A year ago, if you'd asked me what SEO was, I would have said something confident and vaguely incorrect. Maybe something about keywords. Definitely something about Google. Probably the word "algorithm" thrown in there to sound smart. Today I run SEO strategy for five clients across roofing, carpentry, business lending, and municipal services. I track AI search visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. I have opinions about schema markup. I mean honestly at this point, I stay awake at night thinking about this stuff.
Here's how it actually happened.
I started by saying yes
I was hired at Killerspots Agency to do social media. That was the whole job. Make posts, write captions, schedule things, occasionally argue with myself about whether to use the word "vibes." I wasn't bad at it, and I liked it.
Then one day, someone needed help with an email campaign. I said yes. Then someone needed graphics designed in Canva. Said yes. Then Adobe Creative Suite. Yes. Then someone needed help on a blog post. Yes again. The pattern, in case you missed it, was yes.
I want to be clear that this wasn't some genius career strategy. I just genuinely liked learning new things, and I had not yet developed the protective instinct that more experienced professionals have, which is to say no when something is outside your job description. That instinct is probably good for work-life balance. It's also probably why most people don't end up in roles they weren't hired for.
Then SEO became a priority
At some point, I started learning more and more about SEO. Clients were asking about it. Google was changing constantly. AI search was, and still is, just starting to matter. The SEO work needed a designated person to actually run it.
I had no formal SEO experience. What I had was three other things that turned out to matter more than I expected:
- A willingness to read documentation that nobody else wanted to read
- Already knowing how to write for the web from social and email
- The vague sense that this was where things were going, and I wanted to be there when they got there
I started learning. Like, really learning. Watched every Local Falcon tutorial. Read every Backlinko post. Watched HubSpot tutorial videos because someone on Reddit said it would help. (It did.) Asked my coworkers questions that would probably make experienced SEO people roll their eyes.
Nobody is going to give you the keys to the next thing. You have to ask for them, and then prove you should keep them.
I broke things, professionally
I'd love to say my SEO journey was a graceful upward arc. It wasn't, and honestly, I don't think anyone's is. Early on, I made a Cloudflare change I thought was straightforward, and it briefly took the site offline. Not for long, but long enough to teach me a real lesson about why staging environments exist and why "I'm pretty sure this will work" isn't a green light to touch live infrastructure.
Another time, I installed a WordPress redirects plugin to handle what should have been a quick fix, and it returned a 502 error that locked me out of the admin dashboard. I worked through it, got the site back up, and walked away with a much better understanding of how plugins, caching, and server configurations actually interact.
Both moments stuck with me because they shaped how I approach the technical side of SEO now. I research tools before I install them. I always know how I'm going to back something out before I touch it. I keep access to FTP or hosting controls so a broken WordPress install never means a stuck project. And I've learned that pretty much every problem you'll run into has been someone else's first, which means the answer is usually findable if you know where to look.
The lesson is that the technical side of marketing rewards caution, curiosity, and a healthy respect for what you don't yet know.
The part most people don't talk about
Career changes look clean from the outside. From the inside, they feel like a long stretch of being slightly bad at the new thing while still being good at the old thing. There's a window where you're not yet the SEO person, but you're also no longer just the social person. That window is uncomfortable. It's also where the actual learning happens.
The thing nobody told me is that you're not supposed to feel ready. You're supposed to feel about 60% ready, do the thing anyway, and learn the other 40% on the job. Anyone who claims they felt 100% ready for their last job is either lying or hasn't grown in a while.
What I'd tell anyone trying to do this
If you're trying to break into SEO or pivot from one marketing role to another, here's the honest version:
Be useful first. Nobody hands you the next role. They hand you adjacent work, and if you do it well, more of it shows up. Get weirdly good at one specific thing before trying to be a generalist again.
Take the free certifications. HubSpot, Google Analytics, Semrush Academy. They're not magic, but they make you legible to recruiters and they force you to study. The certificate matters less than the knowledge you pick up earning it.
Find a real mentor or a reasonable approximation of one. Mine has been a mix of co-workers, Reddit threads at 11pm, and a whole lot of Google searches. You don't need a guru. You need people who'll answer "is this stupid?" without judgment.
And maybe most importantly: write things down as you learn them.
NOTES, NOTES, NOTES!!
In just this last month I've filled up a whole notebook on SEO related subjects. That's part of why this blog exists. The act of explaining something forces me to actually understand it, and a year from now when somebody DMs me asking how to break into SEO, I'll have an answer that isn't a 45-minute voice memo.
If you're trying to figure your own version of this out, my inbox is open. Say hi!.