When I was an SEO Specialist, becoming an SEO Manager felt like the natural next step.
You get better at SEO. You gain more experience. Eventually, you manage SEO.
Simple.
Except the further I’ve progressed in my career, the more I’ve realised that becoming a manager isn’t just about becoming better at technical SEO, keyword research or content strategy.
The work changes.
You go from being responsible for doing good SEO to being responsible for making sure good SEO happens.
That sounds like a small distinction.
It isn’t.
You spend less time doing and more time deciding
As a specialist, a large part of my day could be spent inside the work.
Researching keywords.
Auditing websites.
Writing recommendations.
Looking through Search Console.
Investigating technical issues.
Building content strategies.
As a manager, I still do those things.
But there’s another layer now.
What should we work on first?
A website might have 50 things that could be improved. The job isn’t necessarily identifying all 50.
It’s deciding which five matter most.
That requires understanding the website, available resources, business goals and what is realistically going to get implemented.
I’ve learned that a technically perfect recommendation that never gets implemented has very little value.
You start thinking about the business behind the website
Earlier in my career, I could become very focused on SEO metrics.
Rankings improved.
Traffic increased.
More keywords entered the top 10.
Great.
Those things still matter, but eventually someone asks:
“What did this actually do for the business?”
That’s when the conversation changes.
SEO becomes less about getting more traffic and more about getting the right visibility.
Did we generate leads?
Did people call?
Did they book?
Did they buy?
Did we improve visibility in markets the business actually wants to grow?
The higher I’ve moved in SEO, the more important business context has become.
Communication becomes part of the job
You can have a brilliant SEO strategy and completely fail to communicate it.
I’ve learned this one over time.
Clients don’t necessarily need to know every technical detail behind a recommendation.
They need to understand:
What’s happening?
Why does it matter?
What are we going to do about it?
Sometimes explaining a complicated SEO problem in three sentences is harder than finding the problem in the first place.
Management means switching between audiences too.
You might explain something one way to another SEO, differently to a developer, and differently again to someone responsible for the company’s budget.
The recommendation hasn’t changed.
The communication has.
You become responsible for prioritisation
SEO has no shortage of things to do.
There’s always another page to improve.
Another technical issue.
Another content opportunity.
Another competitor doing something interesting.
Another Google update everyone suddenly needs to discuss.
The difficult part is deciding what not to do.
I’ve become much more comfortable asking:
Does this matter right now?
What’s the likely impact?
How much effort will it require?
What happens if we don’t do it?
What should this take priority over?
Being busy and making progress aren’t always the same thing.
Managing multiple locations adds another layer
Working with multi-location and franchise brands has made this especially clear to me.
You aren’t thinking about one website or one market anymore.
One location might need stronger local content.
Another might have Google Business Profile issues.
Another could be losing visibility.
Ten others might be performing perfectly well.
At the same time, there are things that need to work across the entire brand.
You have to zoom in and zoom out constantly.
That’s taught me to look beyond account-wide averages and ask what’s actually happening underneath them.
You have to become comfortable not knowing
This surprised me.
I used to think becoming more senior meant eventually reaching a point where you knew the answers.
It doesn’t.
Sometimes a client asks something and the correct response is:
“I don’t know yet. Let me investigate.”
Google changes.
Websites behave strangely.
Analytics breaks.
Search Console produces numbers that don’t make sense.
AI is changing search while we’re still trying to understand what the previous changes meant.
Experience doesn’t remove uncertainty.
It makes you better at navigating it.
Your team’s success starts mattering more than your own
There’s another shift that comes with management.
You can’t measure yourself only by what you produced.
Can you help someone else solve a problem?
Can you review their work without simply rewriting it yourself?
Can you explain why something needs changing?
Can you give someone enough room to figure things out?
That requires a different skill set.
Sometimes the fastest solution is doing something yourself.
The better long-term solution is helping someone else learn how to do it.
You still need to stay close to the work
I don’t want management to mean becoming disconnected from SEO.
I still enjoy opening Search Console and finding something interesting.
I still like technical investigations.
I still enjoy keyword research and figuring out why one page performs while another doesn’t.
That curiosity is what got me into SEO in the first place.
The difference is that I’m now looking at those things through a wider lens.
So what actually changes?
You don’t stop being an SEO Specialist the day you become an SEO Manager.
You add layers.
Strategy.
Prioritisation.
Communication.
Commercial awareness.
Leadership.
Accountability.
And increasingly, the ability to make decisions when there isn’t an obvious answer.
Technical SEO can teach you how to fix a website.
Management teaches you that sometimes the harder problem is deciding what needs fixing, why it matters, who needs to understand it, and how you’re actually going to get it done.
That’s probably been the biggest change for me.
