I’ve worked in digital marketing for over 15 years, from content creation to email marketing and now technical SEO. Here’s the life and career decisions I’ve learned along the way.
It was 2009 when I started to learn about SEO. I was a copywriter and my work evolved from print into digital. Words are delivered differently online, so I had to build my knowledge on organic SEO.
I followed SEOs on Twitter, I watched videos, I went to conferences (like BrightonSEO). I met other SEOs in person, and went from freelance ecommerce manager to project manager, to an SEO specialist for Shopify and Magento websites. Even now, I’m still learning – I don’t know an SEO that isn’t.
Knowledge is earned
I used to feel like SEOs I followed started big and strong. But actually, a career in SEO develops in layers. You learn from reading and doing. So I learnt from the migration that didn’t quite go to plan, the algorithm update that caught me off guard, the audit where I missed something obvious the first time round.
Nobody starts off perfect. The people who look like they did, have just been stacking layers longer than you. I keep reading (still!), talking to other SEOs, and documenting my knowledge.
Education never ends
This kinda follows on from my last life lesson. SEO changes fast, so you can’t just take a course and live the rest of your career in a safe bubble. Google is pushing updates faster than we can get a good night’s sleep, and that’s scary. Not just that, but everyone has an opinion about SEO, so you spend more time fact-checking than you can absorb what they’re saying. Being an SEO means embracing continuous learning.
Imposter syndrome doesn’t leave, it just evolves
Despite the positive feedback, the compliments, the lovely comments from clients, co-workers and other SEOs, imposter syndrome still shows up. Usually when I’m not expecting it.
It’s tangled up with my anxiety, which is why I can deliberate over something as simple as a LinkedIn post. Who will see this? What will they think? Will someone smarter than me pull it apart in the comments?
I still don’t have a perfect answer. I’m working on it every day.
What I’ve learnt is that imposter syndrome doesn’t go away, even with time. It just changes shape. The more senior you get, the bigger the rooms you’re in, the more it finds new things to whisper about. You’re not imagining it, and you’re not the only one feeling it.
Instead of letting it consume me, I remind myself of the work that’s actually shipped, the problems I’ve genuinely solved, the clients who came back because the results showed up where I said they would. Evidence beats anxiety most days, as long as you bother to look at it.
Topical authority wins
Single blog posts rarely do much for SEO. A tight cluster of well-linked, genuinely useful content on a focused subject does a lot. I advise my clients to plan and structure their content properly now. Parent category, subcategory, and articles that reinforce each other through internal linking.
A cluster of articles in Garden guides › Lawn care that live under a guides and downloads hub, all cross-linked, offers greater organic visibility and user engagement than having one topic on its own.
Design decisions require SEO direction
When designing a website, those design decisions affect not only engagement, but how search engines crawl and understand your website (and more specifically, the individual pages). From heirachy, site speed, even seemingly small components like accordions, affect SEO.
So SEO isn’t a “worry about it later” matter, for either the designer or SEO. An SEO should be just as much as part of the project as the developer is. That’s why, even small agencies need to have at least one SEO on the team, or at least collab with their client’s SEO (inhouse or agency partner).
The more I care about design (and I do, being an ex-designer), the better the SEO work gets. The two aren’t separate disciplines. They’re the same problem viewed from different angles.
Clarity is everything
I used to send reports and wait for clients to act on them. A long time ago, but not too long that I’ve forgotten about it. Not only that, but my reports were long, and boring. I thought the data told the story. And, that the answer was obvious. The data wasn’t the problem, the clarity (or lack of) was.
Now, every report after a technical SEO audit is a reason to tell the story myself, as humanly as possible. What’s the issue, why is it an issue, how critical is it, and what needs doing, when, and by who?
A report is a starting point for a conversation, not a substitute for one. The clients who get the most out of my technical SEO services are the ones I talk through the findings with on a call (or in a meeting), not the ones who open the PDF once and close it without any engagement.
Don’t rely on SEO tools too much
Tools help of course, but they don’t always see the full picture, or capture everything. Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush, Sitebulb, Search Console, GA4. They’re how we scale the work and spot patterns we’d never catch by hand (or spend days doing it the manual way).
A site audit tool will flag broken links in a sitemap, but won’t tell you that’s an old sitemap that isn’t even listed in robots.txt. It doesn’t understand the business behind the site.
I use SEO tools, sure, but I look at the site properly too (not only the front end, but in the code too). I click the links. Scroll the mobile view. Read the copy like a human. Search Google and see what actually comes back. Half the real issues show up in five minutes of genuine browsing that no tool ever surfaces.
Tools are a starting point, not the answer. The SEOs who lean on them too hard end up solving the wrong problems very efficiently. The ones who treat tools as one input among several, alongside their own eyes, judgement and time on the site, tend to find the issues that affect crawling and indexing.
Don’t take on too much
The perfect SEO (not that there is one) doesn’t generalise. Despite what some of those corporate BS job posts say, sticking to your strengths is better than being an octopus SEO. Avoid getting into a situation where you’re asked to jump between technical SEO, content, paid ads/media, email marketing, and everything else in the digital marketing bubble.
You don’t have all the answers
Not immediately, anyway. An SEO’s favourite thing to say is “it depends”, and for good reason. Some things you just can’t give a quick answer to. It involves deep discovery and looking at all the options, not just the eventual answer. This kinda sucks when you’re agency side and bound by the client’s budget.
Fortunately, if you’re agency-side (as long as you’re not the only SEO there) you can bounce your ideas off in standups, ask for help from other SEOs. If you’re in-house and its a large enough company that it employs an SEO team, you can surround yourself with a network of resources.
Experiment and test the unknown
Most best SEO practices are mostly theory, and work in practice, until they’re tried, tested and true. Even following new advice from Google doesn’t mean you’ll magically rank better. And for wild, risky tactics, you’ll probably want to experiment using your side project’s website.
That’s why I always have at least one side project running. Somewhere I can try the risky tactics or the unknown that I haven’t applied to a client’s live site before. You can’t run those experiments on client sites. The stakes are too high, and the blast radius is too wide. But on your own site, you get to test, fail, learn, and come back to client work with real answers instead of borrowed opinions.
Be prepared to make sacrifices and compromises
The best solution won’t always be the one you can implement or get approved. You’ll sometimes be met with platform limitations, the client’s budget, or conflicting ideas/decisions with stakeholders. When that happens, some sacrifices or compromises will need to be made.
Documentation will protect you (more so than not documenting). Document your recommended approach, what the limitations are with platforms or integrations, and any decisions that went over your head. What you expect will be the fallout, how to mitigate that, etc.
The SEO community is a mixed bunch
I’ve been fortunate to have met and kept in touch with a lot of great SEOs, very supportive and not at all presumptuous. Sadly though, there are others (all online in my experience) that are the complete opposite. It’s important not to take what they say – either to you directly or to anyone who will listen – seriously, or to heart. This began on what was formerly Twitter, and now I see the same types on LinkedIn.
Tips to become a better SEO – A note to my younger self
- Knowledge builds in layers, not leaps. The SEOs who seem polished and perfect have just been stacking experience longer. Keep reading, watching, listening, optimising and documenting your knowledge and results as you go, and you’ll gain more experience.
- Design and SEOs need to work together, not in silos. Hierarchy, site speed and component choices all affect crawling, indexing and engagement. SEOs should be involved from the start of a project, not bolted on at the end. If the designer doesn’t make the first move, make the call.
- Clarity beats everything in reporting. Long, data-heavy reports don’t get acted on. Telling the story yourself, in plain language, on a call, is what moves work forward. Reports start conversations, they don’t replace them. Provide data-rich reports but with clear documentation, they come as a pair.
- Tools are an input, not the answer. Crawlers and audit platforms scale the work but miss context, intent and the real business behind the site. Manual browsing, reading the code and searching as a user often surface the issues tools never will.
What’s next for me? I’ll keep reading, learning, talking to other SEOs, keeping a close eye on what’s new in core updates, learning from results, tracking, tweaking, tracking again. It’s the life of an SEO.
