The SEO Job
The hardest part about SEO is not the SEO, it is the explaining of SEO.
Of course, the above statement is only true after you reach a threshold where the actual SEO becomes easier than the things surrounding it. This situation usually happens when you have years of experience in earning tens of millions of organic traffic.
Because let’s be honest, SEO itself is extremely complex. It involves everything (i mean everything) that is related to a website, and no one actually knows anything. For you and your boss, this knowledge of ‘no one actually knows anything’ is crucial for both parties to know in order to be productive.
One big problem that we have as SEOs is coming off as like we know many things. While we actually do, this approach might not work well because our knowledge will be considered not ‘data-driven’ enough.
Yes, it is based on data, but if you use it to prove your knowledge, there will be so many holes in your argument that you might come off as an idiot. And what do bosses really like? Data-driven, analytical, and all those sorts of things, you know.
You are expected to know how much % of traffic increase will happen if your site loading time goes from 5s to 2s, or how much revenue the company will generate if you change one dofollow to a nofollow.
Can you find out how much % of traffic increase will happen if you shave off 3 seconds? Yes. Try spend 2 trillion USD and 5 years of time to research how the whole google algorithm actually works. Or, you can just have a strong belief that a faster site is better than a slow site.
People might disagree with the above because there is a lot of data that can prove the importance of site speed. Correct, but again, having to be data-driven for thousands of optimizations is like having to be data-driven for every designer’s brush stroke and hand movement.
Now all the above might sound like I’m blaming everything on your boss. But no, we SEOs are also at risk of not communicating abstract things in a logical manner.
If you have a regular, stereotypical, corporate type boss, try to be extremely logical whenever you say something related to SEO, otherwise your words will backfire very easily. The first step towards SEO job safety is acknowledging your knowledge gap related to google algorithms. You have to know what you know for certain, what you think you know, and what you don’t know.
Now this is a spoiler: the part where we don’t know as SEOs might take up as much as 90% among all the SEO things. This is why many companies tend to go for SEO packages that eliminate the 90% of don’t knows and present the 10% as if it were the whole of SEO. These things make them comfortable because the harsh truth is hidden.
You can have two approaches, protect your boss from the harsh truth of SEO and keep him comfortable, or you can both be adults and acknowledge the reality and uncertainty.
Does your boss need to be comfortable? Can they handle the truth? Are you at risk of losing your job? Are they mature enough? These are some questions to help you decide how to manage your boss as an SEO.