#opentowork – it’s the hashtag I keep seeing on LinkedIn from SEO professionals.
Attached to this hashtag is a long post about the SEO being shocked and asking for help finding work.
Why? SEOs are being made redundant by agencies.
It’s been happening all year and is about to fuel the biggest career crisis in SEO.
You need to be ready.
You need to think about how you’ll handle things.
You need to make some decisions about your future.
This article will help.
The COVID boom is over: Welcome to the dark times of SEO
When COVID-19 happened, and we were all locked away in our homes, an SEO boom occurred.
People suddenly remembered the importance of digital marketing, and we saw a huge increase in demand for services.
Agencies emerged from nowhere, and others grew at speed.
I recall trying to find SEOs to hire, and it was a nightmare. Many were in a bidding war for staff as wages increased and demand outstripped the supply of SEO staff.
Big agencies were now happy with fully remote or hybrid work. It was a glorious boom time of high salaries and demand for services.
But things change.
Throw in a few wars, an energy crisis, politics, inflation, higher interest rates, a cost-of-living crisis and sprinkle on a few elections.
As a result, people are spending less, and marketing budgets have tightened.
Money shifted to immediate customer acquisition (paid search), so SEO has been hit.
The kneejerk response would be that SEO is dead or dying. It’s not. By all accounts, SEO is a growing industry.
However, we experienced a period of rapid growth that would never have been sustainable during normal times, followed by a downturn.
The simple truth.
We have too many SEOs right now.
Redundancies fuel a race to the bottom
The freelance market is booming.
We all know it. But this is being fuelled by agencies collapsing or making staff redundant.
When an SEO faces redundancy, they end up having four options.
Start their own agency.
Find another role, either at an agency or on the client side.
Go freelance.
Walk away from SEO.
The latter tends to happen with execs. They can start a new role or career and even freelance on the side.
However, many freelance or start their own agency (in a decreasing SEO role marke)t.
This means that you often add to the competition field for every redundancy you make.
We then end up with a position where the price has to drop because supply outstrips demand for SEO services.
And that’s the current market. It’s been a messy 18 or so months.
But it’s about to change.
Dig deeper: What to do if you lose your SEO job: The emergency handbook
The next boom is coming
Companies have overspent on paid search and will turn to organic next year. We know that growth, no matter how minor, will likely be heading to economies.
And here’s the issue.
Agencies have let go some of their best staff… and getting them back is complicated.
First, there are huge benefits to being self-employed.
From tax efficiency to general work-life balance.
Second, you’re asking people to give up their relative freedom for 1 to 3 months’ notice and a probation period of less.
And then we have earnings.
Once you place tax into a mix, being a freelancer means you can take a six-figure salary home without earning six figures on paper.
Freelancers only need a few clients to earn more than their old salaries.
This causes a big issue for agencies.
So, what’s the solution?
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Agencies of the future are brand experiences
There are two ways this is going to go.
The first is that agencies that have survived will promote inexperienced staff to ensure they have enough people to do the work and fill the bottom with graduates.
A core issue with this is results.
A good executive does not always make a good account manager, and a good account manager does not always equal a good head of SEO, and so on.
People tend to be promoted to their position of “incompetence” and don’t go further.
This can result in many “bad agencies” that churn clients at scale.
That’s not to say they can’t thrive – in boom periods, they do. It’s just a tad on the depressing side, and generally, agencies like that reach their saturation point.
This is where they achieve a natural balance of client gain and churn. They don’t grow; they just stay the same size.
But there is another future.
The birth of the SEO agency brand.
Right now, I’d say that agency marketing is pretty awful generally.
We are in bad times right now, but we weren’t always in bad times, and we won’t be in bad times in the future.
Therefore, it’s how we market agency brands that matters.
But I want you to answer a question (in your mind).
If BrewDog had started an SEO agency, I think we could imagine how their agency would look.
Image via ChatGPT
We could guess the decor, style, approach and what it would feel like in the office.
As a client, I’m sure you’d like to visit the office. You’d have a nice beer poured in the meeting room while you chatted.
But what about if L’Oreal or any major beauty brand started an agency?
I think we’d say most of the staff would have nice hair, but aside from that, we’d know that the office would be glamorous, and their advertising and marketing content would be luxurious.