Breaking point has been reached.

[Bee]

I've officially hit my breaking point with my 9-5.

I need out, and I need out ASAP.

I'm working on my first solo digital marketing project as a side hustle right now... and my timeline looks pretty good... but I've still got awhile before it's going to be strong enough to provide me an income. I'm not looking to make it a "get rich quick" thing or take any shortcuts, which leads me to this:

I need to get a different job to pay my bills in the meantime.

How do I get a company to hire me to do SEO without any on-paper proof of the things I'm learning and implementing on my own site? What sort of things would look good on a resume? Are there other types of similar positions I could look into? (Or really, just ANY decent remote work position to get me though)

I know. A lot of you are going to say tough it out... bite the bullet and hustle harder, and just wait and make it happen for my own site... but I cannot stay in this job, and I cannot survive to pay my bills if I'm not earning a steady income yet. I would not be shocked if I get fired soon, so I am really just trying to be prepared.

(There have been continual incidents of sexual harassment. I asked for it to be stopped, and am now being treated like absolute garbage. This is private practice medicine... so there is nothing to protect me, and they've got the money and lawyer access to make it like I never existed... so I am really not interested in going down that road. I am just looking to get the heck out. )

Thanks in advance for the advice if you've got any to share. I need to make some drastic changes this year and any input at all is greatly appreciated.

 

[turbin3]

Sorry to hear about the issues and the work environment.

Although a lot of this might not help immediately, it can definitely be useful in the long term, especially when trying to "prove" it. Start a personal/professional blog for you, if you haven't already, and post regularly about new things you're doing, thoughts you have, experiments you've done, etc. This is great stuff for a hiring manager, when researching a candidate, as it helps gain a glimpse into the mindset and work ethic of that candidate. Another great idea is buying a domain name of YOUR name, and then setting up email for it. Easiest is usually connecting it to gmail and using your custom domain through there (I'm happy to explain further if you need). The idea being, you have your own site, you also have your own self-branded email, which is the email you'd use in applications and resumes.

Consider the fact that YOU have created your own website on your own initiative. The vast majority of marketers I've come across, worked with, and/or interviewed, have NEITHER of those things. If they have a blog, it's a 10y/o one with 2 posts, and is basically pointless. As someone involved in the hiring process, I would absolutely consider major bonus points for a candidate that has taken that initiative, in contrast to the average minion who can mindlessly recite Moz dogma from memory. Hell, I can't even tell you how many resumes I've seen where their email is a gmail like "420smokebro@". Seriously? Makes me want to ask them, "At what point did this seem like a good idea...?" LOL Most of this stuff can be taught and learned on the fly. Mentality and work ethic pretty much can't.

 

[ryandiscord]

To Turbin's point being able to prove you have the mentality and work ethic speaks volumes. Demonstrate some of the keyword research, optimizations and outreach you've done on your site. If it's an in-house position, perform an audit on their site and do some keyword/competitor research for them and be prepared to explain how that would help them. Being able to demonstrate a working knowledge of commonly used tools, like SEMRush, Moz, Ahrefs and Excel would help.

Also, the Google Adwords and Analytics IQ certifications look good on a resume. The exams are now free and Google provides excellent training courses for both of them.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If the company's human resources section won't help you or doesn't exist, there are government programs that exist that will go to bat for you. That's the extent of my knowledge but they'd might go as far as to provide a very experienced lawyer. My guess is if you have records of the dates, times, and methods of harassment, it's probably an open and closed case. We all know sexual harassment is a daily occurrence. You might find a lawyer who'd take the case for a cut of an out-of-court settlement.

I wouldn't recommend any of that unless it was a very serious issue beyond just verbal comments. You'll likely get wrapped up in legal hell for a while with a lot of added stress.

726 x 238​

 

[eliquid]

I've known SEVERAL cases of this going on where the abusee got fired, not the abuser.

HR exists to protect and help the company, not you. This is very common and doesn't end the way it should.

BTW, you need to become the "company" you wish to work for. Get your own clients instead.

When you get hired for a job, everyone wants to see those credentials you speak of and all that experience. When you get hired as the "expert", hardly any clients ask for proof of that stuff.

The same company that would require a MBA in Business Marketing, Adwords and Analytics certs, 9+ years experience, social media skills, and a clean background with clean drug testing... will also turn around and hire some bum off the street dressed in a nice suit selling themselves as a "consultant" or "agency" and never once check any of that shit.

See where I am getting at?

 

[Bee]

I wouldn't recommend any of that unless it was a very serious issue beyond just verbal comments. You'll likely get wrapped up in legal hell for a while with a lot of added stress.

726 x 238​

This is my exact feeling. There is no concrete proof... just a lot of uncomfortable comments and he's touchy feely. I privately told him it needed to stop and that I do not like to be touched...but a coworker happened to overhear what was going on and called in management. I was trying my hardest to avoid having the confrontation... but it happened. So now I'm kinda screwed.

Also, the Google Adwords and Analytics IQ certifications look good on a resume. The exams are now free and Google provides excellent training courses for both of them.

This is awesome, I didn't know that. Thanks!

I've known SEVERAL cases of this going on where the abusee got fired, not the abuser.

HR exists to protect and help the company, not you. This is very common and doesn't end the way it should.

BTW, you need to become the "company" you wish to work for. Get your own clients instead.

When you get hired for a job, everyone wants to see those credentials you speak of and all that experience. When you get hired as the "expert", hardly any clients ask for proof of that stuff.

The same company that would require a MBA in Business Marketing, Adwords and Analytics certs, 9+ years experience, social media skills, and a clean background with clean drug testing... will also turn around and hire some bum off the street dressed in a nice suit selling themselves as a "consultant" or "agency" and never once check any of that shit.

See where I am getting at?

Very true... This is a bit of real life marketing psychology in action!

 

[coredev]

This is my exact feeling. There is no concrete proof... just a lot of uncomfortable comments and he's touchy feely. I privately told him it needed to stop and that I do not like to be touched...but a coworker happened to overhear what was going on and called in management. I was trying my hardest to avoid having the confrontation... but it happened. So now I'm kinda screwed.

kick him in the nuts. he touches you so that means you can touch him

 

[CCarter]

"Paid Media Expert" is where it's at.

To give you an idea of how easy it can be and how lost these corporations are, a friend of mine that knew NOTHING about Amazon PPC asked me for help, I knew nothing as well so I hit up the HR at BuSo about it: Amazon Paid Search Trainer. @ryandiscord PMed me with a killer strategy that he later posted here: Amazon PPC.

Working with my friend on a weekly basis with skype she took a $20K campaign and turned it into $140K in profits for a company in 6 weeks - it was during the holidays. But the kicker is, she knew NOTHING about Amazon before hand - NOTHING, she could barely login! The company that hired her as a consultant had people there that even used to work for Amazon that knew even less.

Large corporations DO NOT KNOW JACK SHIT about Paid Media - they're ALL faking it. Someone going into PPC (Google Adwords, Bing Whatever), Amazon PPC, Facebook Paid Advertisement, or whatever can make a killing as a consultant - a lot more than you can with SEO consulting!

The one skill you really need to know how to do is know how to invoice your clients and follow up on the invoices - and be strict.

Regarding the job situation, I hate to say this but it'll get worse in the coming days/weeks. This is one of those extreme darkness before the dawn. This might be the worse it gets for you, but keep hope alive cause when you hit rock bottom, there is only one direction to go. Even if you get let go, it'll be a lot less stressful than having to deal with idiots that make your life miserable and a living hell.

Life's too short and there is too much money out here to let others affect your well being. Honestly, I'd be a gangster if I were you and dip on that lease agreement and move in with your boyfriend and call it a day if it's really that bad. Lease agreements don't hit credit reports last I checked, it's a dick move, but if you are in a shitty situation, you gotta do what's best for you - #1. Getting screwed over by roommates, your employer, and co-workers and the world - meanwhile you gotta be the good guy/girl? Fuck all that. If I was in desperate times, everyone can go fuck themselves at that point - you gotta take care of you, #1, first. If your mental well being is not taken care of or you don't feel safe going to work, nothing else means much. Get out, move out, and tell everyone else in the world to Fuck Off!

 

[darkzerothree]

Take those Google certs (they are solid, especially if you apply what you learn at the same time)

A guy owning an agency here does the following:
He invites small business owners to a FREE 1hr Adwords training session.
Basically "Google Adwords for small businesses with Mr.A from XYZ Marketing"

Result?
1/3 run with it.
1/3 see how much work and knowledge is involved and hire him right there.
1/3 come back later or refer a friend to him.

When he started, he barely knew the material google gives out.

All you need is a one page business site and some vistaprint business cards.

 

[Bee]

In addition to the google certs, are there any other types of certification or accreditation I can obtain in a reasonable amount of time to have as "badges of proof"? Particularly anything with CSS/HTML, and preferably one that will allow me to build skills in the process?

 

[eliquid]

In addition to the google certs, are there any other types of certification or accreditation I can obtain in a reasonable amount of time to have as "badges of proof"? Particularly anything with CSS/HTML, and preferably one that will allow me to build skills in the process?

Yes, wordstream is one and so is hubspot. There are a couple others, but those are pretty well known in the space

 

[Potatoe]

Lots of interesting ideas in here, please keep us updated with how things work out. I'm hoping your inbox will light up with some sort of offers of gigs that can give you more experience and help build a bit of a cushion if things at work get much worse in the short term. Have you considered posting a reply in the Rolodex thread?

 

[propipper]

You can also try FB certification: https://www.facebook.com/blueprint/certification

Another one maybe Hootsuite certification. We use Hootsuite and I signed up for their online university so I can learn more about how to leverage the platform and discover all its functionalities. I probably only use 30% of what HS can really do. I'm pretty sure certification is free. If not, take the classes and don't get the certification.

Regarding the job situation - that sucks. But, if you're going to go out, go out with a bang. I'd file a federal EEOC complaint. Will the perv continue to work there - sure. I guess depending on how big the company is. For large corporations, they won't take it seriously but for small-medium sized businesses, they don't want (or need) the hassle of that. I know we try to avoid that at all costs.

 

[finnegan]

Regarding the job situation - that sucks. But, if you're going to go out, go out with a bang. I'd file a federal EEOC complaint. Will the perv continue to work there - sure. I guess depending on how big the company is. For large corporations, they won't take it seriously but for small-medium sized businesses, they don't want (or need) the hassle of that. I know we try to avoid that at all costs.

No need to make some A-hole lawyer rich. Just leave the job and find another if you don't like it.

 

[Bee]

No need to make some A-hole lawyer rich. Just leave the job and find another if you don't like it.

Yep, definitely not going the legal route, never once considered it. This surgeon is way more valuable to the company than I am. I don't want the hassle. It's not a career or career field I'm looking to preserve. I'm just getting out.

Thanks all for the certification leads, and all the other input as well! It is definitely helpful. I've got some great avenues to pursue.

As for worse before better at work... I genuinely don't know if I'm on the chopping block or not. I'm just working on the exit strategy either way.

 

[animalstyle]

Clip a hemostat to the center of his nose and slowly explain your feelings. Don't rush, you'll have his attention.

 

[darkzerothree]

center of his nose... ya right

 

[animalstyle]

Seriously though hemostat joke aside, its a tough situation to be in.

I respect the fact that you're redirecting your energy elsewhere instead of fighting. Tons of great advice in this thread. The only thing I can add is that nobody is looking out for you except you. It's a balancing act though... timid and passive has its place, just as strong, loud and aggressive does too.

 

[Bee]

I've found a position I'm pretty interested in... and the application has a question asking me to describe my process with doing SEO site audits. I'm not yet familiar with how to do this. Can anyone link to a resource for me to study up to give a good answer? My own search lead me to the Moz guide and I'm working through that right now, but are there others with even more information I can keep working on?

Thanks again, guys. <3

 

[ryandiscord]

Do some research on content audits and technical seo audits. Moz is a good place to start: https://moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial

Ryan Stewart has a ton of actionable information: http://webris.org/how-to-perform-a-technical-seo-audit/

If you're performing an audit on a larger site you would want to look at server logs to find crawl inefficiencies: https://moz.com/blog/technical-seo-log-analysis

 

[JasonSc]

I work at an agency focused strictly on local SEO. We build a lot of reports because it makes the client feel all warm and fuzzy. I think most of the reports are crap, but it’s a sales tool of “look what we do for your site”.

Here is how we do technical site audits. This does not include a content audit. Content audits are done by our content manger.

Run the site through screaming frog. From there we create several reports for the clients to create a baseline.

We are looking for:
1. Internal and External 301
2. Internal and External 404
3. Any 500 errors
4. Missing alt tags or just bad alt tags
5. Missing H1 and H2
6. Missing, to long ,to short meta descriptions
7. Look at word counts to find any thin content
8. We look for pages with high internal/external out links.
9. Then export Anchor text and start analyzing to make sure the anchor text is not stuffed. (This can be tricky because navigation menus, footers and side bars are in this report.

We then look at site speed.
We use Pingdom, Gtmetrix, and Google PageSpeed Insights to get a baseline of how the site is performing.

If we are not hosting the site we run serious of time to first byte. Our admin will run this ever 30 minutes for day. From this we can tell if their hosting sucks or not.

We also test to make sure the site passes Google’s mobile friendly test.

Next we use Ahrefs to analyze their backlink profile and see if they have ever been negative SEO’ed or the past agency did some spammy crap. We create a list of links which we think are bad and should be added to Disavow file.

We also export a list of pages which have backlinks to them. If we end up changing slugs or removing a page we want to 301 the old page to right spot.

We all look to see what their anchor text ratio is. If its been stuffed we require the client to do a serious of PR release, so we can water it down.

Since we focus on local, we run a citation report from Bright Local. We want to see how accurate their citations are and if they are missing any of the important ones.

If we have access to Google Analytics we will dive into that and see top landing pages and pages with/or with out traffic. We create a report for our content manager, which then decides if the page gets chopped, merged with other similar content or left alone.

Most our clients are in the same vertical, so we can put together a keyword file in about 10 minutes. We run a baseline rank report for the client.

We do a high level reputation management report. We basically do multiple variations of brand searches and key personnel to make sure there isn’t anything negative in the SERPs. We also check the major review sites to make sure they have company profiles and personal profiles (where applicable) as well as solid review/ratings.

From there we check knowem.com to see what their brand looks like. These typically are the first links we will build for them.

The last thing we do before we package up a shinny report it is do this search:
site:abc.com "lorem ipsum"

It simply amazing how many sites have "lorem ipsum" either buried in a widget or footer or sample page which never got deleted.

Agency work is not rocket science at all and is fairly straight forward. We hired a Jr SEO person about 6 months ago and I was involved hiring process. Most of the resumes we received where crap. I would say only 20% of the candidates could cover half of what I listed above.

 

[propipper]

I work at an agency focused strictly on local SEO. We build a lot of reports because it makes the client feel all warm and fuzzy. I think most of the reports are crap, but it’s a sales tool of “look what we do for your site”.

Here is how we do technical site audits. This does not include a content audit. Content audits are done by our content manger.

Run the site through screaming frog. From there we create several reports for the clients to create a baseline.

We are looking for:
1. Internal and External 301
2. Internal and External 404
3. Any 500 errors
4. Missing alt tags or just bad alt tags
5. Missing H1 and H2
6. Missing, to long ,to short meta descriptions
7. Look at word counts to find any thin content
8. We look for pages with high internal/external out links.
9. Then export Anchor text and start analyzing to make sure the anchor text is not stuffed. (This can be tricky because navigation menus, footers and side bars are in this report.

We then look at site speed.
We use Pingdom, Gtmetrix, and Google PageSpeed Insights to get a baseline of how the site is performing.

If we are not hosting the site we run serious of time to first byte. Our admin will run this ever 30 minutes for day. From this we can tell if their hosting sucks or not.

We also test to make sure the site passes Google’s mobile friendly test.

Next we use Ahrefs to analyze their backlink profile and see if they have ever been negative SEO’ed or the past agency did some spammy crap. We create a list of links which we think are bad and should be added to Disavow file.

We also export a list of pages which have backlinks to them. If we end up changing slugs or removing a page we want to 301 the old page to right spot.

We all look to see what their anchor text ratio is. If its been stuffed we require the client to do a serious of PR release, so we can water it down.

Since we focus on local, we run a citation report from Bright Local. We want to see how accurate their citations are and if they are missing any of the important ones.

If we have access to Google Analytics we will dive into that and see top landing pages and pages with/or with out traffic. We create a report for our content manager, which then decides if the page gets chopped, merged with other similar content or left alone.

Most our clients are in the same vertical, so we can put together a keyword file in about 10 minutes. We run a baseline rank report for the client.

We do a high level reputation management report. We basically do multiple variations of brand searches and key personnel to make sure there isn’t anything negative in the SERPs. We also check the major review sites to make sure they have company profiles and personal profiles (where applicable) as well as solid review/ratings.

From there we check knowem.com to see what their brand looks like. These typically are the first links we will build for them.

The last thing we do before we package up a shinny report it is do this search:
site:abc.com "lorem ipsum"

It simply amazing how many sites have "lorem ipsum" either buried in a widget or footer or sample page which never got deleted.

Agency work is not rocket science at all and is fairly straight forward. We hired a Jr SEO person about 6 months ago and I was involved hiring process. Most of the resumes we received where crap. I would say only 20% of the candidates could cover half of what I listed above.

Wow. Thanks for the info.

 

[Bee]

I would say only 20% of the candidates could cover half of what I listed above.

Jason. This post is absolutely incredible. Thank you. I'm actually in awe of the generous information sharing in this thread.