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Ask HN: Where Are the SEOs?

4 points by rigid_airship ↗ HN
My company has been looking to hire a lead SEO for MONTHS now but it's been incredibly difficult to even find candidates for the pipeline. I'm close to the point of bringing on a technical recruiter but - for obvious reasons - have kept that option as a last resort. Does anyone have any suggestions that have worked for them in the past to find and hire these folks?

6 comments

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arrakis2021
1. They must be hired in-house. agencies are terrible at SEO so don’t settle for one

2. A good SEO will say there is no such thing as a good SEO, so look for humble players

3. If you’re having trouble searching - “SEO” is unlikely to be In their title. Look for “content marketing” as a skill instead

4. As a last resort, Learn some yourself and at least you’ll be able to lay the foundation.

karlhughes
Narrow down.

Don't look for generalist SEO people, but instead content marketers with experience in your industry.

I've seen so many of our clients get crappy keyword research because the consultant/SEO person they work with doesn't actually know their audience well.

vgeek
So many leave for greener pastures. You can do everything right in creating content, getting great links, having solid on page optimization, but no movement for months at a time. When you're solely SEO, you probably report to someone who starts to get antsy after a few months of "not ranking 1st for X term", so you end up switching to paid or something else entirely.

I've had most success in hiring copywriters who are eager to learn and then teaching them the fundamentals related to creating content-- keyword research, interlinking and thinking of who/how their content will either further business goals or help with generating backlinks. The technical component is easier- just look for anyone with Screamingfrog on their resume or be willing to teach someone who is semi-technical.

rigid_airship
Makes a lot of sense, thanks. And are you typically finding these folks on LinkedIn? Job fairs? Conferences? Meetups?
vgeek
Plain old Indeed job postings and looking at their resumes, speaking to them and seeing what motivates them. It was pretty easy to hire in Chicago due to plenty of candidates for the copywriting roles. We got lucky in finding a few people who didn't fit the traditional molds but were eager to learn.

We also kept an SEO analyst type role posted for over a year (salary was posted at 65-75k in far suburb, 2015 vintage, so fairly competitive at that time) to see who would apply, and out of 100+ applications we only hired one person (the company I was at would hire qualified people to grow headcount-- I'm ignoring that dysfunction here). Most of the applicants with claims of "5+ years experience" couldn't describe concepts like nofollow, anchor text importance or the difference between robots.txt and meta tags. I've also hired in 2mm population midwestern metros and it gets a lot harder. In less populated areas, remote will probably help quite a bit.