Module 10: Find a Job
The employed track trades freelance freedom for a steady salary and other people's clients to learn on. This module covers the two kinds of SEO employers and what they actually pay, applications built on case studies instead of claims, the audit exercise that decides most interviews, and how to negotiate and start well.
Employed paths: agency vs in-house
Two doors, both legitimate. Agency SEO means many clients at once — a plumber, a SaaS startup, a regional retailer in the same week. It's the faster education: more sites, more problems, more audits in a year than in-house gives you in three, plus a team of specialists to steal habits from. The costs are real too: client churn, sales promises you didn't make, and several reporting deadlines landing on the same Friday. In-house SEO means one brand, owned deeply: you sit closer to revenue, ship with the same developers, and see your compounding work pay off over years. The risk is narrowness — one industry, one site, one set of problems.
The pay, so you can read offers clearly. Payscale puts the SEO specialist average at $59,179 a year, with the broad range running roughly $44,000–80,000. Titles skew the numbers: Glassdoor's median total pay for an SEO consultant is $93,179, ZipRecruiter lists $95,500 for the consultant title, and senior SEO managers in major metros run $75,000–95,000. Same trade, different rung and title — which is why the ladder matters: specialist, senior specialist, manager, head of SEO. Each step is bought with broader scope (budgets, strategy, people), not just more years.
Read the actual posts before you apply. Nearly all of them ask for the same evidence: a portfolio of outcomes (traffic moved, problems fixed, with context), working fluency in Search Console and GA4, a crawler you've actually run, and increasingly a specialty — technical, local, ecommerce, content strategy. A degree is rarely the filter. Your portfolio from Module 8 is.
You're early in your career and choosing between an agency specialist seat and an in-house role at one brand. Which statement matches this lesson?
Applications: case studies first, résumé second
Hiring managers for SEO roles spend their first thirty seconds on one question: has this person ever actually moved a number? So your application leads with the case study, and the résumé supports it. The portfolio link goes at the top of the résumé, in the application form's portfolio field, and in the second line of your cover note. If they click one thing, it's the practice-site case study from Module 8 — baseline, dated screenshots, the work in order, the results with honest context.
The résumé itself is one page of receipts. Every bullet is action + scope + result: "Audited a 300-page service site; found and fixed 190 duplicate location pages; indexed pages fell to the intended set and organic clicks rose 38% over the following quarter." "Built keyword maps for 14 service pages, each matched to a single search intent." Ban the duty list ("responsible for SEO tasks") and the tool name-drop with nothing behind it. Where a job post names a skill you genuinely have — site migrations, local SEO, log-file analysis at whatever level — use the post's own words for it, truthfully, so both the software filter and the human recognize the match.
The cover note shrinks to four lines: the role, your one best outcome with its number, your specialty lean, and the portfolio link. Then apply like it's a pipeline, not a lottery: a target list of agencies and brands, tailored applications over volume, and a simple log of where each application stands.
Which résumé bullet gets the interview?
The audit exercise is the interview
Most serious SEO hiring processes include a live or take-home audit exercise: here's a website (sometimes theirs), here's a time limit, show us what you'd do. Treat it as the whole interview, because functionally it is. Your résumé got you the exercise; your exercise gets you the offer. They're not grading whether you find every problem — no one finds every problem in ninety minutes. They're grading your judgment: what you check first, what you rank as urgent, and how you talk about it.
Run it like a real audit in miniature. Start with index and crawl health — is Google seeing the right pages, only the right pages? Then intent fit: do the money pages match what searchers actually want? Then the obvious revenue leaks: the Business Profile for a local business, titles on top landing pages, broken internal paths to conversion pages. Pick your top five findings, rank them by impact against effort, and for each one say what you'd do, in what order, and what result you'd watch for. State your assumptions out loud ("I'm assuming these location pages drive the calls — I'd confirm in GA4 before rebuilding").
Two traps to avoid. First, the undifferentiated list: forty findings in crawl order tells them you can run a tool, not that you can prioritize. Second, trashing the site or the last SEO — you may be talking to the person who built it, and professionals diagnose without sneering. Close with a 90-day sketch: month one fixes, month two builds, month three measures. That ending turns an exercise into a hiring plan with your name on it.
In a 90-minute interview teardown, your crawl tool surfaces 40 issues on the company's site. What's the strongest way to present?
Negotiating pay, and your first 30 days
Negotiate with the bands, not with hope. You know the map now: specialist average $59,179 (Payscale), most specialists landing somewhere in the $44,000–80,000 range, senior managers at $75,000–95,000 in major metros, consultant-titled roles posting medians above $93,000. If you can, let them name the first number; ask for the band for the role if it isn't posted. If a specialist-scoped job offers low-40s with no review structure, that gap is the negotiation: counter with the published range and your portfolio, and be ready to trade among salary, title, a six-month review with a written raise trigger, training budget, and remote days. Whatever you agree on goes in the offer letter. Verbal raises evaporate.
Then earn the seat in month one. Week 1: access and inventory — Search Console, GA4, the Business Profiles, the crawler exports, the last year of reports; meet the people who ship changes. Week 2: your baseline audit of the property, findings ranked the way Module 8 taught you, shared as a document. Week 3: quick wins shipped — the index cleanup, the broken money pages, the profile gaps — visible proof the new hire produces motion. Week 4: present the 90-day plan: priorities, the metrics you'll report and on what date, and the first honest expectations conversation. That sequence — baseline, quick wins, plan — is the freelance onboarding from Module 9 wearing a salary, and it works for the same reason: it makes your value measurable from day one.
You've just started an in-house SEO role. The marketing director asks you to "fix the rankings" in your first week. What's the right first deliverable?
What you can now do
- Choose between the agency and in-house doors knowing what each pays, what each teaches, and what each costs you.
- Lead a job application with your practice-site case study and put the portfolio link where a hiring manager will actually click it.
- Work a timed audit exercise the way it's graded — judgment and fix order over finding every problem — and negotiate inside the real pay bands for the role.