A Day In The Life of A Rankings Expert: SEO From Our Eyes

This isn’t an article about cutting-edge SEO tricks or tactics as much as it’s an ’empathy article’ — a look behind the scenes at what really actually happens in a modern-day SEO office here onshore in America. Most of our clients have some sort of vision of us as living in a cubicle farm a la Office Space, but that’s actually mostly not true. It may be in Bangladesh, I don’t know for certain, but here, it tends a bit more toward the casual and chaotic for us expert SEO types.

The fact is that most of us SEO types don’t have offices per se. Or rather, we do, but we don’t have an office mentality — or, quite often, an office schedule. We get up, eat breakfast, check our Email. Depending on what we see there, we either panic, sit down, log on, and start working right there at the breakfast table, or we take a jog and a shower and then head into the office.

At the office, there’s the usual setup — a couple of guys that talk to new clients, figure out what they need, and set up a plan in order to get it to them at a reasonable price. Several guys (or gals, I’m using ‘guys’ in the gender-neutral sense here) each in their own rooms, with their own posters and their own computers set up the way they like them, all diligently creating backlinks, writing articles, researching the latest cutting-edge SEO techniques, and playing Dungeons of Dredmor during their lunch breaks. And a couple of guys in the back that keep all of the wiring and servers and other technical doodads doing what they’re supposed to do.

If it sounds relaxed, that’s because it’s supposed to be — not because we don’t work our butts off, but because it’s easier to work your butt off when you can expect your manager to walk through the door and pelt you with a half-dozen Nerf balls before he hands you your turkey-ranch-and-Swiss and tells you to get back to work.

The amazing thing about SEO is that it’s portable. If our company accidentally takes on more work than it can do in a given timeframe, we can hire another company to take over whatever portion we can’t handle — we pay them whatever we were going to get (gotta make sure the quality level stays on par, which means paying the right price), and we call it good. We know who the other good guys are, and we work with them — because next month, they’ll overpromise, and we’ll get their overflow.

Probably not every top SEO office is like ours — but a lot of them are. We think of ourselves like rock stars or financiers: we work hard, we play hard, and we get the job done — just probably not quite the way you thought we did.