What It's Actually Like Working at an SEO Agency
Honest answers from the Optimising team
We asked our people what surprised them, what keeps them here, and what they'd tell someone just starting out.
If you've ever wondered what it's actually like to work at an SEO agency, you're probably imagining one of two things; chaos or corporate.
The reality sits somewhere more in between. It's faster than most people expect, broader than most job descriptions suggest, and a lot more methodical than the outside world gives it credit for.
We asked a handful of people from our team. Here's what they said.
It Moves Fast. Like, Actually Fast.
This one came up almost immediately, and unprompted, across nearly every response.
The pace of agency life isn't something you fully appreciate until you're in it. Priorities shift, client needs evolve, and the landscape itself keeps moving underneath you. The expectation isn't that you'll see every change coming. It's that you'll be the kind of person who adjusts when it does.
As SEO Specialist Brandon put it: "Things move really fast. We're always evolving so you've gotta always be on your toes."
What's telling is that in our responses, nobody framed this as a challenge. The speed is part of what makes the work engaging. The variety of clients, the different industries, the constantly shifting priorities keep things dynamic in a way that's hard to replicate anywhere else. And compared to in-house, where the pace tends to be steadier and the scope narrower, the difference is noticeable from day one.
You Will Become an Accidental Expert in Things You Never Expected
This is the part that's hardest to explain to people outside the industry.
In-house, you go deep on one thing. One brand, one audience, one market. You get very good at knowing your lane. Agency work inverts that entirely. You move fluidly between industries, and you bring genuine curiosity to each of them. Not a surface-level familiarity, but a real working understanding of what makes each client's world tick.
The result is a kind of knowledge that accumulates in unexpected ways.
"Do I enjoy gardening? No. Can I name at least five species of grass and a couple of facts about each? Also yes." - Niamh, Content Specialist
It's one of the more demanding aspects of the role, and one of the more quietly rewarding ones. Every new client is effectively a new brief on an industry you may know nothing about. What they do, who they're talking to, what makes them different, and how to communicate that in a way that actually works. It's tiring in the best possible way, and it's also the kind of thing that makes you better at the job over time; there’s always something to learn.
The Chaos Is the Point
Prioritisation comes up a lot when you ask agency people about challenges. And honestly, it makes sense.
When you're working across multiple clients simultaneously, with internal projects running in parallel and timelines that don't always play nicely with each other, the demand on your attention is real and constant. There's no version of this job where everything is neatly sequenced and nothing overlaps. That's not a flaw in the system; it is the system.
What it requires is a particular kind of thinking. The ability to step back, assess what actually needs to happen right now versus what just feels urgent, and communicate clearly with the people around you when things shift. Strong organisation helps, and so does staying flexible enough to adapt when the plan changes (which it will).
"Our timelines can be really tight. Clients also have their own internal timelines that they need to stick to, and they need us to work with, so we have to be agile. Lots of forward planning, cross-team communication and collaboration, and just being flexible as things change is really the only way to approach it." - Ellie, SEO & Content Executive
The upside of operating this way is that it keeps you sharp. It builds the kind of adaptability that's hard to develop in slower-paced environments, and it means the team is rarely caught flat-footed when something unexpected lands. Because something unexpected almost always does.
The Highlight Reel Is About 10% of the Work
This is probably the thing people outside agency life least expect.
There's a tendency to think of SEO as the visible stuff. The content that ranks, the traffic that grows, the result that gets reported back to a client. Obviously those things matter hugely. But they're the surface layer of something much larger and less visible.
The reality is that great results come down to process and consistency far more than they come down to big ideas or bold creative swings. The audit work, the structural decisions, the technical groundwork; most of it happens well before anything goes live, and a lot of it is never directly seen by anyone outside the team. Some of it happens for clients who may not even be actively engaged in the process.
That last part is worth sitting with. Not every client has a large budget or a fast feedback loop, and we're still committed to putting in the work regardless. The discipline to bring the same rigour to every account, not just the more vocal ones, is where a lot of the real skill lives.
"Great results often come down to process and consistency, not just big creative ideas." - Daniel, SEO Specialist
What gets attributed to success is usually the last 10%. The other 90% is planning, collaboration, problem solving, and the kind of behind-the-scenes consistency that doesn't make for a great headline but makes the headline possible.
So What Is Agency Life, Actually?
It's fast, and it stays fast. It's collaborative in a way that's genuinely useful rather than performative. It rewards people who are curious, adaptable, and comfortable not having everything figured out yet.
It's also broader, more structured, and you’re juggling more than it probably looks like from the outside. Which is exactly why we asked the team to describe it instead.
If any of this sounds like your kind of environment, you know where to find us.
Niamh O'Higgins
Content Specialist
