So you want to be a Senior SEO Associate (Sr. SU) at Seer? Fantastic! We’re filling roles in our San Diego and Philadelphia offices! The Senior Associate role, however, can be a little elusive if you’re not familiar with our roles and the way we operate. This guide will help you understand this unique hybrid role and help you understand how to thrive as a Senior Associate at Seer.
What is a Senior SEO Associate?
A Senior Associate or Senior Support (Sr. SU) is a unique combination of an SEO Support Associate and Account Manager (AM). This means you’ll be working with your account teams to complete our tactical deliverables like Keyword Research, Search Discovery Analyses, Monthly Reports, Content Audits, Outlines, and more. On another day or another account, however, you’ll put on your SEO Manager hat and create a custom Project Plan, Scope of Work, Renewal Deck, or determine Goal Projections and KPIs. While your title may not be Account Manager (AM), you’ll assume many of the responsibilities of the role while learning to manage your team, and complete each of the deliverables we provide for our clients.
The SEO AM role can sometimes feel like “baptism by fire." You will manage four to six mid-to-large clients right out of the gate. Conversely, as a Sr. SU, you have the opportunity to learn the ropes with one account, while you gain hands-on experience with the foundational elements you’ll continue to employ throughout your time at Seer.
What’s Unique About the Role?
If you work in TV Production, for example, your title may be Production Assistant but you may assume the role of a Production Coordinator, Editor, and Field Producer. In many cases, a Segment Producer can have the same responsibilities as a Director. Just like other industries, SEO job titles may not be consistent from one agency to another. You may have served as an AM at another agency, but your experience may be more aligned with that of a Sr. SU at Seer. This does not mean you’re taking a step back in your career trajectory, it means we want to give you the technical experience and client exposure to ensure you’re set up for success in the SEO AM role.
Senior Associate Responsibilities
- Drive traffic and increase ROI by doing Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Content Creation, and Link Building
- Measure the effectiveness of Seer’s strategies by reporting from a variety of resources including Google Search Console, SEMrush, and Google Analytics
- Work closely with a handful of clients, researching far beyond the SEO landscape to understand their specific challenges
- Executive annual strategies designed to solve a problem for a very specific audience
- Serve as the main Point of Contact (POC) for your clients and focus on building relationships and trust
- Report on campaign success as it relates to your clients’ goals and ROI
- Present deliverables on phone and Zoom meetings as well as on-site meetings and quarterly business reviews
We Do Things Differently at Seer
Every company, no matter the industry, has its own unique set of processes and protocols. This could be the number of business days we take to deliver items, how we run our status calls, our internal review process, the way we conduct our analyses, or the formats we use for our deliverables. As a new hire at Seer, there are many moving pieces and new processes to learn. Acclimating to a new role and a new way of doing things can be difficult, even for someone with SEO experience. As a result, we often feel prospective candidates who apply for our AM roles may be more suitable for a Sr. SU role, but only temporarily!
We would much rather have someone start as a Sr. SU and become an AM in six months or less, versus hiring the same candidate as an AM and watch them get overwhelmed and burned out and leave a year later. We want to equip you with the resources you need to be successful, not overload you with training and protocols on top of the five to six client accounts you are now project managing!
You may look at the job description and think, “I’ve done keyword research and competitive analyses, why wouldn’t I be ready to join Seer as an SEO manager? While you may be used to comparing three to five competitors and 500 keywords, at Seer, we integrate data strategy into everything we do. This means rather than looking at five competitors, we look at hundreds, plus several thousand keywords. We also use paid data to add another layer of analyses and insights. The Sr. SU role allows you to acclimate to these new processes and adjust to the way we manage accounts and teams. If you haven’t been leveraging big data to combine organic and paid search data, it would be super overwhelming to be expected to do this for the first time across four to six complex accounts.
We Show You the Ropes & Let You Ramp Up
Whether you’re hired as a Sr. SU or you’re promoted from an Associate role, the Sr. SU position molds you into a more empathetic Account Manager. If you’ve never completed one of our lengthy deliverables, like a Competitive Analysis, or Content Gap Analysis, you won’t understand the process or know how long these items take to complete. When you assign tasks to your Support Associate, you may not give them a realistic deadline.
When you’ve spent time working on these deliverables for multiple clients, you have the perspective to create realistic timelines, not only for your Account team, but to manage your client’s expectations as well. This doesn’t mean we’re not deadline-driven here at Seer, but the last thing you want to do is overpromise, underdeliver, and force your Support to pull an all-nighter to meet an impossible deadline.
In addition, your time in the Sr. SU role will help you manage your internal team and your clients. You will understand how our account teams work and how you can help your Associates learn and grow because you’ve been in the role yourself. Every agency has a different approach to Account Management, so it’s important to understand how Seer works before you’re given a full client load and tasked with driving the strategy for a large corporation or Enterprise client.
“As a Sr. SU it gave me the experience of an SEO Associate so that I could be more emphatic to the role, but it also helped me really grasp how Seer manages clients,” says SEO Account Manager Zaine Clark. “It would be tough to hop into Seer and immediately start managing accounts without understanding everything about Seer and all the deliverables. As a Sr. SU, I got to be a better tactical SEO as well as a better manager. I got to work with strong AMs and learn how they manage processes.”
It’s Not a Step Down, It’s a Step Towards Success
When I interviewed at Seer, I wanted to be hired as a Sr. SU. I thought, “I have experience in SEO, I shouldn’t be hired at an entry-level.” Less than six months into my role, I couldn’t have been more grateful that Seer’s People Team was able to assess my skills better than I was. Seer takes SEO seriously, as we should. Our team members are extremely smart, experienced, and experts in the industry. If a team member is not an expert in some area of SEO, they’re using every available resource to learn and improve. That’s the culture here at Seer, our team members work together and help each other in an effort to help everyone level up. That’s how we create a strong, unified team.
Two years later, I’m an SEO AM, and I’m happy I had the opportunity to grow into the role, learn more about the industry, how Seer works, and how to manage teams and clients. I’ve also seen the other perspective, where someone starts at Seer as an AM. It can be overwhelming with so many new things to learn at once. It definitely makes me grateful that I was already familiar with the way Seer works before I also had to adjust to the responsibilities of a new role.
The Sr. SU Role Gives You an Opportunity to Choose Your Own Path
One unique aspect of working at Seer is that not every employee has the same trajectory. All of our deliverables at Seer are rooted in Data Strategy; we like to make sure we’re making decisions based on data and not guessing. As a result, we’ve had SEO team members realize they’re more suited for Data Strategy, and have been able to move into hybrid or custom roles. We’ve had Sr. SUs who realized they didn’t want to be full-time AMs and were able to carve out their own unique roles.
“Being a Sr. SU made me realize I didn’t want to be a full-time AM,” says Sr. SU Katherine Pietrangelo. “Personally, for me, it was the project planning aspect that I realized I didn’t like. I also realized I was really interested in UX. So I brought the two ideas to the table at my next 1:1 with my Team Lead. I told her my ideas for a possible career path.”
I’ve experienced this myself: I have a passion for content and was able to combine by SEO experience at Seer with my background in writing to move into a dual role as an AM and Sr. Content Associate. As a Sr. SU, you’re exposed to so many aspects of account work, you may decide you don’t want to be an AM after all, and that’s OK because Seer gives you the autonomy to find your own path.
Whether you want to be an Account Manager or you’re unsure of your ultimate goal, the Senior Associate role will help you learn, grow and succeed. This hybrid role gives you exposure to tactical deliverables, project management, reporting, presenting and more. If you’re a jack or jill of all trades, you would make a fantastic Sr. SU and we want to hear from you! Take a look at our open positions!
