With the current economic turmoil and newly released jobless numbers (staggering and growing), I figured I’d write a quick post about what it’s like to have a search marketing job. This is written for all the individuals, either fresh out of college, or newly unemployed, who are considering search marketing jobs. After all, since search is certainly affected, but not hurting, many non-search marketing people may be exploring job opportunities in search engine marketing.
First things first, there are a lot of different careers and jobs in search marketing. You could work for an agency, or you could work in-house. You might manage pay per click advertising campaigns, or you might engage in seo / search engine optimization. You might do sales, selling the services, or you might actually be in the trenches. Since I’ve spent much of my search marketing career in the trenches, managing paid search campaigns, I’ll let you know a little bit about that.
First things first, a search marketing job is similar to many other jobs you may be more familiar with, like writing jobs, analyst jobs, sales jobs, etc.
Lets start with Pay per click manager or analyst, a common breed of mid level search job. A pay per click campaign analyst or manager will be dealing with keywords, which you’ll bid on. When these keywords are searched, your sponsored ads may display in the search engines. You’ll probably be the guy who bids on the keywords, produces the keyword lists or taxonomy, writes the ad copies, and manages the whole shebang. Or you might just handle one component of all of this. It depends.
Either way, you’ll probably be dealing with and analyzing data. You’ll probably use excel. Math. Your brain. You’ll be dealing with words and semantics. You’ll possibly be writing creative and testing different versions. Finally, you’ll interpret - or attempt to interpret - data which will inform future ‘optimizations’ to a campaign.
It’s a lot of work depending on where you work and who your clients are. Surprisingly though, it’s very gratifying stuff if you’re delivering results to your clients. Possibly best of all, there appears to be a lot of opportunity in this industry, espicially relative to other stagnant or generally hurting industries.
Interested in understanding the basics of pay per click? Read my pay per click for beginners post.
If you’re getting into SEO, another type of search marketing job where you attempt to help websites rank organically, it’s a whole ‘nother story. With seo, you’ll make changes to a websites structure, produce content for the website, and gain links, all in an attempt to draw free attention/clicks to a website.
If you’re getting into SEO, you should enjoy writing, as you’ll probably be producing content which is keyword rich and also relevant. You should also enjoy research, as researching keywords before choosing the words and phrases you’ll attempt to ’seo’, will be another big component of the job.
Finally, you should ‘enjoy the web’. You’ll need to generate links to be successful in seo. This means you’ll need to produce content people love so much they’ll link to it from their own web site. By understanding the web and what works on the web to produce buzz or garner attention, you can be successful in SEO.
Interested in an SEO job? Then you probably shouldn’t read my post claiming traditional SEO is headed for extinction — it’s probably not true anyways, so don’t worry.
There you have it, a brief intro to your common search marketing job and what it’s like. If you’re interested in getting a job in search marketing, visit some sites and start learning the basics. Take a look around this site, then head over to a few of the great blogs and industry sites like searchengineland.com, searchenginewatch.com, seomoz.org … the list goes on and on.
Good luck! Espicially if you end up with a search marketing job. Search marketing jobs ain’t easy, but they’re not too bad either!!
