Hi! 👋 We’re so glad to feature you on SEOjobs.com. Please introduce yourself to our site’s readers.
Hey! I’m Scott [@MoeySEO] from New York. I’ve been doing SEO for around 10 years and my blog is ohmycrawl.com. I focus largely on strategy and technical SEO for content driven websites.
The majority of websites I currently consult for are in very competitive markets. Banking, Insurance, and all the industries that are pretty tough.
I suppose within my friends group I’m most known for recovering websites from Google penalties. To date I played a pretty large role in recovering large scale affiliate websites for my private work and as well as the finance niche.
I consider it to be a blessing and a curse, it’s great folks reach out to me for help, however there are times I’d love a more straight forward project 😃
Please share with us your current SEO role and for what company you work for:
Mostly I’m the lead for a few pretty large projects. I’ve been there for around 3 years. I have been doing consulting projects here and there via ohmycrawl.com for about 6 months now. I purposely try not to take on too much personal, sometimes I enjoy not sitting in front of the computer 😃
Can you share with us how you entered the SEO industry?
I took an internship years ago, back in the PBN days. I learned how to build PBN networks and do keyword research. From there I built a website for my family business and ranked it for the local keywords with all kinds of crazy stuff that no longer work.
I was starting to get sick of the family business and dabbled in building affiliate websites. From there one of my good friends invited me to help manage a portfolio of affiliate websites. I learned a ton there, however it was incredibly stressful, but I learned a ton.
I started building out my own affiliate websites once I left that job and consulted on the side, which I did for years. Later my main website got hit by a penalty, I became deeply saddened ha.
From there I started studying programming, thinking I’d shift away from SEO. Thanks to my newly technical background, I got recruited for my current job as a technical SEO manager.
I highly recommend working at a company that can offer mentorship, working with strong mentors has been game changing. It taught me how to solve SEO problems all on my own, run SEO tests, in short highly recommended.
How did you start to learn SEO? What are you currently doing to keep up with the ever changing SEO industry?
I heard on a podcast about it and I was completely blown away. I thought it was so cool and I thought SEOs were like wizards.
Currently I work on a lot of different types of projects and do my own problem solving. Every client is very different, from there you run into a lot of different situations, where frankly there is no book or course on the market to solve whatever issue you are encountering. Imo, with SEO you gotta be in it to win it.
From there, I recommend researching a lot of different sites and running your own tests. In the online community ‘internet marketing gold’ there is a great course on it. In short, imo, you have to test out your own theories.
Provided, I’m not extremely busy, I try to spend around 40 mins per day learning something new or playing with an idea. For me personally, this is the most fun aspect of SEO.
Thankly via my job I got an amazing mentor, truly a life changing experience. I also get to take thousands of dollars of courses that help feed new ideas throughout the year.
As a word of caution with SEO courses, I would use them to get started, keep yourself sharp, & seed new ideas for testing. I find lots of SEOs kind of pick their “guru” – following what they say similar to a religion. They follow what someone else taught them and never really learn how to solve problems.
This is just my perspective, whether it’s running your own sites or clients, the highest paying gigs/niches always require an independent thinker.
Can you share what factors are most important to you in an SEO career and why? When do you know its time for a new job? Do these same factors play a role?
I think I’m a terrible person to ask about these types of things. I’ve always chased mentorship over a high salary.
When it comes to soft skills, I’m highly focused on client communication & happiness. I suppose I’m not the best at figuring out how to get a new job, raise etc.
For Remote work, there has never been a better time, these types of jobs seem to be everywhere.
What recommendations would you give to someone who is looking to join the SEO industry and get their first full-time SEO position?
I’d recommend trying to work at a company that gives you the ‘vibe’ that you’ll learn a lot.
When it comes to actually getting the job and my experience hiring SEOs, my biggest complaint is that candidates have a lack of problem solving abilities.
Rather, the vibe candidates give me is that they are copying a blog post from 5 years ago and have no idea if it works or not.
To be clear, you don’t need to be the best in the world, but solutions without your manager’s help is always a plus. You should actually try what you read about.
My suggestion would also be to build your own website and rank it for a handful of keywords. imo, in SEO you need some skin (or have had skin) in the game, without it candidates often lack a certain scrappiness.
It’s also a weird value proposition. Imagine you are interviewing me and I said “I’m amazing at SEO, but I’ve never dared rank my own website in Google, trust me it will be fine.”
For example, you can try to rank for SEO service terms in your own town or city, build a small affiliate website, etc.
For a self-plug, if you want to learn about technical SEO or Javascript SEO, just hop on my mailing list. The OhMyCrawl SPA article is a good place to start and learn about SPA (Single Page Application) and Javascript SEO. It’s a javascript resource I wish I had when I first started.
