Look, I own an SEO agency. Well, my partner Kim and I do.
We do real work. We do real work OURSELVES. We don’t just sit back, go on trips and expect everyone to do work around us. I’m often up by 3 or 4 am and hacking on something. Kim seems to relish her work hours at night. Between us, there’s probably on a few hours out of the DAY that ONE of us is NOT behind a keyboard. And THEN we both likely have notifications coming in on our phones. But time SPENT isn’t everything. We do good work. And we know exactly what good work looks like — because we’ve done it all ourselves. AND STILL DO IT DAILY. One day, I HOPE we can be all traveling and having a great time and all that, but this ain’t the time.
The headaches of SEO are one thing. What’s worse is being in CHARGE of SEOs that claim they are DOING work for you. Managing SEOs – It’s truly up there with cat-herding at times. Putting up with the bullshit that most SEOs think you’re go to accept and then expecting a “Thank you!” from me? The GOOD ones, I can take – and DO say thank you. We actually HAVE a few of those. I relish them and praise them as often as possible. Which makes it all the more maddening when we bring in “SEOs” who claim they know their stuff — only to hand back absolute junk… and slap a 20-hour timesheet on top of it.
Twenty. Freakin’. Hours. For a sitemap.
Not for building the site. Not for writing all the content. Just… a sitemap.
In the most RECENT case, this was all for a local flooring store. That sells 5 products – carpet, LVP/LVT, laminate, vinyl and hardwood flooring. And offers 3 services – installation, repair and refinishing. This isn’t a national e-commerce brand with 14,000 SKUs and a multilingual site structure. This is a small business website that should’ve been handled in a couple hours — max.
And yet, these people want to act like they’re constructing the architectural blueprints for the Louvre.
Let me break this down real slow for anyone out there with a Wix SEO badge and a laptop full of excuses:
- Keyword research? For the above? Maybe 30 minutes if you’re being fancy.
- Initial sitemap with page titles and maybe some supporting content ideas? Another 30 minutes. At worst.
- Meta plan, internal link paths, and URL structure? Another hour if you’re thorough.
Two hours. On your worst day.
If you’re taking 20 hours, you’re either milking the clock, going for a quick trip to the beach in there, hopelessly confused, or worse — you think we don’t know better.
And that’s the insult. We bring people in to help, to scale, to lighten the load. And instead, we have to babysit. We have to review every line of work, re-do assignments, and sit through baffling justifications like, “Well, I had to do research.” What research? It’s a flooring store. It’s 5 kinds of flooring and 3 services. Google didn’t reinvent search last week.
If you’re applying for an SEO gig and you don’t have the chops to knock out a sitemap before lunch? At least with ME? You’re not ready. Go do some actual work on your own dime first. Build some sites. Rank something. Learn what matters – and what is an everlovin’ WASTE OF TIME.
But for the love of Yoast, stop billing 20 hours for something a trained monkey with a laptop and Ahrefs could knock out in 90 minutes. If you can’t pull THAT off, you surely are NOT ready to pull off the magic that SEO CAN be and the value it can bring to our customers.
We’re not mad just because it’s bad. We’re mad because we know it’s bad — and you thought we wouldn’t know the difference.
–Eric
