Even if you can spend your entire SEO career at a highly competitive SEO-driven company (e.g., Tripadvisor, Condé Nast), that won’t necessarily translate well into doing SEO for a new SaaS company with limited resources and no bespoke or custom tooling.
In an agency, you get to use a variety of the clients’ homegrown tools and off-the-shelf SEO tools your clients may already be bought into, so you’ll know the right tool for the job.
Learning incredible project management skills
A lack of project and posicionamiento web stakeholder management skills can often cripple your career.
I suggest SEOs focus on these soft skills if they ever want to move in-house.
It’s a survival skill most agency SEOs pick up as they juggle client work and relationships.
Early mentorship and a repeatable playbook
In an agency, assuming SEO is a commonly sold service, there might be a lot of senior SEOs with vast experience around you.
Generally speaking, every vertical has best practices that are fairly repeatable and usually work.
Having this wealth of knowledge and experience around you can quickly uplevel you and compensate for your own lack of experience.
In-house, you might be the only SEO trying to figure it out while teaching yourself.
I’ve often found completely self-taught SEOs to be a little undisciplined if they never received feedback early in their careers from other SEOs.
Company incentives to send you to SEO events or allow you to speak
Public speaking can be an incredible platform to build your SEO career. It’s also great for networking and discussing SEO tactics privately with other SEOs.
Quite frankly, they’re also quite fun if you’re social like me!
But being in-house, it is rare that companies will pay for you to do public speaking or attend SEO events. There’s simply little incentive to do so.
Agencies need new business, so sending employees to events and putting themselves in front of companies looking to learn about SEO makes fiscal sense.
It’s a great way to build your agency’s brand and bring in inbound leads.
Within some organizations, sending SEO employees to speak is sometimes seen as a double negative. Not only is it costly, but the talent is also likely to be poached and they won’t be able to easily anonymize their data.
No company wants their secrets openly shared with the world to live indefinitely on SlideShare, where competitors can easily see them.
The best companies I’ve been in allowed for a single conference each year. Generally, you need to speak about the work of other companies to qualify for speaking engagements.
A more developed career ladder for SEO
If you’re the only SEO in your company or one of a few, and SEO is not a major lever, it is unlikely SEO will have a well-defined career ladder.
