Good reads · Roundup
Nobody in SEO meant to end up here
I can't find one guest who set out to work in search. Paul Shapiro's girlfriend talked him into applying.
When I asked Paul Shapiro how he got into SEO, he warned me first. "I feel like people have these real grand stories about how they get involved in SEO, and mine is not that."
He'd finished university, needed a job, and couldn't get anyone to hire him in social media marketing. His girlfriend at the time told him to apply for an SEO role. He did, reluctantly:
"I hate SEO. It's like you stick a bunch of text and make it white and match the background. I didn't know anything about SEO at the time."
I laughed, because I was in the same boat. I was freelancing as a web developer and SEO looked like smoke and mirrors to me, full of snake oil merchants. Paul went on to found TechSEO Boost and run SEO at an agency. I went on to start Kwasi. Neither of us planned any of it. (The written interview has the rest of his story.)
Going back through the WojCast archive, Paul's story turns out to be the normal one. I can't find a single guest who set out to work in search.
The side doors
Wil Reynolds calls himself an accidental CEO. He didn't want a business. He wanted someone to employ him doing work he loved, and spent two years of holidays knocking on company doors: "after all that time, when no one would hire me, I kind of felt like I didn't have a choice but to start the business." That business became Seer Interactive.
Jason Acidre applied for a writing job with an Australian SEO agency. "The recruiter thought that I'm a better fit as an SEO," so he tried it. A month and a half later he was let go when the client he was working on left the agency. A week after that he started his own blog.
Dr. Pete Meyers joined a late nineties startup that was him, the founder, and a warehouse owned by the founder's dad. The founder was out three days a week, so Pete picked up the phone. The questions were the ones we still get: "why am I not ranking? What's going on?"
Tim Soulo had just finished university in Ukraine and wanted "something where I would have a career ladder". A friend mentioned a guy at his company doing SEO who was "making nice money", so Tim found a junior SEO role with almost no knowledge. Before that he'd built community websites and worked technical support for a Canadian hosting company that outsourced its help desk to Ukraine. He told me all this when I interviewed him in 2018 (the write up is here).
Oli Gardner became Unbounce's marketer because the startup needed one. "I had never been a marketer before, I didn't like marketers." What he had was UX, usability and interaction design, and he "always had a strong opinion".
Nathalie Nahai needed a website and was quoted a couple of grand. She decided she "could just spend a couple of hundred quid and learn how to code and design a site myself", and people started asking her to build theirs.
Jeff Sauer, when I interviewed him in 2022, described building "really rinky-dink websites before even WordPress was out" for about $1,000 each. He added SEO and a bit of PPC because he couldn't work out how to get past that first contract. His written interview covers where that led.
And Ian Lurie started Portent in 1995 to make a living "for a little while" from writing. His early work included customer support in AOL chat rooms.
What they actually learned on the way in
Put those stories side by side and the entry points repeat.
| Way in | Who | What it taught them |
|---|---|---|
| Answering customers | Dr Pete, Tim, Ian | What people are really asking, in their own words |
| Building their own sites | Nathalie, Jeff, Paul, Tim | How the web works, and what it costs a business when it doesn't |
| Writing down what they learned | Jason, Dr Pete | Learning in public, which turned into a reputation |
| Being rejected elsewhere | Paul, Wil | Nothing, at the time. It just pointed them somewhere else |
The support desk ones are my favourites. Tim said the first thing he learned in hosting support was to always ask "is there anything else I can help you with today?" before closing a ticket, and he took that habit to Ahrefs, where he did support work so he could see what customers were stuck on. Dr Pete's way into Moz was a bit of work on the side, "answering sort of advanced questions for people and a little writing". MozCast came out of that, a 50 keyword experiment that became a full time job.
Nobody in that table learned SEO from a course. They learned people or the web first, and SEO happened to need both. Which is basically talking to the people behind the screen, before anyone called it that.
Jason was blunt about the writing side. He doesn't think of himself as a good writer, he said, "the only thing that can actually help me remember the things I'm trying to study or learn more about is to write about them." When he later hired for his own agency, he preferred people with no SEO background, as long as they had "above average writing skill". He could teach the SEO.
The side doors are closing
The trouble is, the jobs our guests started in are the ones AI is best at.
The Content Marketing Institute's 2026 career research found one in three marketers say their organisation is cutting entry level marketing hiring, nearly two and a half times the share that are adding it. Job searches have stretched from 3.1 months in 2024 to 5.2 months. On the support side, Forrester predicted in June that AI will cut customer service jobs in half by 2030, hitting high volume, simple enquiries hardest. That's the help desk Tim started on.
Stanford's Digital Economy Lab found in August that it's young people in textbook jobs getting hired less, the kind of work you can learn from a manual. Experienced people who learnt on the job are doing fine. And it's happening through less hiring, not layoffs.
Jason saw this coming years ago, and we marked his call in our piece on pre ChatGPT predictions. Reading these stories again, those accidental first jobs were on the job training, handed out for free. You don't get that from a prompt.
If you're trying to get in now
The side doors are narrower, but you can build your own version of each one.
- Run a site that has to earn its traffic. Nathalie, Jeff and Tim all learned by building things for themselves or friends. A hobby site, a club's site, a mate's business. Our 13 fast and free ways to get started with SEO is a decent first checklist, and Search Console on a real site will teach you more than any certificate.
- Get close to real questions. If there's a support queue, a sales team or a front desk anywhere near you, sit with it. Read the tickets. Answer a few. It's Dr Pete's phone and Tim's help desk, and AI hasn't made it less useful, just rarer.
- Write down what you learn, publicly. Jason's blog started a week after he lost his job. Write up what you tested and what broke. It's proof of thinking that a hiring manager can actually read.
- Take the adjacent job. Paul wanted social, Jason applied to write. Content, support, web development and analytics roles all sit next to search, and people drift across.
- Learn the people part on purpose. Oli came from UX, Nathalie from psychology. You can't automate empathy, and it's the part of the job the Stanford numbers say is holding up.
None of our guests would have passed a keyword test on day one. Most were just curious and a bit stubborn, and they listened to whoever was on the other end of the line.
Wil, as usual, doesn't BS. "It's hard to beat somebody who loves what they do," he said, "because they'll stay on the treadmill longer than you will." That was true when nobody would hire him. I think it matters more now. You can hear all of these stories on the episodes page.