Starting & Growing SEO Teams

“Tell me, who/what do I need to hire to run our SEO program? What is the first hire for a new SEO team?” Questions I often get, usually followed by: “Do you know anybody for our team?”. As so many companies around the Bay Area are hiring it makes sense, which also makes hiring harder. I’ve previously blogged about writing a better job description for SEO roles but I also wanted to shed some light into what I’d suggest as good setups for an SEO team and what roles + seniority to hire for depending on your company structure.

Why need SEO support?

Most startup founders or early employees don’t have an extensive background in Marketing or specifically SEO (and they shouldn’t). Most of the time, they have been too busy building the company, getting to product-market fit and iterating on their product/service. In a lot of growing B2C companies, you need to establish plans for long term growth. That’s what SEO can usually bring to these companies: a sustainable long term growth strategy. But in order to get there, you’ll need to bring in extra help to make sure that it actually is sustainable. Instead of employing short term SEO tactics that might put your growth more at risk if you approach it wrong (as many startups also do).

Why create an SEO Team?

So why do you need to create an SEO team, for many of us this is common knowledge as we’re in this on a daily basis? But let’s say you’re getting started, these could be some of the objectives:

• Dedicated focus on SEO, there are too many other channels to take care off.
• Need to grow a long-term channel to success.
• Too many tasks, need to specialize with its own dedicated specialized IC/team.
• Build out more brand awareness for the company (SEO is a great way of doing this long term).
• Grow revenue & transactions at a low Customer Acquisition Cost.

Consultant versus Hiring Inhouse

Hiring an SEO Consultant versus an Inhouse SEO

Some teams can’t always hire talent right away (think about the Bay Area where basically all the bigger companies constantly have a need to hire SEO talent) or it might take too long to ramp up SEO. In some other cases, it made more sense for the company to hire a consultant in the short term to take care of some issues and figure out what’s actually needed instead of just hiring somebody with potentially the wrong skill set for the long term.

My take on this is usually that if you already know what you want your SEO team to work on & are able to wait another 2-3 months that you’re better off hiring somebody in-house (if resources are available). In other cases: you have a short term need, you need a technical SEO but want to hire a content person, etc. You’re likely better off starting with a specialized consultant in an area to make sure your issues around that are covered.

Also, read my blogpost on levels & seniority in SEO roles.

Hiring SEOs isn’t good enough: resources!

The Skills of an SEO Leader

Provide them with resources, when I joined Postmates one of the questions that I wanted to make sure was that they provided me with not just resources to set up some tools but also that I had engineers available to run the actual implementations and a designer to create the new pages that we needed there.

• Engineering: It’s important, as you the SEO can’t make all the changes yourself, you’ll need the team to make actual changes. Most SEOs that I meet don’t have the knowledge about their infrastructure to actually push code or design something that complies with brand guidelines.
• Design: You need to add additional content, you need more blog posts, but they can’t just be text. There need to be visual add-ons to it, so you need design support.
• Content: In a bigger company there will be an actual huge need for content (either new or to edit existing content). 

How have you been growing SEO teams, what is missing, what should SEO teams really focus on? Leave a comment!