring new staff members, ensuring you can transition into a people manager role when ready and adding tools to your martech stack.

Issue 2: The Jack of All Trades

Another issue when it comes to working in-house is the lack of help available. When you are hired into an in-house role, especially if this is their first SEO hire, you will find that you are doing literally everything when it comes to ranking sites. Within agencies, especially large agencies, you will probably find that there are different teams for everything involved in SEO. You will have a content team, an outreach team, maybe even a team dedicated to running A/B tests as well. It’s easy to move up in this type of environment and start managing that team individually, then moving up to lead divisions.

In-house is a completely different story, it’s common that you will find that you are probably going to be running the entire operation. You will be responsible for creating content, running outreach on this content, running a wide number of A/B tests on site and analysing all of your SERP competitors yourself! Not only can this be challenging, but it can lead to burnout very quickly.

And on top of all this, you may have been asked to take on other areas of the company’s digital presence. You may have been tasked with running social media, potentially running paid ads too. All of this adds to the pressure on you and leads to quick burnout.

I have been in this situation myself, up until March when we took on an extremely talented digital marketing executive to take over the branding side of the business, I was doing everything when it came to ranking our site. I was doing the vast majority of the content creation/updates, I was building the majority of links to the websites and doing everything else to improve our organic traffic. On top of this, I was running the company’s social media accounts, working with influencers to promote our stock this way and everything else with running the brand online now.

Solving the Issue with Being the Jack of All Trades

This answer is going to seem very obvious, but please bear with me as I will explain my thinking. The simple way to solve your problem of being the jack of all trades within your business is to ensure the wheels are put in motion to hire an SEO team. Play your cards right, and you can ensure you are leading this team!

Within your SEO team you are going to need:

• SEO Manager (AKA Head of SEO, SEO Director etc)
• SEO Specialist
• Link Building/Outreach Executive
• Content Writer
• Social Media Manager

I have included the last two as, well we all know, social media and content writing also fall into the category of SEO when you play your cards well. Also, having these people within a team can leave your SEO staff to what they are best at… SEO!

But what happens if you don’t have the budget to hire an SEO team? If your turnover year on year is too low, you simply won’t have the budget to pay your staff. When this problem arises, you can hire freelancers and virtual assistants like I have done (and still do) very successfully in the past. These will allow you to outsource some of your work, and ensure you can spend the majority of your time growing revenue for your employers.

The advantage of hiring freelancers and virtual assistants is you only pay them for when you need them, even if it is only an hour or two a week. You also don’t need to pay other expenses when hiring staff (National Insurance etc).

Then, once your company revenue has grown enough, you can start to build an in-house team. Naturally, you are going to be at the front of the queue to lead that team. Especially as you will now have some people management experience from managing your freelancers!

Issue 3: Selling your Ideas

Like it or not, to be successful as an in-house SEO, you need to be good at sales! Of course, you are not selling products to consumers, but you are going to need to sell your ideas to management! You’re going to need to convince them to run with your metadata experiments, convince them to spend the additional £200 per month on that tool you need, convince them to hire a freelancer for 5 hours per week to write content for you!

This really is all I am going to say on this issue, because it is really that simple. If you cannot sell your ideas to management, you are going to have less of a chance progressing with your in-house role to where you want to be. So, with that being said, I’ll jump straight into how you can solve this problem.

Solving the Sales Issue

When it comes to selling your ideas, especially to management, there is one simple piece of data they are going to want to see. Above all else. They are going to want to see how whatever it is you are trying to get them to do will improve revenue. It’s that simple. So you need to break it down into monetary value.

Let’s say, for example, it takes you 30 hours of planning, writing and outreach in total to get a piece of content ranking, but getting that piece of content ranking where it does generates an additional 15,000 users to your website per month (average, as it will depend on search volume, CTR etc at that time). If these additional 15,000 users result in an additional £5,000 of revenue, then it is going to be worth it.

Now, let’s say a freelance content writer (who will be able to save you 20 hours per month because they take on the content planning and writing) costs £50 per hour for you to hire. You hire them for 20 hours at a cost of £1,000… It’s going to be easy for your management team to see how this will benefit them, and they will surely hire that freelancer!

Of course. I have just used one example here, but there are plenty of options for you to show additional value in what you are doing to management. Ultimately helping you get your team and martech stack where it needs to be, all ready for you to lead them into the future!

I managed to do this myself at Land of Rugs. When I came into the business in December 2020, I was able to have a great impact on the number of backlinks we were getting to existing content, which helped our organic ranking. So I was able to convince management to hire our digital marketing exec, who now runs the branding of the business, as it allows me to spend more time on outreach. Because I can spend more time on outreach, I build more links and rank us higher.

When I joined the business, they had 817 referring domains. We’re now sitting pretty (currently) at 1,467 referring domains. So it’s easy for my management team to see the value I bring, even just to this side of SEO.

Evangelising SEO within Companies

The best way I can summarise this article is by saying one thing. You need to start work on evangelising SEO within your business. You need to make sure that from the top down, the people in your business understand SEO and how even small changes can make a large impact. Let’s break it down into different business areas. I’ve only focussed on the two main departments, your executive branch and developers as these are the areas you need to be focussing on the most. I’m also aware this article is quite long already, and don’t want to ramble!

Executive Management

As I explained a little bit earlier in the article, when your management team understands SEO, they are going to be a lot more sympathetic to your role. They will be able to fully understand the value you bring to their bottom line. Because of this, they are going to be willing to listen to your ideas when it comes to making changes on the website, more willing to bring you into discussions about hiring marketing staff, more willing to pay you what you’re worth. Your influence within the business rises as a whole as management can directly see the impact SEO (and you) have on their bottom line.

That being said… They’re also going to be on it when it comes to mistakes too! Everyone makes mistakes, it’s natural. But when a mistake you make leads to a hit in revenue, you will lose credibility in the business for a short time. Believe me, I have been there.

Development Team

Almost any time I look at a case study where a website has suddenly lost lots of organic visitors and rankings, excluding core updates which can happen to the best of us, it is ALMOST ALWAYS down to development teams making changes without consulting SEOs within the business.

Imagine what would happen if your development team made changes to the site resulting in the canonical URLs being removed site-wide… You don’t want to, right? It happens, more often than you might think!

Ensuring your developers are aware of how changes on a website impact organic traffic means they’re more likely to bring you into discussions about site changes. This way, you are able to fix mistakes before they’re pushed live and ensure you are not going to drop organic traffic and revenue without being involved in the discussion.

So there we have it! I hope this article has given you some more insight into the issues in-house SEOs have growing their careers. If you do work in-house, hopefully, you can use the tips within this article to advance your own career! That’s my end goal with this article!

If you have any questions at all, I am happy to help! You can find me on Twitter, where I am almost inhumanly active…

Or you can catch Ryan at Brighton SEO this September!