SEO
Understanding Information Security & Risk Management
This edited extract is from How to Use Customer Data by Sachiko Scheuing ©2024 and reproduced with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.
I have an extremely confidential piece of information on a particular sheet of paper. This A4-sized paper contains a list of Christmas presents I plan to give to my family members.
To make sure that no one gets access to this information, I have hidden it in my home office, in the cupboard next to my desk. There you find a chunky English dictionary.
When you open the page where “Christmas” is listed, you will find my precious list, carefully folded into two.
But what if my children or my other half comes to look something up in an analogue dictionary? Arguably, the risk is small, but I am not taking any chances. I have a secret language called Japanese.
My family might find that piece of paper, but all they will see will be タータンチェックの野球帽 and 腕時計, which are basically hieroglyphs to them.
Thanks to this, my family enjoys wonderful moments exchanging gifts every Christmas. Just writing about this makes me grin, imagining the surprised faces and a burst of laughter, surrounded by the green scent of the Christmas tree and the obligatory mulled wine.
This motivates me to conceal this highly sensitive information even more!
We will discuss how companies and their marketing department can protect their secrets, and their data, so that they, too, can bring a smile to their customers’ faces.
Understanding Information Security
In some games, you have this “get out of jail card.” With these cards, you can avoid missing out on a round of games. What if I said GDPR has something similar?
It is called data security.
The GDPR provisions for data security are in line with the risk-based approach embedded in law, where risk is minimized, and more flexibility is given to controllers.
For instance, when regulators decide on fines, they must take security measures companies have put in place to protect the data into consideration (see Article 83(2)c of GDPR) (legislation.gov.uk, 2016).
Say your laptop is stolen.
If it was encrypted, you do not need to inform your customers that there was a data breach. Not having to inform your customers saves the brand image your marketing department has been building for years.
That is one reason why data security is such an important discipline. Many organizations have a separate security department and a chief information security officer who heads the functional areas.
Those marketers who had security incidents published by news outlets must know how life-saving security colleagues can be in times of need.
Definition Of Information Strategy
The word data security is not found in Article 4 of GDPR, the article where definitions are listed. Instead, the word “security” appears in Article 5, where the basic premises of the data protection law are described.
In other words, data security is one of the main principles of the GDPR, “integrity and confidentiality.”
GDPR expects organizations to ensure the prevention of unauthorized or unlawful processing, accidental loss, destruction, or damage of data as one of the starting points for protecting personal data.
TOMs must be implemented to this end so that the integrity and confidentiality of the data are protected (Article 5(f) GDPR) (legislation.gov.uk, 2016).
Outside Of GDPR, Information Security Is Defined As Follows
Information security is the safeguarding of information and information systems against deliberate and unintentional unauthorized access, disruption, modification, and destruction by external or internal actors. (Gartner, Inc., 2023)
Information security is the technologies, policies, and practices you choose to help you keep data secure. (gov.uk, 2018)
Information security: The protection of information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction in order to provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability. (NIST, 2023)
Approach To Information Security
Just as marketing professionals created strategic frameworks – 4Ps, 7Ps, 4Cs, and so on – so the school of information security strategy has come up with frameworks: the CIA triad and the Parkerian Hexad.
CIA stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.
Donn Parker, a security consultant, later expanded this framework with three more elements, namely Utility, Authenticity, and Possession.
Below is a brief description of the six aspects of the Parkerian Hexad (Bosworth et al, 2009).
Availability
Availability refers to the ability of the organization to access data. When, for instance, there is a loss of power and your marketers cannot access customer data, it is considered an availability problem.
The file is there, so it is not stolen. However, the marketer is temporarily unable to access the particular data.
Utility
Utility of the Parkerian Hexad relates to the problem of losing the usefulness of the data. For instance, if a campaign manager loses the encryption key to the data, the data is still there, and it can be accessed.
However, the data cannot be used because the emails needed for carrying out an email campaign are encrypted so they are useless.
Integrity
Maintaining integrity refers to preventing unauthorized changes to the data.
For instance, if an intern of the marketing department accidentally deletes the field “purchased more than two items” within the dataset, this is an integrity-related security incident.
If the manager of the intern can undo the deletion of the field, then the integrity of the data is intact.
Typically, integrity is maintained by assigning different access rights, such as read-only access for interns and read-and-write access for the marketing manager.
Authenticity
Authenticity relates to the attribution of data or information to the rightful owner or the creator of that data or information.
Imagine a situation where your advertising agency, acting as your data service provider, receives a fake email which instructs them to delete all your customer data.
The agency might think that it is a genuine instruction from your company, and executes the command. This is then an authenticity problem.
Confidentiality
When someone unauthorized gets access to a particular marketing analytic file, confidentiality is being breached.
Possession
The Parkerian Hexad uses the term possession to describe situations where data or information is stolen.
For instance, a malevolent employee of the marketing department downloads all the sales contact information to a mobile device and then deletes them from the network. This is a possession problem.
Risk Management
In addition to understanding the problems you are facing, using the Parkerian Hexad, your organization must know the potential security risks for the business.
Andress suggests a useful and generic five-step risk management process, for a variety of situations (Andress, 2019).
Step 1: Identify Assets
Before your organization can start managing your marketing department’s risks, you need to map out all data assets belonging to your marketing department.
In doing so, all data, some distributed in different systems or entrusted to service providers, must be accounted for.
Once this exercise is completed, your marketing department can determine which data files are the most critical. RoPA, with all processes of personal data mapped out, can be leveraged for this exercise.
Step 2: Identify Threats
For all data files and processes identified in the previous step, potential threats are determined. This may mean holding a brainstorming session with marketers and security and data protection departments to go through the data and processes one by one.
The Parkerian Hexad from the previous section can be a great help in guiding through such sessions. It will also be helpful to identify the most critical data and processes during this exercise.
Step 3: Assess Vulnerabilities
In this step, for each data-use surfaced in Step 2, relevant threats are identified.
In doing so, the context of your organization’s operation, products and services sold, vendor relations as well as the physical location of the company premises are considered.
Step 4: Assess Vulnerabilities
In this step, the threats and vulnerabilities for each data and process are compared and assigned risk levels.
Vulnerabilities with no corresponding threats or threats with no associated vulnerabilities will be seen as not having any risk.
Step 5: Mitigate Risks
For the risks that surfaced in Step 4, measures necessary to prevent them from occurring will be determined during this stage.
Andress identifies three types of controls that can be used for this purpose. The first type of control, logical control, protects the IT environment for processing your customer data, such as password protection and the placing of firewalls.
The second type of control is administrative control, which is usually deployed in the form of corporate security policy, which the organization can enforce. The last type of control is physical control.
As the name suggests, this type of control protects the business premises and makes use of tools such as CCTV, keycard-operated doors, fire alarms, and backup power generators.
With the time, risks may change.
For instance, your marketing department may be physically relocated to a new building, changing the physical security needs, or your company might decide to migrate from a physical server to a cloud-based hosting service, which means your customer data will have to move, too.
Both such situations necessitate a new round of the risk management process to kick off.
In general, it is advisable to revisit the risk management process on a regular interval, say annually, to keep your company on top of all risks your marketing department, and beyond, carry.
Approaching Risk Management With Three Lines Of Defence
Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) established a risk management model called Three Lines of Defence.
The model requires three internal roles: (1) the governing body, with oversight of the organization, (2) senior management, which takes risk management actions and reports to the governing body, and (3) internal audit, which provides independent assurance, to work together and act as robust protections to the organization (IIA, 2020).
The elements of the Three Lines of Defence are (IIA, 2020):
First Line Of Defence
Manage risks associated with day-to-day operational activities. Senior management has the primary responsibility, and emphasis is put on people and culture.
Marketing managers’ task here is to make sure that their department is aware of data protection risks, including security risks, and are following relevant corporate policies.
Second Line Of Defence
Identify risks in the daily business operation of the business. Security, data protection, and risk management teams carry out monitoring activities.
Senior management, including the CMO, is ultimately accountable for this line of defence. A well-functioning second line of defence requires good cooperation between marketing and security, data protection, and risk management teams.
Practically, it would mean understanding the importance of operational-level auditing and providing input to the security team, even when there are other pressing deadlines and business issues.
Third Line Of Defence
Provide independent assurance on risk management by assessing the first and second lines of defence. Independent corporate internal audit teams usually have this role.
Here, too, the marketing department will be asked to cooperate during audits. Assurance results reported to the governance body inform the strategic business actions for the senior management team.
References
- Andress, J (2019) Foundations of information security, No Starch Press, October 2019.
- Bosworth, S, Whyne, E and Kabay, M E (2009) Computer Security Handbook, 5th edn, Wiley, chapter 3: Toward a new framework for information security, Donn B Parker
- Gartner, Inc. (2023) Information technology: Gartner glossary, www.gartner.com/ en/information-technology/glossary/information-security (archived at https:// perma.cc/JP27-6CAN)
- IIA (2020) The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), The IIA”s Three Lines model, an update of the Three Lines of Defense, July 2020, www.theiia.org/globalassets/documents/resources/the-iias-three-lines-model-an-update-of-the-three-lines-ofdefense-july-2020/three-lines-model-updated-english.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/9HX7-AU4H)
- legislation.gov.uk (2016) Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council, 27 April 2016, www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/ contents (archived at https://perma.cc/NVG6-PXBQ)
- NIST (2023) National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce, Computer Security Resource Centre, Information Technology Laboratory, Glossary, updated 28 May 2023, https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/ information_security (archived at https://perma.cc/TE3Z-LN94); https://csrc. nist.gov/glossary/term/non_repudiation (archived at https://perma.cc/DJ4A- 44N2)
To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the US and UK. Use promo code SEJ25 at koganpage.com here.
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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
9 Surprising Takeaways From Analyzing HubSpot’s SEO Strategy
They have a special place in content marketing and SEO history. They were among the early champions of inbound and content marketing and living proof that SEO is a great marketing tactic. Just copying what they do for SEO would be enough for a complete SEO playbook, especially for SaaS.
I dug deep into Ahrefs data to share these nine surprising takeaways from their strategy.
We all know that the sun is big, but when you see one of those at-scale depictions of the solar system, you instantly realize that “big” is an understatement. The same is true of HubSpot’s blog.
I found no bigger corporate blog than HubSpot’s. If you know one, do let me know, and I’ll be more than happy to take this back: HubSpot’s blog is the biggest corporate blog ever regarding search traffic.
Their blog generates an estimated 8.2M organic visits per month, worth over $5.3M in ad money. Just a few months back, it was even larger — over 10M visits.
And since this is how HubSpot’s “solar system” looks…
We need to travel to another “system” to find bigger blogging stars. We need to look at blogs in general to the point where it’s unclear whether these are still blogs or news sites.
So, HubSpot’s blog isn’t as big as Mashable, and Health.com, but it’s bigger than Harvard Business Review, RollingStone, Coindesk, The Verge, and comparable to Wired. And these are all businesses of their own.
In case you’re wondering how big the blog is, it’s over 18K pages with 148 blog posts published in May 2024 alone.
You probably expect their best-performing posts to be about marketing or sales… and you’d be wrong.
“Shrug emoji” and “famous quotes” together account for almost 10% of all blog traffic, and there are many more topics like that.
Now, it’s common sense this is low-intent, unqualified traffic they won’t convert quickly, if ever. But it’s also common sense that the more traffic, the better. So which common sense wins?
Naturally, this is no accident that HubSpot fights for these loosely knit keywords. If you try to outrank them, they will fight you, because they’ve been fighting with Goodreads for “famous quotes” for years.
Ahrefs’ Page Inspect tool shows that they’ve been making some major changes to keep this page ranking.
Why bother with these topics? Because when you’re the size of HubSpot and you share their freemium model, you’re going to need “irrelevant” traffic more than small companies. We’re explaining this phenomenon in more detail in Why Big Companies Make Bad Content.
Good luck copying this stunt:
Why is this a big deal? Because it’s very, very rare to rank twice on the first page of Google with the same type of content (blog posts in this case). I wrote about this in Keyword Diversification: Cannibalization’s Good Twin (SEO Study).
Is this one of those “too big not to rank” situations? Why do we need to be told what HubSpot thinks product marketing is twice? When Ahrefs ranks two times on page one, we at least give you two different things: knowledge and a tool.
Maybe it means that there’s something broken with Google? If you ask me, that one SERP is a great topic for one of those panels where search engineers gather to talk about the quality of the ranking systems.
Sidenote.
HubSpot once discussed using an SEO strategy called surround sound, which involved being featured in multiple top rankings (through its own content and third-party content). What we just saw could be a consequence of that strategy.
HubSpot tried to rank for “crm” (183k monthly volume and 85 KD) with a typical product page https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm (green line). They never got to that #1 spot.
So, years after, they made a page in a more educational style https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm/what-is, catering to a purely information search intent and it worked (blue line).
All it took was explaining on that page the definition, who should use it, when, and a bit about how they developed it. What a great lesson about search intent.
Interestingly, it’s not a problem for Google that the page starts with a product pitch. Which is weird because the H1 refers to information but visually, everything leads to that sign-up button.
I guess it’s good enough for Google, since the page says “sign up or learn”; Google sees the entire text, the human eye, the picture and the buttons.
Actually, that dual purpose may even be an advantage — searchers don’t need to return to the SERP to search again, all their needs are served via that landing page.
Another interesting thing — they didn’t link from the crm directory to what-is-crm. Once you’re on the first page, you’re not supposed to find the latter one.
Every year HubSpot publishes an industry report about the state of marketing. For this, they poll their audience about hot marketing topics and partner up with other big brands like Wistia or Litmus. I’m sure you’ve seen it at least once.
Here’s why this is a backlink goldmine. Not only the landing page for this report gets tons of backlinks but also every other page they spin out of that report.
To illustrate, here are their most linked pages: their homepage, legal page, and the annual State of Marketing twice.
Combined, these two pages alone earned 88,892 backlinks from 21,496 domains, and there are a few more pages like that.
Part of the reason why those numbers are so high is that they keep the report under the same URL, so every year a new batch of backlinks come to basically the same page. And they get some high-profile links this way:
Backlinks are not the only benefit here. That report, its spin-off landing page, and articles heavily drawing from the content of the report, all get organic traffic.
For example, here’s the State of Marketing ranking only #10… but that’s ok because a spin-off ranks #3.
There are three things that are for sure now: death, taxes, and that HubSpot is going to publish the state of marketing report next year.
HubSpot has eight free, stand-alone tools that act as lead magnets. One of them clearly stands out in SEO terms: the Email Signature Template Generator.
“Email Signature Template Generator” — these four words make up nearly the entire content of the page.
But it’s enough for the page to rank for 5.9K keywords, bringing in 134K of free traffic from Google each month, and it even earned 22.7K backlinks.
This traffic is worth $172K in ad money that HubSpot doesn’t have to spend (instead they “only” spend an estimated $2.6K on search ads—more on that later).
Why do those few words work so well? It’s surely search intent. Most people looking for help with their email signatures simply want a tool for that, not a guide.
And here’s a tip for Ahrefs users. You can use the AI Identify intents feature in Keywords Explorer to see what kind of intent could get you the most traffic.
HubSpot has 5 big content hubs which you can see right away when you look for the most internal links to pages on the site:
But they’re nowhere to be found when you look for pages with the most organic search traffic. Which is a shame because their respective target keywords would bring tens of thousands monthly visits:
It’s proof that you shouldn’t expect content hubs (aka topic clusters) to rank at all times. And it’s kind of ironic that it comes from a brand identified with this content marketing tactic.
That said, these hubs are probably great for UX (and driving referral traffic), and could be helping other pages rank, as HubSpot’s article on the tactic suggests.
While browsing through the data, I found that Hubspot has an unusual number of lost pages.
I’ve cleaned the data a bit and found out that they are no stranger to pruning content. At least 84 pages have been redirected to other pages on the same or similar topics between April and June 2024.
Why? I think they do it to help some more promising pages rank. I’ve seen this on some other pages, and it worked.
For example, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-create-embed-codes-generator-infographic-content-ht, with all of its 102 backlinks from 75 domains, was redirected to https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-add-html-embed-codes-ht.
That last page actually ranks (unlike its donor).
Smart. Something you may want to try, too, if you have a large content inventory.
I’ve recently collected opinions of 100 markers, SEOs and business owners on the value of SEO, and most of them said this: SEO is money better spent compared to search ads. And many markets do SEO instead of search ads. But not HubSpot.
Despite the huge volume of free traffic, they still buy a portion of their traffic from Google. According to Ahrefs, they’re bidding on 2367 keywords, with CPC from $0.01 to $45.7.
These are the types of keywords they pay for:
- Keywords they already rank for like “free crm”. Probably to secure even more SERP real estate. Classic.
- Branded keywords like “hubspot pricing”. Possibly to stop competitors from eating their lunch. Classic.
- Other people’s branded keywords like “less annoying crm”. Just as competitors bid on their keywords, they bid on theirs. Classic, c’est la vie.
- Keywords hard to catch otherwise like “website maker free”. And this is the most interesting category.
So let’s take this page for example: 7 Best Free Website Builders to Check Out in 2024 [+Pros & Cons].
Initially, they created the page before offering a CMS. When they introduced the CMS later in 2022, they had find a way to drive more traffic to pages that mentioned that feature.
Unfortunately for them, as you can see on the organic traffic chart below, since they added that feature (arrows) the traffic has been quite volatile.
The volatility is caused by keyword rankings they keep gaining and losing. The more established website builder tools get them, probably because of their authority in that area.
Here’s an example: “website maker free” with 2.5K volume and 98 KD. Below you can find their ranking history.
And here you can see their ads position history chart, showing the point where HubSpot probably realized buying those keywords would be a better idea.
And it worked. Looks like they’re squeezing some traffic out of that keyword after all.
I think it’s a smart move. Some keywords are just too hard to catch. When your SEO tricks don’t work, but the keyword is still worth it, bidding on it becomes more reasonable than wasting time devising clever tactics to rank.
Final thoughts
A small bonus for Ahrefs users: if you want to earn a link from HubSpot, help them remove some of those 3080 broken external links. Head over to Site Explorer > Outgoing > Broken Links (and read our guide on broken link building).
Want to share an interesting finding about HubSpot SEO strategy? Have comments? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.
SEO
I Analyzed 52 SEO Specialist Job Listings. Here’s What They Do and How You Can Become One
SEO specialists are responsible for improving a website’s visibility in organic search results. But what exactly do they do? What skills and qualifications do they need? And how can you become one?
To find out, I looked through 52 SEO specialist job listings on Indeed and SEOJobs.
Sidenote.
I only focused on job descriptions that asked for “SEO specialist.” That means no “SEO content specialist,” “technical SEO specialist,” and the like. (Though job listings for Senior SEO specialists were included.)
The most common responsibilities I found are:
- Keyword research (90.4%)
- SEO performance monitoring and analysis (75%)
- On-page and content optimization (69.2%)
- Reporting (67.3%)
- Technical SEO (61.6%)
- Collaborating with other teams (61.5%)
- Staying up-to-date with SEO trends and Google updates (61.5%)
- Develop an SEO strategy (55.8%)
- Link building (53.9%)
Sidenote.
Given that it would have been impossible to check each listing for hundreds of potential responsibilities, I got ChatGPT to help. I gave it ten job posts from the list and asked it to identify the most common responsibilities. I then went through all 52 listings and checked how common each responsibility was.
It seems like SEO specialists are expected to do everything. Some listings even expect SEOs to run conversion optimization, and there were even listings where SEOs were in charge of PPC.
A lot to ask for, in my opinion, since there are people who actually specialize in each facet of SEO.
That being said, it could also be the case that most of these job listings are in-house. According to my colleague Despina, who has been an SEO specialist herself, it’s more common for an in-house SEO specialist to be an all-rounder since they’re often either the only person doing SEO or part of a very small team where versatility is rewarded.
Despina reminds us:
The way I see it, being an SEO specialist isn’t about what you do. It’s about the results you’re accountable for, i.e., growing organic visibility and, ideally, organic revenue. Today, you might plan technical, content, and link-building tasks to help you get there. Tomorrow, it might be brand building, UX, or even CRO tasks.
Here are the common skills I saw:
- Experience with SEO tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs (75%)
- Communication skills (61.5%)
- Knowledge of SEO best practices, SEO trends, and how Google works (57.7%)
- Analytical skills (48%)
Sidenote.
I also enlisted ChatGPT’s help to answer this question, using the same methodology as before.
Interesting note
Of those who asked for experience with SEO tools, 38% asked for experience with Ahrefs. So if you want to be prepared for the SEO specialist role, you’ll need to get familiar with our toolset.
There’s no better way to do this than to actually play with the tool, so I highly recommend signing up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account and, later on, one of our paid plans. If you want to dive even deeper into our toolset, I also recommend taking our free certification course.
Again, this corroborates Despina’s experience. Here’s what she said:
It’s a mix of soft and hard skills that most employers tend to look for in my experience. These soft skills are increasingly valuable: communication, initiative, the ability to learn and adapt quickly, time and project management, and the ability to handle and make sense of lots of data. For hard skills: ability to put a strategy together and the ability to recommend SEO actions.
One thing I found interesting was that there were two job listings that specifically requested experience with AI tools.
Although it was only a teeny tiny sample (for now), I see it as a sign. AI skills—specifically related to using AI for SEO—will become more important in the future.
Good news: You likely don’t need one since 61.5% of the job listings did not ask for a college degree.
For the rest, they typically ask for a bachelor’s in SEO (does that exist?), marketing, business, or something related. This jives with what Despina has seen, too.
Even so, I don’t think you have to disqualify yourself from a particular listing just because you don’t have a degree. After all, Despina has a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Sociology and Education. No doubt it’s a degree, but it’s as far as you can imagine from being related to SEO.
You’d be better off worrying about how to gain actual SEO experience.
What about SEO certifications? Disregard. They’re not important at all. Only three job listings asked for them.
Both agencies and companies hire SEO specialists.
However, according to our sample, there is currently more demand for in-house SEO specialists (63.5%) than at agencies (36.5%).
One reason might be that the term “SEO specialist” is used interchangeably with “SEO consultant” or “SEO expert” in the agency world, at least according to my colleague Chris Haines, who has ten years of SEO agency experience.
He also noted that agency roles are typically more hierarchical and have this common progression (in UK agencies):
As you can see, there’s no “SEO specialist” role in a standard agency career ladder.
The most common annual salary range we saw was $50,000 – $54,999. This was followed by $45,000 – $49,999 and then $40,000 – $44,999.
This is in line with Despina’s experience, who said a junior SEO specialist makes around AU$60,000 – $70,000 (~US$40,000 – $46,000). It also corresponds to our SEO salary survey, where the median salary was $49,211.
The one outlier number (>$100,000) was a senior in-house SEO specialist role at a tech company. They required a minimum of five years of SEO experience.
Among the job listings I looked at, barely any were entry-level. Most of them required at least a year or more of SEO experience.
This creates a catch-22: You need work to get experience, but you can’t get experience without work.
How, then, can you become an SEO specialist? I turned to Despina and Chris for answers.
1. Learn the basics of SEO
You don’t need to be an expert to get an internship (or even a job), but you do need to know a bit about SEO. So, kickstart your education by learning the basics of SEO.
There are so many free SEO courses these days, so you won’t even have to worry about your wallet. I recommend starting with our free SEO course for beginners, which covers everything you need to know, from keyword research to technical SEO. If you prefer reading, then you can read our free beginner’s guide to SEO.
That should give you a good grounding of the important SEO fundamentals and principles.
2. Build your own website
There’s no better way to gain immediate practical experience than by building your own website.
In the end, SEO is a practical skill. There’s no amount of reading and watching that will prepare you for reality than actually doing the thing.
Building a website and optimizing it for search will teach you how to navigate content management systems like WordPress, gain experience with SEO tools (you can always start with free ones), and practice each aspect of SEO. All important things you need to know in your future as an SEO specialist.
3. Get an internship at an SEO agency
Despite most job listings being for in-house positions, both Despina and Chris recommend that you get an internship at an agency.
Why? Three reasons:
- Agencies typically have a coaching process for interns. That’s a great way to be trained from scratch in everything SEO.
- Agencies allow you to be exposed to a variety of SEO experiences across different clients, whereas you’ll be more “specialized” in an in-house role.
- There is a chance you’ll be the only SEO person in an in-house role, especially if you’re working for a small business or startup. You’ll still have to figure out everything yourself without any mentor’s guidance. I had this experience myself in my first job—I joined a startup as a marketing intern, and I was the only marketer.
To find internship opportunities, go to LinkedIn or Indeed and search for “SEO intern” or “SEO graduate.”
You can set up alerts for these positions so you’ll be notified of new ones in your inbox.
Work hard, gain experience, and you may find yourself converted into a full-time role. Or use the work experience to apply for future jobs as an SEO specialist.
What happens next after you’ve successfully become an SEO specialist? It depends on your goals and how you see your career panning out.
Nevertheless, I asked Despina and Chris, and these are the common progressions most SEO specialists take:
Become an SEO lead
You can aim to get promoted within the agency or become an SEO lead/head of SEO in an organization with larger SEO teams.
In a sense, this is the most straightforward, as you’re simply climbing the SEO career ladder.
If this is the path you’re interested in, the good news is that Chris himself was an SEO lead in an SEO agency. He wrote an article sharing ten tips that advanced his career and helped him become an SEO lead. I highly recommend reading it to learn what made a difference in his career.
Become an SEO consultant
Being a consultant will likely earn you more money and give you more control over your time. But it’s not for everyone. As Despina says:
Consulting takes more entrepreneurial skills than working for someone else. You’ll need to sell yourself or focus on building your personal brand.
You’ll have to get used to putting yourself out there, selling, facing rejection, handling all sorts of administrative work (e.g., accounting, taxes, etc.), and more. If knowing this doesn’t faze you, then it could be a path you consider.
Read the guide below to learn how Nick LeRoy transitioned from an SEO employee to a full-time SEO consultant.
Start your own agency
If you have entrepreneurial ideals or dream of being your own boss, this could be a potential progression.
However, I’ll quote Despina again here:
This is not an immediate next step. You progress into this after consulting for a while, and you get so busy that you need to hire more people.
You also have to know that starting an agency likely means no longer doing SEO. Plenty of agency owners I’ve talked to spend most of their time managing people, handling admin, and selling. If your love is SEO and not running a business, then reconsider this path.
One final note: No matter how many inspiring stories you’ve read, know that being an entrepreneur is no easy task. Every story you’ve read is a victim of survivorship bias, and the world is littered with agencies that did not work out. However, if hearing this makes your passion burn brighter, then hey, this could be for you.
Final thoughts
Whether you’re an SEO specialist, SEO consultant, or run your own agency, three things are true:
- SEO changes fast — Stay updated with what’s happening with Google, its competitors, and the industry itself. Follow smart SEOs on X and LinkedIn, participate in SEO communities, and attend SEO conferences.
- Never stop learning — You can always improve your SEO skills or soft skills like managing a team, being an effective leader, and more.
- Always be networking — Humans are ultimately social creatures. We want to work with people whom we trust and can vouch for. Making friends in the industry can alert you to the latest SEO tactics, find valuable people to hire and partner with, commiserate when things aren’t going well, and celebrate when things are.
SEO
Our Ranking Systems Aren’t Perfect
Google’s SearchLiaison responded to a plea on X (formerly Twitter) about ridiculously poor search results in which he acknowledged that Google’s reviews algorithm could be doing a better job and outlined what’s being done to stop rewarding sites that shouldn’t be ranking in the first place.
Questioning Google’s Search Results
The exchange with Google began with a post about a high ranking sites that was alleged to fall short of Google’s guidelines.
@dannyashton tweeted:
“This review has been ranking #1 on Google for “Molekule Air Mini+ review” for the past six months.
It is 50% anecdotal and 50% marketing messaging. It doesn’t share in-depth original research.
So, how did they make it to the top of Google?”
“Instead of a third-party review (which is likely what searchers are looking for), Google ranks an article backed by the brand:
Searchers land in an advertorial built off marketing materials:
So little care that they even left briefing notes in the published version 😞
And I think I found the reason why it ranks #1… Money.”
The general responses to the tweets were sympathetic, such as this one:
“WILD.
And this is on page 1…
Is this what writing for readers is? Is this what people need/want?
I think of folks like my mom here who wouldn’t know better and to dig more.
It looks and seems nice, must be trustworthy.
I mean, that’s their goals, right? Dupe and dip.”
Google’s Algorithms Aren’t Perfect
SearchLiaison responded to those tweets to explain that he personally goes through the feedback submitted to Google and discusses them with the search team. He also shared about the monumental scale of ranking websites, saying that Google is indexing trillions of web pages, and because of that the ranking process is itself scaled and automated.
SearchLiaison tweeted:
“Danny, I appreciate where you’re coming from — just as I appreciated the post that HouseFresh originally shared, as well as this type of feedback from others. I do. I also totally agree that the goal is for us to reward content that’s aligned with our guidance. From the HouseFresh post itself, there seemed to be some sense that we had actually improved over time:
“In our experience, each rollout of the Products Review Update has shaken things up, generally benefitting sites and writers who actually dedicated time, effort, and money to test products before they would recommend them to the world.”
That said, there’s clearly more we should be doing. I don’t think this is particularly new, as I’ve shared before that our ranking systems aren’t perfect and that I see content that we ought to do better by, as well as content we’re rewarding when we shouldn’t.
But it’s also not a system where any individual reviews content and says “OK, that’s great — rank it better” or “OK that’s not great, downrank it.” It simply wouldn’t work for a search engine that indexes trillions of pages of content from across the web to operate that way. You need scalable systems. And you need to keep working on improving those systems.
That’s what we’ll keep doing. We’re definitely aware of these concerns. We’ve seen the feedback, including the feedback from our recent form. I’ve personally been through every bit of that feedback and have been organizing it so our teams can look further at different aspects. This is in addition to the work they’re already doing, based on feedback we’ve already seen.”
Some of the takeaways from SearchLiaison’s statement is that:
1. Google agrees that their algorithms should reward content that is aligned with their guidance (presumably guidance about good reviews, helpfulness, and spam).
2. He acknowledged that the current ranking systems can still use improvement in rewarding the useful content and not rewarding inappropriate content.
3. Google’s systems are scaled.
4. Google is committed to listening to feedback and working toward improving their algorithms.
5. SearchLiaison confirmed that they are reviewing the feedback and organizing it for further analysis to identify what needs attention for improvement to rankings.
What Is Taking So Long To Fix Google?
Someone else questioned Google’s process for rolling out updates that subsequently shakes things up. It’s a good question because it makes sense to test an update to rankings to make sure that the changes improve the quality of sites being ranked and not do the opposite.
@mikefutia tweeted:
“Danny, aren’t all your ‘system improvements’ fully tested BEFORE rolling them out?
Surely your team was aware of the shakeup in the SERPs that these last few updates would cause.
Completely legitimate hobby sites written by passionate creators getting absolutely DECIMATED by these updates.
All in favor of Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Forbes, Business Insider, and other nonsense gaining at their expense.
I guess what I’m saying is — surely this was not a surprise.
You guys knew this carnage was coming as a direct result of the updates.
And now — here we are, NINE months later — and there have been ZERO cases of these legitimate sites recovering. In fact, the March update just made it 100x worse.
And so Google is saying ‘yeah we f-d up, we’re working on it.’
But the question is—and I think I speak on behalf of thousands of creators when I ask—’What the hell is taking so long?’”
We know that Google’s third party quality raters review search results before an update is rolled out. But clearly there are many creators, site owners and search marketers who feel that Google’s search results are going the wrong way with every update.
SearchLiaison’s response is a good one because it acknowledges that Google is not perfect and that they are actively trying to improve the search results. But that does nothing to help the thousands of site owners who are disappointed in the direction that Google’s algorithm is headed.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/ivan_kislitsin
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