Mine is a story of twists and turns, paths taken while never looking back.  I am going to start this column, which I will write regularly the challenges of managing an SEO department, by providing a brief history of my work history. Although I have been an internet marketer for over six years, I have only been doing the SEO thing for a short 13 months. 

Life started as a wee lad in a small town, well; maybe I won’t go back that far; my career started in the insurance industry finding technology solutions that could replace people.  I wasn’t very popular, and after about eight years I wasn’t very interested in it anymore either.  I decided I needed to make a change and move into the vast World Wide Web and, specifically, marketing.  This move started in 2000 when I was hired as a project manager at a small interactive healthcare agency in Philadelphia, which allowed me to apply some of my strengths and skills to something new.  After a couple of years of building web sites, developing email campaigns, and banner advertisements, I decided it was time to broaden my horizons and moved on.

The next chapter started with an even smaller online media agency where, in 2002, I was charged with building out its web development capability basically from scratch.  I started with one project manager and two programmers – I really had my work cut out for me.  Over the next few years the department began to blossom and grow into a sizable business, and today it earns over 1/3 of the agency’s revenue. 

I branched out from  managing just the project management and development staff to overseeing, coddling and coercing a creative staff as well.  Now this new group of project managers, programmers and creative needed a name. We called it the Experience Design Group because that is what they did: design the end user experience on the web.  While all of this was growing, soon to over 40 people from the humble beginnings of just 3, I also took on the responsibility of managing the analytics department and started a user experience group.

Managing Resources and Personnel in the Agency Space: A Zookeeper’s Playground?

One of the challenges of these new responsibilities was managing not just very different individual personalities, but also equally diverse departments.  Programmers by nature are generally quiet, reserved, and pale, and speak in grunts – the creative team on the other hand is expressive in personality, passionate to a fault at times, and generally an outgoing and loud group.  In the middle of all of this you have the project managers, who are focused on getting the job done
and balancing the needs and wants of the two groups to not only deliver on deadlines and what is outlined in the contract, but to ensure that we are delivering great work.  Balancing all three groups requires a degree in psychology, right?  That or a lot of patience and keeping an eye on the end game, which is how we managed to deliver on clients’ needs and exceed their expectations.

The third chapter of my career included a six month stint as the operations manager for the agency, overseeing agency long term planning and finances.  I had to give up one of my three jobs, or staying afloat and sane was not going to be an option.  Administrative management of the creative team went officially to the executive creative director, but I maintained my position overseeing the project management and technology folks.

Becoming the SEO Lead: Epilogue or Prologue?

Where did all of this experience get me? To where I am today; at the helm of one of the best search engine optimization teams in the country or, let’s say, the world.  Why was it important to understand my background before we got here?   I think it is important to know that you don’t need to grow up in a specific discipline in order to manage it effectively, and there isn’t a whole lot of difference between managing an SEO department and any other department with diverse personalities

Within our SEO department we have a variety of different disciplines and therefore a variety of personalities and egos; I have not seen such egos anywhere else.  You have your account management teams, who are on the front lines of service for the clients and are responsible for keeping a project moving, on track and on budget.  The Robin to the account teams’ Batman are the engineers and analysts that dig into the depths of the web site to understand what is wrong with the code, page titles, Meta data, redirects and content management systems.  To support these two groups there are; the software developers, who create the proprietary software that helps diagnose and analyze a web site; the business development (read salesmen/women) people, who continue to sell in more and more types of products and services; and strategists, who work with the teams to provide, well, strategic direction for the accounts.

Each one of these groups brings its own unique perspective to SEO and has its own objectives for work everyday, but in the end they are all here to do one thing: service the clients’ needs and exceed their expectations – sound familiar?  That is why I rely heavily on the experiences I had earlier in my career to help me lead the SEO team today.
 
In the end a specialized form of online marketing is still online marketing, with the same goals and objectives of an effective banner ad campaign: bring qualified visitors to the client’s web site to, read, register or buy.