In-House, Agency, or Independent: What's the Best Gig for You? |
| In-House, Agency, or Independent: What's the Best Gig for You? Posted: 25 Sep 2012 07:57 PM PDT Posted by Lindsay There are three main roles in the search marketing industry: you can work in-house, at an agency, or as an independent consultant. What role are you in today, and is it the right one? How can you be sure you're following the right path to achieve search marketing nirvana? Like me, there are many search marketers who have worked in all three sectors. I tracked a few of them down for interviews on the topic and have included the most inspiring bits in this post. Before we dive in, let's take a look at what Internet Marketing roles the respondents to the 2012 SEOmoz Industry Survey are in today. The 5000+ respondents shake out like this: Take a peek at the unsimplified details here. In-house roles represent 46% of respondents, agency roles have 22%, business owners represent 19%, and independents took the remaining 13%. You'll notice that I didn't specifically cover the business owners category in this post. That is because a business owner can, and likely does, overlap quite a bit with the other three role types. Agencies are often led/owned by a powerhouse search marketer, so that would land them in two categories, therefore skewing the data. Now that you have an idea of the distribution of roles in our industry, maybe you're thinking about opportunity. "Look at all those in-house jobs! Sweet, I'm jumping in that pie." Or maybe, "Man I'd love to make a go independent. I'll show that boss of mine." It is so easy to make a leap into a new role without really knowing what your in for. You've done it. I've done it. Hold your horses. What strikes me about the jobs I've held in an agency (SEOmoz), in-house, and as an independent (Keyphraseology) is how incredibly different they are from each other. Culture, day-to-day duties and tasks, income, purpose... everything is different! You'll be miles ahead if you know the differences and know what is best for you. Lets take a peek! In-houseCommonly described as: rewarding & limited You might do well in-house if you are diplomatic, detail-oriented, and value stability. An in-house job can be very rewarding but you’ll have to be patient. It takes time to educate your colleagues, champion your cause, negotiate for resources, and see your projects to completion. Your in-house job may be limited to one or a few websites, but you will go deep into the details with them and see projects through from beginning-to-end. Let's take a look at what some seasoned veterans have to say about in-house search marketing gigs.   Laura Lippay| President of How's Your Pony? CNET was an SEOs dream. I worked in an environment where my colleagues were smart and tattooed and in bands and hung out together after work all the time, and while at work we collaborated and brainstormed and learned from each other and built stuff. For SEO, we were not just working on the site issues, but also building an internal hub of best practices and an internal reporting system. Best job I ever had. .gif)  Rhea Drysdale| CEO of Outspoken Media I've held three in-house positions-: one at a multi-channel retailer, one with a large Fortune 1000 staffing company, and one with a pair of genius Ruby on Rails developers/designers. In-house, I got to see how SEO was simply a part of a bigger plan and was surrounded by just as many passionate individuals, but in very different roles. This gave me more perspective and more a analytical mind because we could get so granular with the data. In-house, the worst thing I faced was patience; I don't have it. Having to prioritize work and then wait six months before it goes live or gets changed into some bastardized form of the original idea was heart-breaking to me.  .gif) Aleyda Solis| International SEO Consultant and Global SEO Manager for Forex Club I'm an in-house SEO for Forex Club, where I'm the Global SEO Manager, and I have also my own SEO consultancy that allows me to do independent work. I work for them remotely and although I have to travel a bit more (which I actually also enjoy), it gives me the flexibility I need to organize my own activities and timings (I do freelance SEO work, co-organize a local SEO event in Madrid, I write for State of Search, etc.) while also enjoying to work with people from different disciplines (developers, product managers, analysts, affiliates, communication, etc.) and cultures (from Moscow, Berlin, NY, Madrid, Taillin, Montenegro) in a highly competitive sector and in many languages and for different countries. It's all very challenging and also rewarding. AgencyCommonly described as: fun, exhausting, & rewarding You might do well at an agency if you hunger for a fun and fast-paced environment where collaboration and continuous learning are valued. You’ll be challenged with a wide-variety of project types and clients to keep you on those multi-tasking toes of yours. The environment can be exciting, but also exhausting. Be prepared for some long hours and late nights. Lets see what our friends have to say. Rhea Drysdale| CEO of Outspoken Media I own an agency today and it's my second love after my family. I'm addicted to the speed and atmosphere of agency life. I need to be in an environment where I'm constantly generating new ideas and collaborating with teams of equally driven marketers and technicians. In the agencies, I found incredible teams. They were people that were as driven and passionate as me. They were competitive and thrived on the discovery of new tools, techniques, or industry information. At an agency, the biggest problem is often burn out. You've got so many people working so intensely that it's easy to have personalities clash and compete for attention.  Shaad Hamid| SEO & PPC consultant and blogger for SEOptimise I work agency-side primarily. This is because I love the variety of clients and sectors that I work on. Since working agency side, I’ve never gotten bored. Boredom is my greatest fear, and my experience working within client-side was just that. Although client-side work is really exciting during the first three months, work tends to become repetitive afterwards.  Marat Gaziev| In-House SEO at a large credit bureau. The best parts about working at an agency can also be its negatives. The best part is that you get to work with a number of different clients and websites, each with their own different business needs. The worst part is that you get to work with a number of different clients and websites, each with their different business needs. IndependentOften described as: exhausting, lucrative, rewarding, & unrestricted (free) Done well, independent search marketing work can be lucrative and rewarding. You’ll be the boss, the owner, the search marketer, and more, so it can also be exhausting. If you’re eager for the freedom to choose your projects and clients, the flexibility to set your own hours, and the responsibility of doing it all, an independent gig might be right for you. The lack of coworkers can make this option a lonesome one. Check out these bites from those who have been there.  Marshall Simmonds| Founder of Define Media Group, Inc. Throughout my career, I’ve benefitted most from being aware of and identifying when good opportunities present themselves. Jerry said it best: “Once in a while, you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.” I was the Head of SEO at a small marketing company from 1997-1999. I was green, as was the industry, so I fit in well. Working there, I got the chance to help small companies succeed via search and marketing promotion. This experience lead me to one of, if not the first, in-house positions as Chief Search Strategist with a young About.com in New York City in late 1999. The lesson learned from About.com was enterprise management of an SEO campaign across many verticals and reached over 1200 employees and writers. In 2005, About.com was acquired by the New York Times Corporation, which presented the unique role of shaping online strategy for one of the most influential (and largest) news organizations in the world. The opportunity also fostered the beginning of Define Media Group, a boutique digital strategy consulting arm of the NYTCo. By design, I left the NYTimes five years later. The goal was to establish an SEO program and integrate it deep into the content creation process in the 150+ year old company, all-the-while building up Define. In January of 2011, the time and ‘light were right’ and I spun Define off and officially went independent. Not only has my path been one of identifying opportunities, but also when it was right personally and professionally. I wanted and needed experience at all levels before going out on my own. This approach serves me well today and taught me patience, diplomacy, and perseverance.  Richard Baxter| Founder of SEOgadget I’m a very social person and thrive on having people around me. At first, taking the leap to go solo was exciting, invigorating, and for the first time I really felt fully in control of my own future. I was becoming successful, winning clients, and I got an incredible amount of work completed. I grew the business to a turnover of around £150,000 a year just from a bedroom! I should have been happy with that – but like I said, I was going stir crazy from spending so much time in the house on my own. Obviously, I went out to meet clients and friends a lot. Tom Critchlow was awesome during this period, we’d meet up for chess in the morning (he would always win), and chew the fat over search marketing, SEO, and life in general. I have a few industry friends in the UK that were awesome during this period – very supportive and keen for a hang out. I’m extremely grateful for having that. I quite enjoyed having some regularity and structure in my life, even if it was just a meet up every other Tuesday! Eventually I decided just to get some shared office space, knowing that I’d have to get up in the morning to use it. I began the hunt for a desk. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. I moved in with a small design agency just around the corner from where we are now, around 6 months after I’d started SEOgadget. Within about a week, I was talking with the agency about reserving all 3 remaining spare desks, and a few days after that I’d decided to start hiring. Getting out of the home office acted like a catalyst to start building what I have now. Now, we’re 14 strong and turning over slightly above 10X what we did in our first year, or almost triple last year. How about you? What roles have you held and what were your experiences? Don't be shy! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
| How Many SEO Consultants Actually Know What They're Talking About? Posted: 25 Sep 2012 02:58 AM PDT Posted by Ashley Tate As an industry, SEO has struggled with setting standards of quality from day one. Even with countless professional SEOs doing best-in-class work, the industry as a whole is constantly battling the bad rap of being tactless, unethical, and sometimes even "dead." Black-hat or black cat? At SEOmoz, we find ourselves pleasantly surprised day after day by the array of high-quality SEOs that make our industry such a wonderful place to be. Unfortunately, the time finally came where we had to ask ourselves the nagging questions looming over our industry: where was all this negative noise coming from? Had we been missing a widely accepted fact in the SEO world? And, most importantly, was the current state of SEO really as awful as some were making it seem? There was only one way to find out. Inspired by a post highlighting the "sad state" of today's SEO consultants, we decided to conduct a survey of our own to determine the true, calculated quality of SEOs in 2012. Similar to the Webmaster World member whose less-than-awesome exchange with various SEO consultants sparked this hot debate, we chose to reach out to real, third-party SEO companies for advice on how to improve rankings to collect our data. But we wanted to do it bigger. Enter: The PEPS ProjectTo collect data in the most neutral way possible, we knew we wouldn’t be able to use our own name for fear of skewing responses (i.e. if SEOmoz emailed you, asking for beginner-level SEO advice, would you believe us? No? That's ok, we probably wouldn't, either.). We decided to partner with the charitable organization and long-time friend of SEOmoz, Program for Early Parent Support (PEPS), to help us out. PEPS is a great organization that we'd been wanting to get some SEO help for for quite some time. In return for allowing us to go "undercover" as a PEPS employee when reaching out to SEO consultants for advice, SEOmoz would foot the bill for a complete site audit for PEPS. The consulting agency to conduct the site audit would be the best SEO selected from our study, and everyone involved would win! The project designAfter setting a Moz employee up with a PEPS account, it was time to get to work. We compiled a list of general, broad questions that a site owner new to SEO might ask in reaching out for SEO advice, all the while making sure that the questions would be solid indicators of an agency’s level of ethical or unethical SEO knowledge. Once we selected the top few benchmarks that should be hit, we pulled together an email including these four questions:
With our questions ready to be answered, it was now time to select our SEO agencies. To keep the selection as neutral as possible, we ran three search queries for the terms "SEO Firm," "SEO Services," and "SEO Company" for the following locations:
We then took the top five organic and top two paid results for each location under each search query and added them to our list of companies to reach out to. After eliminating companies that didn't provide SEO consulting, we were left with 86 different SEO agencies to contact for the case study. The emails went out, and we waited anxiously for the *hopefully positive* responses to start flowing in. Case study overviewOf the 86 agencies asked, 28 responded to our outreach with full answers to all four questions. Three clever dudes (Mark Kennedy from SEOM Interactive, Larry Chrzan from Blue Horseradish, and Brady Ware from Softway Solutions) quickly figured out SEOmoz was behind the project, and the remaining 55 declined answering through email. The two most common reasons for not answering the questions were: "In order to help you out I would need to speak with you on the phone." - Anonymous and "You ask many very good questions below, and if you were a client I’d be happy to answer all of them. Some of the questions you ask require a fair bit of research and analysis to answer correctly and I do not provide free consulting based on an email inquiry. Please go ahead and get all the free advice you can stand, but when you're ready to commit to a paid SEO engagement, do keep us in mind." - Anonymous The initial responses included an array of answers with an overwhelmingly high amount of white-hat, helpful SEO feedback. Ruth Burr, the lead SEO at SEOmoz, provided answers to use as a benchmark to guage responses. It was a pleasant surprise when the majority of responding agencies offered advice similar to Ruth's initial answers. Because our questions were asked on a broad scale, we categorized the answers as best we could. Here’s a breakdown of the responses per question with sample answers from various SEO agencies: Question #1: Do you see any quick areas for improvement? Are we doing anything really wrong or dangerous? It's interesting to note that over half (55.6%) of our respondents stated that they didn’t see anything wrong or dangerous right off the bat, with a high percentage of those respondents requesting more information before giving a complete answer. A whopping 11.1% decided that they needed a more in-depth view before giving any answer at all, and the remaining 33.3% gave helpful, more specific advice. Sample answer: "Without looking under the hood of the website, it doesn't appear you are doing anything wrong or dangerous. For the most part, unless websites are either really old and out of date or people are using bad techniques, most people aren't doing anything dangerous. In terms of quick improvement:
​ - John Cashman from Digital Firefly Marketing Question #2: We've been hearing a lot of talk about the "Panda"and "Penguin" penalties from Google. Can you explain what these are? Are we at risk for these penalties? How can we tell if we've been hit? An overwhelming 88.9% of respondents gave the answer we were looking for in regards to the Panda and Penguin updates! We didn’t see any shocking or fully incorrect answers out of the remaining 11.1%, but they were a bit broader than we preferred. Sample answer: "Panda: Google Panda updates are designed to target pages that aren’t necessarily spam but also don't offer great quality. In other words, sites with 'thin' content - really designed to do nothing more than hold ads and make money. (Side note: it's important to follow this one rule that we always adhere to when building content for sites: Google is in the business of producing the absolute best result for any given search query. The best sites are built around this concept. Build using quality content and your rankings will follow. Of course SEO isn't really that simple - it's complex. But, that principle is where all good SEO begins.) Panda really hit sites that were designed for ads only and offered no real content. Things like page layout and quality content have a lot to do with this. Panda was also designed to stop 'scrappers.' (Sites republishing other company's content.) I don't think you have an issue here, just browsing over your home page. Penguin: According to Google, Penguin is an 'important algorithm change targeted at webspam.' And that is the very, very short explanation. Penguin was designed to further cut rankings back on spam-related sites and push up quality sites that are offering regularly-updated and useful content and showing quality incoming links, articles and other content. People seeing problems from Penguin are using techniques like aggressive, exact-match anchor text, exact-match domains (overuse of these) poor quality blog posts and keyword stuffing, to name a few. In other words, spammy-style techniques designed to 'trick' the search engines into a ranking. Again, we tell our clients is to always focus on quality content and don't try any 'tricks' to achieve rankings. This is always bad policy.” - Kirk Bates from Market 248 Question #3: We have the opportunity to buy some domains that relate to our services, like ParentSupport.com. We were thinking of building a second version of our site on a .com site that is more related to our services. Is it better to have a .com or a .org domain? How can we leverage buying other domains that have to do with our services to help get more SEO traffic? Although all four of the above categories are “correct” in one way or another (dependent on preference), 66.7% of respondents gave the answer we were hoping to see. The remaining 33.3% of answers were spread across the multiple categories, but there were no shocking or fully incorrect answers provided. Sample answer: “It doesn’t really matter if you get a .com or a .org- whichever one you want is fine. If you wanted to have a separate site for a specific area of your industry, then you can do that as well, but you don’t need a bunch of URLs all pointing to one website in order to rank in the search engines.” - Owen York from Stellar e-Marketing Question #4: We get lots of emails from people wanting to trade or exchange links with us. Should we be saying yes? Will this help with SEO? This question served as the most interesting indicator of SEO knowledge in our survey. We were pleased to see that 48.1% of respondents advised strongly against trading links with any other site based solely on email solicitation. 44.4% responded “yes” or “maybe” while cautioning PEPS to be selective on sites to trade links with. Unfortunately, 7.4% of respondents encouraged PEPS to exchange links with other sites that ranked well. Sample Answer: “NO! Do not buy or exchange link with anyone who contacts you. This is completely against Google's policies and if they were to find out, you could be penalized." - Brad Frank from IT Chair The (SEO) Fab FiveAfter comparing answers from all 28 responding agencies, there were five in particular that stood out above the rest. The top five consultants and agencies (in no particular order) were:
The answers we received from these five agencies included actionable, ethical SEO advice. (You may have noticed a few of their responses as our “Sample Answers” under the above charts - if not, check them out!) Each response went into great detail to provide the foundation and reasoning behind the piece of advice. Despite the topics being at a high-level of SEO knowledge, the responses were explained in a way that could be easily understood by a website owner new to SEO. We would recommend any of these five companies as an agency worth working with :) And the winner is...After a neck-and-neck race to finish between our top five SEO agencies, we decided to select Dave Davies from Beanstalk SEO as our case study winner of the PEPS site audit. Dave's company Beanstalk SEO showed up as the second result in our "no location specified" organic search. (They are based out of Victoria, BC.) Dave was a front-runner from the beginning. His answers were lengthy, helpful, and provided a fantastic example of how an SEO can explain their work and its tremendous necessity to a potential, first-time client. When we let Dave know that he was on “SEOmoz candid camera” and had been selected to complete the audit, he was thrilled to have the opportunity to not only complete an audit for a charitable company, but to help show the current industry just how sustainable and ethical SEO truly is. Beanstalk SEO, Inc. is a search engine optimization agency based in Victoria, BC. The Beanstalk SEO website even addresses their stance on unethical black-hat tactics in their “About” section. Beanstalk SEO follows guiding principles similar to SEOmoz’s TAGFEE mission, which made them a perfect fit for the PEPS site audit! The current state of SEO consultantsWhen we started this project a few months back, we had high hopes for the responses. The project was driven by the opportunity to display irrefutable data whatever the outcome, but there was definitely some *selfishly-inspired* desire that the answers would help support our initial hypothesis. I’m happy to report that the outcome of our case study exceeded every expectation we set! Out of our 28 respondents surveyed, well over 50% of surveyed agencies provided ethically sound answers for all four questions. Although we did receive a few responses that didn’t fall exactly in line with our expected answers, we did not see one shockingly black-hat response. If’s that’s not a true indicator of an industry with ethically-driven motivations from the majority, I’m not sure what is. Although the experience documented on Search Engine Roundtable that inspired this project wasn’t pleasant, I have to argue that it is absolutely not indicative of the current state of the SEO industry. After analyzing the results of our study, it was clear that an overwhelming majority of respondents are practicing white-hat, sustainable tactics. There are SEOs who can be tactless and unethical in their work, and there will always be haters who claim the industry is “dead.” However, after our data assessment and analysis (coupled with our love of this wonderful industry), we couldn’t disagree more. I want to give a big thanks to all of the agencies that participated in our study, Ruth Burr and Kurtis Bohrnstedt for gathering data, and PEPS for allowing us to go undercover. The faces we know - and plenty of faces we haven’t met yet - are a breath of fresh air who make this industry so vibrant, ever-changing, and full of possibility. There’s never been a better time to be involved in SEO, and we thank our lucky stars to work with you all every day. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the current state of the SEO industry. How do you think the industry as a whole is doing? What direction do you think we’re headed in over the next few years? What sustainable, ethical practices do you wish more agencies and consultants practiced? Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
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Today, I'm an in-house SEO. When you work in an agency, you don't really get the time to focus on one project, one client, and one website. In an in-house role, you have to think long and hard before making any recommendations, and you start caring for the website like it’s your baby. The best part about being "in-house" is that you have the opportunity to truly conceive an idea, follow through on your recommendations, and see the website grow before your eyes.