#1 Enterprise SEO Was Nothing Like I Had Expected
It had been 12 years since my last corporate job and my very first corporate SEO role.
To set the scene, I had spent the past 3 years honing my skills as a search marketer — starting from scratch, working my way up from the very bottom at a boutique SEO agency in Sydney. By the end of my tenure, I was leading a team of 9.
Doing SEO at an enterprise was a completely different ball game.
This is my story.
Agency SEO is nothing like doing SEO at an enterprise
Like many of you, I started my SEO education agency-side.
Agency-side is all about shipping tactical deliverables such as keyword research, content gap analysis, technical SEO audits, content writing, competitor research, link-building, and so on.
The best thing about agency-side SEO is your exposure to a wide gamut of tools. I am so grateful I had access to Ahrefs, Semrush, SurferSEO, Clearscope, and many other SEO tools.
Another benefit of working agency-side is the repetitive nature of issue discovery. These experiences help you become great at spotting symptoms.
You also tend to get your hands dirty and push changes to production for smaller accounts on platforms like WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, etc.
That is, you get really good at getting things done yourself.
However, here’s the thing about agency-side SEO:
Many agency owners and team leaders have little experience working with multidisciplinary teams in a large organisation. They tend to handle the majority of the selling and pitching to clients, which means you lack first-hand experience answering sticky questions from senior staff in meetings.
This gives you a very skewed view and approach to SEO.
At least, this was certainly my case.
SEO roles in enterprise organisations have zero execution authority
I’m not going to lie — for the first 3 months at Optus, I was extremely frustrated.
I was hired to do something, and yet I was unable to do anything.
For example, on the third day of my role, I discovered that our robots.txt file was blocking all crawlers from accessing our new website.
Worse, I had no idea who to approach to get this resolved. And don’t get me started on the internal politics involved in getting 2 lines of code scrubbed.
When you’re hired as an SEO at an enterprise, 99% of what you do is advocacy, not execution. You bring your knowledge and experience as a search marketer and use your influence to get others to execute the various facets of SEO tactics.
Welcome to the reality of working at a large organisation. In future editions, I’ll share ways to increase your sphere of influence to get things done.
In many cases, your headcount is the SEO budget
My first enterprise role was at a company of 8,000 staff, where there were 5 full-time SEOs.
Five — let that number sink in.
That’s smaller than the agency I had just left!
Each of us was responsible for one or more portfolios.
But a headcount of five SEO Managers represents a significant investment — half a million dollars a year in salaries alone. Especially when you consider that this budget could have easily been spent on media buying.
In many cases, at least for the first year, you are the SEO budget, and those who pitched for your headcount expect to see results.
But how you communicate results at an enterprise is very different from what you might expect — especially if you’ve just come from agency-side, as I had. In the coming editions, I’m going to reveal everything I’ve learned so far (and hopefully bring on some guests to share their experiences as well).
Thanks for making it this far!
If you’re a search marketer wanting to transition to an enterprise role, you’re going to want to subscribe to Journal of an Enterprise SEO.
What exactly is Journal of an Enterprise SEO?
A lot of people think in-house SEO is boring.
- How to get a job as an SEO at an enterprise
- How to increase your sphere of influence
- How to get the most out of your 1:1s with your manager
- Mistakes to avoid in your performance review
So whether you’re at the beginning of your SEO career, about to apply for an enterprise role, or have just started and are finding it really difficult to get things done, I’m writing this for you.