GrowTraffice was originally established by a freelance SEO consultant and over the years has morphed in a full-service digital marketing agency that primarily acts as an SEO-focused content marketing agency. But what’s it really like for an SEO consultant to work in a content marketing agency?
If you’re asking yourself this question it may be because you’re thinking about a career change, you’re trying to figure out what it’s like for one of your colleagues or because you’re currently working as an SEO consultant in a content marketing agency and you want to know if your experience is normal.
Whatever your reason for thinking about this question it’s fair to say that no two content marketing agencies are the same just in the same way that no two SEO consultants are the same. So some SEO consultants will find it easier to fit into a content marketing agency than others.
If you think about what an SEO consultant does on a day to day basis you’ll find there is a great deal of cross over between their activities and those of a content marketing agency. Most SEO consultants worth their salt should be able to write some fairly decent content because most of them will want to use blogs, static page content and offsite content in order to help their clients to rank.
Similarly, a content marketing agency will employ strategies that attempt to increase rankings in search engines like Google. However, a content marketing will be more concerned about buying cycle than your average SEO consultant in an SEO consultancy, whereas an SEO consultant will have a greater understanding about technical SEO, with most of them being fairly proficient with code, unlike most content marketers.
That being said content marketing agencies do tend to like to have an SEO consultant in their agency because they will regularly need an SEO expert to fall back on when they are struggling or when they need to build the confidence of a client.
This means it can be very exciting for an SEO consultant to work within a content marketing agency, especially if they are the main or sole SEO consultant within the agency. It can also mean that they have more pressure put on their shoulders because they will be relied upon to come up with the kind SEO strategy that will fit into the content marketing strategy and which will best benefit from the content calendars developed for clients.
It can sometimes be a bit more frustrating for an SEO consultant to work in a content marketing agency than it would for them to work within an SEO consultancy because they can’t advise a client to solely act with SEO in mind. I think this can be beneficial for SEO because it makes them consider the broader marketing objectives.
So it would probably depend on the emphasis the content agency places on SEO on the one hand. It also depends on the skills of the SEO consultant and in some ways their personality. SEO is a funny game to get into. It requires a person to have strong opinions and to stick with their conviction when there isn’t a great deal of evidence that what they’re doing is right. After all, there are hundreds of factors that go into ranking a website so the SEO has to hope that they’ve got a good mix of them right and this results in additional or improved rankings. But generally, they can’t specifically point to what they’ve done as the cause of the ranking movements. On the other hand, a content marketer can use data to directly evidence what’s happened – or not happened – with the content they’ve produced and make decisions based on that data.
If you work in a content marketing agency and your looking at your SEO consultant and wondering what it’s like for them in your agency perhaps bear in mind it’s not that easy to be the only one of your discipline in a group of experts in a different field of marketing. Cut them some slack.
If you’re thinking about this because you’re an SEO who is thinking about joining a content marketing agency it’s important to understand what the expectations are and how the execs within the content marketing agency define SEO. Many content marketers would see SEO as being a much more specific and technical discipline than most SEOs would and you could face the issue of them not seeing much of a difference between what you do and what they do. This can be an issue if they’re paying you more than the content marketers within the agency.
If you’ve got a choice between a content marketing agency and an SEO consultancy or SEO agency you might want to consider where you are up to in your career journey. If you’re a senior SEO expert you might want to be the leading light on SEO within a content marketing agency but you might get more visibility or credibility if you were the leading SEO guru within an SEO consultancy. If that position were even available.
Good luck and we hope this has given you a bit more of an indication about what it’s like for an SEO consultant to work within a content marketing agency. Please feel free to give us a call if you ever want to talk any of this through.
