Being an SEO vs having an SEO job
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[00:00:00] Hi, it's Olga Zarr. So welcome to SEO Podcast by SEOSLY. So today I want to talk about, this is again, something that's a lot of you requested me to talk about being an SEO consultant and independent SEO consultant versus having a job as an SEO specialist. I've been in both worlds. For the like majority of my SEO career, I had an SEO job.
[00:00:24] I was an in house SEO. I worked at SEO agencies. I was at the very beginning of my SEO career for a very short period of time. I was an SEO freelancer, but This was not necessarily a good idea because I had no experience. So I need to work my way through to become an SEO consultant that can actually like provide for herself that can actually make this business profitable and that can actually live this way.
[00:00:56] First, being an SEO consultant differs a lot from being an SEO employee And this is not for everyone. I know people who prefer being Like SEO specialist at companies and they would never want to be an SEO consultant versus I know people like myself who would never be happy being someone's employee and having the boss tell them what to do.
[00:01:24] This is also, I think, a personality thing. So for me, This was like the worst thing in the world, that I have someone who tries to tell me, Olga, do this, Olga, do that, Olga, prepare this for me, Olga, let's have five hour call. So this was so, frustrating for me, especially that in many cases I knew that the things that someone from above Suggests are not necessarily the things that I know will be good in terms of SEO, but I still had to do them Or that someone demanded that I work from the office, even though I knew that my personality I have those Autistic tendencies kind of I like to be alone.
[00:02:07] I am an introvert So I knew that I like the light is bad for me Sounds so I knew that I will never be able to work in an office environment. So having me go to the office was maybe from the manager's point, that was okay. We need to go to the office. We need to meet there. But from my own productivity standpoint and how much I can bring to the table, this was terrible and this kind of killed my motivation, productivity.
[00:02:40] I'm totally okay with having calls, virtual calls, working with people like that while being in the office is like totally not for me. So I also know people who, for example, have families and they just need their SEO job and they need to finish it, forget, focus on their family, then next day start the job, finish it, never think about work over the weekend.
[00:03:09] So, let's talk about it first, what it is being an SEO employee. So usually you have, you have the working hours depending on whether you work from home or remotely or from the office. You need to like commute or you don't. You have a manager, you have the tasks you need to do depending on the Kind of the setup.
[00:03:32] You may have to have calls with clients or you don't. For example, in one SEO agency I had to do a lot of client calls. In the other I have, it was like totally cut off from client communication whatsoever. Depends. You have, paid leave usually, depends on the type of contract you have, but in most cases , you can be sick and still get paid.
[00:03:57] You can have like 20, 26 in Poland. It's 26 days where you get paid and basically unlimited number of sick days, at least in Poland. So you have a baby. The baby gets sick, so you are on sick leave for a month and no one will tell you anything because your, your baby is sick. So this is comfortable, usually, this is comfortable, right?
[00:04:23] Because you, you don't have to worry about the money aspect if your child or you get sick. If you have an operation, then, you are entitled to having that many days free. So. The money potential usually is quite limited because the client will pay like a given amount of money to the SU agency where you're hired and you will get like one one hundredth of that or even less so that has to be profitable for the agency owner even though usually the work you put in there is worth like 50 times more than you are actually paid off.
[00:05:04] But this is kind of the arrangement, right? You are, you finish the work. In most cases, you don't have to be engaged at all. You forget you have free weekends, you get paid, year by year, usually you get small rise and you have bonuses if you like do something extra or you provide extraordinary results.
[00:05:26] So that's more or less, you can also grow in your in your positions. You can have higher positions, you can become a senior SEO, SEO manager, and then you can after a few years, you can change the job because you are you're fed up with the current one, but More or less you are in this more secure environment.
[00:05:48] Being an SEO consultant is different. For me, it's better, but as I said, this is not for everyone. So first of all, you run your own business. You have your own clients and you are accountable to them. And if you get sick, you have to either find someone who will fill in, you have to work some more hours in advance, or you have to Arrange it with a client that for this month you won't be working.
[00:06:19] So you won't get paid. So this Financial aspect is not that secure but on the other hand you usually get paid 10 times more or Depends five ten times more than as an seo consultant than you would be paid as an seo Employee, so still it is usually time money wise. It is way more profitable With having a higher amount of income, you can save a lot of money and then have that money saved up in case you need to take a break, you get sick or, or whatever.
[00:06:54] So, even though you, you cannot be sick, you cannot really go for vacation unless you like really talk about this with your clients and arrange something beforehand. But you get paid more, so that's one thing. So, another thing. You don't have anyone to tell you what to do. You need to be able to define that for yourself. You don't have anyone who will tell you, you did that wrong, you did that right. There is a deadline. You will have to organize it all by yourself.
[00:07:27] So usually you need to have your own, SEO management, project management tool where you put all the clients, all the deadlines, all the priorities, everything lies on you. You need to know what you need to do. How much of it when everything like strategy wise and organization wise is on you, but it gives you way more flexibility.
[00:07:50] So, for example, no one is telling you that you have to work from this hour to that hour. You can work whenever you want, maybe except for like being present on some calls, right? So this is like huge for me because. If I don't feel like it, I can just go out and run. And most of my clients are from the US, which means that I am here in Poland, so my mornings, pretty much everything until 3 p.
[00:08:17] m., I am free to do whatever I want. But here's the thing. If you are an SEO consultant, if you are like an ambitious one like me, You will end up working way more than you initially intended. So at first, when I started out, I knew that I am contracted to, I don't remember back then, to do that many hours per week by those clients.
[00:08:41] So it means that I can work way less than I used to work because at some point I had three jobs. At two agencies and I was an consultant with a client Then I had one job and I was an independent seo consultant and it meant I I worked like 70 hours or something. This was crazy Then I switched to being a solo seo consultant.
[00:09:04] So I knew that okay now I can rest I can have more free time I don't have to work over weekends, but the reality was that I Basically kept working the same, more or less the same amount of hours because I love it, right? And I made it a goal to split my SEO hours into client work and my own kind of branding SEO site type of work.
[00:09:31] And both are fascinating. And I usually end up working over the weekends too, but my goal is to stop that. maybe to not stop that, but to, to work less, to try to work those 40 hours per week, because, because it's simply, at some point you, you will get burned out, even though, even if you love SEO like I do.
[00:09:54] So that's another thing you need to be aware that you will, you may end up working more and you may end up working over the weekends. You have usually direct contact with your clients. Sometimes they may need something urgent over the weekend, depending on how you set the borders kind of. You may need to answer them over the weekend.
[00:10:20] This is all up to you, how you set it up. I usually try to be flexible. I don't want to say this is weekend, I'm off, forget. Usually I, I am reachable like every day. If something is happening, I won't be waiting until Monday to fix it. If I know that it may impact SEO, then I will fix it on Saturday morning, right?
[00:10:44] So this is the difference. And another thing is the growth, the great growth that you can experience. You can experience it being an SEO as well, but it all depends on the SEO agency. If your SEO agency is willing to invest in your, in some courses, in some education, gives you some hours to, to learn, that's cool.
[00:11:08] But if this is the SEO agency that wants you to rip off your. energy and do like everything, just work, work, work, then you probably won't have time for like, growth and you will be simply doing like all the tasks they had. So the one SEO agency I was working on, like the one I was the longest with, they were cool because they actually, at some point, they understood how I work, that I, Like to work for a longer time on one project.
[00:11:37] I don't like to like quickly change things I don't like calls because in most cases I think calls are like a waste of time and if you're an employee you don't care then you can of course sit for five Hours on a call and do your own stuff during that and get paid for that But this is not something that I wanted, so they actually let me do my own experiments, learn, and simply share what I learned with others.
[00:12:02] So this, this was really cool. And as an SEO consultant, this is also something that I can do, which is, which is great, because 50 percent of my time I spend on reading. learning, sharing the things I learn with my audience. And then I have like real clients, uh, for whom I have a lot of time and to do a lot of things.
[00:12:25] And they're all eager to implement those things. These are not like corporate clients that will not implement anything in like years. These are the clients. where I have access to their sites and I am able to implement those things and experiment very, very quickly, which is the best learning field for me as an SEO because I have practice.
[00:12:50] And I have like theory, and I have the audience, and I have great relationships with my clients. So for me, the path of being an SEO consultant is the best one and the only one. It doesn't have to be for you, but I hope with this video I was able to show you a little bit more of how it looks from this side of that side, so you can better decide what's best for you.
[00:13:14] I hope this video was helpful. If you like this video, please like it, share it with others, give me a thumbs up and help me grow my channel because all I do, I do here for free. I share my knowledge for free so that you can become a better SEO. That's all for today and see you in the next video. Bye bye.