It started around the beginning of this year: a low-level anxiety showing up as a dull tightness in my chest. I’d experienced anxious feelings before, but they were usually something I could clearly ascribe to a particular thing – maybe something I was stressed about at work or a family member being sick. This was the first time I had trouble figuring out why I was feeling anxious.
New job, same as the old job
In November of last year, I started a new job at a marketing agency. I’d had previous experience working at an agency and, after leaving, had fairly categorically decided that “agency life” wasn’t for me.
When you work in marketing, there are generally two tracks: working for an agency or working “in-house”. When you’re “in-house”, you’re essentially doing the same work as you would in an agency but solely working for for company as part of an internal team. While the fundamental work functions roughly the same, the pace, stressors, and approach between the two environments often differs substantially.
An agency aims to service as many clients as it possibly can while maintaining a base level of performance (or at least the illusion of performance – I’ve had clients who seemed to be satisfied by us telling them interesting things about search) so the client doesn’t fire you. Or, if they do fire you, you at least get a year or so of payment from them before they do. The churn of finding more and more clients enables agencies to grow. As a result, the work at an agency often becomes more about how to retain clients and keep them happy, rather than doing quality work around whatever expertise brought you, as an employee, to the agency in the first place.
Working in-house follows a similar dynamic to any other role in an organization – you are aiming to do your work in a way so that your manager thinks you’re doing a good job and wants to keep you around. Obviously, there are factors outside of your manager’s control when it comes to keeping you around, but ultimately this is your best bet if you want to continue working at a particular company. So, there I was, mired in the slightly mind-numbing work of an in-house role when a former agency colleague reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in working for a new agency he’d recently joined. We’d worked together quite a bit at our old agency, so when he did reach out I took this as a good sign that this new agency would be a good place for me, despite my reservations about agency work in general. Combining that with being in a lull period in my in-house role, it felt like fortuitous timing. In fact, only a few days before my former colleague reached out, I had mentioned to my partner I was thinking I’d start looking around for something else within the next few months. Later that week, here it was.
During the next 6 months or so, I often looked back at this decision and wondered if I should have approached it differently. It was hardly the frenetic job search I’d been used to in previous moves – applying to any job posting that resembled “SEO Manager” and seeing what interviews I got back. But maybe this was a sign I was maturing and getting ahead in my career. Maybe this was the way things were going to be now – people reaching out eager to work with me and offering me jobs without much effort on my part.
There was definitely an ego component to all this. It felt good to have someone contact me in this way. It conjured images of people sitting in Zoom meetings trying to brainstorm how they could staff a certain position before inspiration would hit and someone would come off mute, excited, “Dude, you know who we need? Ben Ballance! He’d crush it here.”
Though this ego-stoking was a factor, I do think I approached the opportunity with the consideration it warranted. I remember weighing up whether my dislike of agency work would be worth it compared to the new things I’d learn at this new forward-thinking agency. Ultimately, I decided that it would and while in my lowest moments over the following few months I’d curse my former self, I think it was the right decision with the information I had at that time.
The new role started well enough. I liked my manager, the new approach to SEO felt exciting and different – much less bogged down by the rampant “it depends” mindset that muddies so much SEO work.
Then, in the new year, the anxiety started – what was this all for? The constant, low-level adrenaline buzz of having lots of tasks to do started to waver. The novelty of the new approach began to wear off and instead began to feel constraining – as though I’d been hired to copy paste one set of recommendations and strategy for one client over to another. The distillation of our performance of our work as consultants down to charts showing clicks heading up and to the right (ideally at least, if this wasn’t the case, there’d be trouble) became energy-sapping. After a couple of weeks of this chest-tightness, I started seeing a therapist, who gave me some exercises to help quell some of these feelings.
Though this all certainly helped (and therapy is something I plan on continuing with), the low-level anxiety around my job, never really went away. I tried different tactics to help me get through the day: one tact was to view the tasks I was given as a game. I’d amp myself up each morning to see how many things I could cross off my to-do list each day. How many threads could I pro-actively open up in various Slack channels?
As you might expect, this isn’t really a sustainable way of approaching work. The anxiety remained.
In retrospect, I was burned out. Burn out always seemed to me to be something that existed only in the context of suggested articles in various “read later” apps I’ve used over the years. But now, having rested and taken time to recover, I know this is something I need to be wary of in whatever work I do. Burnout and how we work with it probably warrants its own post.
The AIs are coming
SEO (Search Engine Optimization), like a lot of industries, is at an interesting crossroads. Search engines are beginning to experiment with incorporating more AI-driven answers in their search results. Instead of presenting a user with a list of websites the search engine thinks will answer their query, it is instead trying to answer that query themselves.
If the goal of SEO is to drive traffic from search engine results to websites, this presents a problem. While Google and Bing are looking to provide their users with more complete answers to their queries directly in search results, it follows that fewer users will need to click through to websites to find those answers.
My concern with SEO as a long-term career is twofold: first, it generally doesn’t feel good to have one’s career be so closely tied to the whims of massive corporations like Google and Microsoft. This isn’t new, SEO practitioners have always been beholden to big organizations in this way, but, this move to AI feels more heightened than ever. Second, with marketers and search engines similarly leveraging AI writing technology to generate copy at a much larger scale, this feels like another inflection point in the race to the bottom.
Before now, searching on Google already felt like wading through a swamp of carefully optimized marketing copy that kind of answered a question but ultimately wasn’t particularly insightful or enjoyable to read. This copy was often generated by well-meaning copy writers, who with the guidance of SEO practitioners, would include the right keywords (all the while pushing the boundary of incorporating keywords into their copy while maintaining some semblance of sounding like a human), make sure the copy answers some questions users might have, and generally being just interesting enough to not completely bore the ready but send the right signals to search engines so the copy continues to show up in search results.
With the increased prevalence of AI-driven copy generation tools, this blandness will increase exponentially. The time it takes to churn out a mundane, inoffensive blog article, fully keyword optimized and answering the right questions users might have has drastically decreased. It follows that the quantity of this content then will increase. This is spam and it bums me out.
There are aspects of SEO that still excite me. Finding random technical issues, putting together documentation to address those issues and seeing them get fixed still gets my juices going for whatever reason. But this AI-stuff points to a destination where SEO no longer feels like a craft. Instead, it points to a highly-refined, streamlined, plug and play future where the winners will be those who put out just the right amount of spam without appearing to spam. I remember reading a Seth Godin book a few years ago where he describes SEO as being a race-to-the-bottom and feeling hurt. In the years since, I’ve started to get the creeping sense this is probably accurate.
All this feels a lot like the journey email marketing took over the past couple of decades. Getting an email from a company used to feel special – a carefully crafted message at the right time which made the receiver feel like they’d won some very minor competition. Now, our inboxes are flooded with hundreds and thousands of promotional emails every day. All of them pretty much saying the same thing – offering the same promotional offer with very minor variances based on whichever side of an A/B test you happen to have been randomly placed in.
A new path
So, while I intend on keeping my eye on SEO (which I concede is somewhat hypocritical given the previous section of this article), I’m hoping to embark on a new path.
Hopefully, this new path that takes me toward work that feels as though it has more meaning and more value. Instead of working towards a career that I’m “supposed” to be doing or going with the flow of norm, I want to be more intentional about doing work that feels good to do. This doesn’t necessarily need to align with what others see as “good to do”.
It needs to be work that sustains and interests me, with a cause that feels greater than the day-to-day nuances of tactical work – these are a distraction.
I also hope to allow myself the grace that this new path will change and shift and take turns that I can’t even see from my current vantage point.
I’m excited to see what turns present themselves from here.
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