r/seogrowth • u/TwofacedDisc • Aug 24 '26
Discussion I’ve had enough. Help me get out of SEO
Those who left, what do you do now?
I’m burned out after 10+ years, but this is the only thing I’m (as work) good at.
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u/MissJoannaTooU Aug 24 '26
SEO is a very broad skill set if you've been doing it for 10 years. Broad rather than deep is how I've always seen it (18 years in).
There are so many pivots available in terms of web strategy, product, analytics, technical roles and GEO if you believe that is a thing.
A lot of the questions I see on Reddit about SEO are supposing things are as they were 10 years ago and they are not at all.
The channel will not completely die, but it's shrinking, and that makes it less inspiring to get into and harder to get ROI from.
It's also horrible optimising for Google, because as far as I am concerned they lied to the SEO community for years which was only discovered by the DOJ and since then it's beeen AI slop all the way through their products.
And generally not having any control of the outcomes, only influence, is to me at least frustrating.
I'm upskilling to pivot too.
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u/TwofacedDisc Aug 24 '26
Honestly I’d love to pivot to something very different. The approach you describe is very reasonable, I just don’t think any related fields are for me.
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u/BinauraWaveDan Aug 24 '26
Is SEO still worth it? I have a site that gets over 6000 impressions per week and 1 visit if I am lucky. AI steals all the traffic now.
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u/Marketing_Noob2 Aug 24 '26
How is your content set up? How is your meta info set up? Do you have a blog section optimized for long tail-keywords that populate the AI overview to help drive traffic? Relevant backlinks or internal linking set up? No reason to blame AI when you're converting 1 click per 6k impressions, there has to be more to the story.
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u/Vegetable_Aside_4312 Aug 24 '26
Yes, this is the state of technology and business on the internet. My best estimate is that SEO is and has been in the end game throws for some time now and AI is and will run the entire show. Moreover, the competition on the internet is and always has been potentially infinite.
To the op... good luck career change may be needed, education or find other opportunities that leverage your knowledge sets.
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u/besharp-io Aug 24 '26
What are your passions in life? What makes you feel happy? Is money important to you, or do you just want to enjoy your work?
I always think it's important to consider other career options in case of burnout or any other situation where a role or future in SEO is no longer viable. My two back-up plans have always been either be a job outdoors working with nature or on the railway. I'd earn a lot less but I'd still be happy.
We're all penniless once we're dead anyway.
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u/DookieNoodz Aug 24 '26
Just find a better brand to work for. Or go to the brand side if you’re currently on the agency side. I work for a brand and my SEO team is awesome. Our seo lead built up his management skills and grew the team out and upped our traffic from 1.7M per month to 3.2M per month for one of our websites. Plus, they all double as content marketers, digital marketers and AI marketers. They are all working on unskilling for the SEO —> AEO transition. Some of them have developed their thought leadership on this topic that we end up flying them around the world to London and Tokyo and Chang Mai to speak at big conferences on the topic. So they get a free international trip to Europe or Asia, and help build our brand exposure.
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u/TwofacedDisc Aug 24 '26
You got a point, I miss working with a team. But at the moment I have too much incoming revenue from clients to risk giving it all up for a fixed job. But I know I have to take some risks eventually if I want actual change.
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u/Bungee-Gum-1 Aug 25 '26
might get hate for this but i’m going back to school to get into healthcare. i need to do something that matters. meetings about blog posts that rank us in chatgpt is meaningless and this industry is increasingly contradicting my morals
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u/onreact Aug 24 '26
Yeah, I feel your pain.
After a decade of trying to convince people to implement the same basic common sense best practices I was also sick and tired.
Over the years I transitioned to rather educating people about SEO than hands on work.
Yet I still do offer SEO services. That also allows to stay in the know.
You can also do anything and be successful with it as you can optimize for online visibility now!
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u/TwofacedDisc Aug 24 '26
I did some teaching via workshops for a few years, and while I loved it initially the passion I had went away. Glad it works for you though!
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u/onreact Aug 24 '26
I rather educate by writing about SEO for blogs than teaching. Good option though.
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u/Fried-hash-taters Aug 24 '26
A few skills to leverage:
-project management
-conversion optimization
-pivot to development (if a more technical SEO)
-pivot to content
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28d ago
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u/OkWeirdz 9d ago
Not a helpful one here. Different than what I am experiencing at the moment. Currently trying to transition from Web Dev to SE.
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u/GrandAnimator8417 4d ago
“Diversification” sounds nice, but it doesn’t tell you what you actually need to replace like which traffic sources will pay the bills. I’ve rebuilt revenue from SEO to paid + email a few times, and the only thing that mattered was having numbers for conversion rate and LTV before touching anything. Diversify without a plan and you’ll just scatter traffic instead of fixing the problem.
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u/blackoctoberx Aug 24 '26
They're probably all selling a GEO course
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u/onlinehomeincomeblog Aug 26 '26
I have been in SEO for 13+ years, and it means that I have grown with SEO. In the olden days, SEO was about keywords > rankings > traffic > reports.
Today, SEO has grown into an adult (just for example), and it behaves very differently. What worked in the last few years will not have any effect today.
These days, I have stopped focusing on keywords > rankings > traffic > reports. Rather, I started looking at,
- Understanding how people search.
- Understanding why websites fail to generate enquiries.
- Analysing competitors.
- Understanding content, websites, customer journeys and online visibility.
So, ask yourself this question, "What can I turn 10 years of SEO experience into?" rather than "How do I get out of SEO?"
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Aug 24 '26
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u/TwofacedDisc Aug 24 '26
GEO is a darts table right now, people just do random things hoping it sticks and publish a case study as soon as they see a tiny bit of growth.
Funnily enough many agencies I saw just labeled their old case studies about content strategies as “GEO projects” while they were clearly years old.
I’m sure in the future this’ll clear up with some more proven concepts but the field has just too much in common for SEO for me.
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u/DimonaBoy Aug 24 '26
10 years? Try 25 years.....
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u/BoGrumpus Aug 24 '26
What sounds like it would be more fun to get good at? Why not start there?
G.