If you’ve landed on this page, chances are you’re an SEO enthusiast like I am. I’m a veteran SEO professional with more than a decade of agency experience. Working on the agency side gave me deep, hands-on SEO knowledge, the chance to collaborate with top industry experts, and the opportunity to support some of the world’s most recognizable brands. I wore many hats at the agency — from technical SEO and content marketing to pitching and winning new business. But agency life is very different from working in-house. After many years at agencies, I transitioned to my first in-house role. Here are seven lessons I’ve learned since making that move. 1. Being directly accountable for performance changes how SEO is judged At an agency, when performance dips, the pattern is familiar: a panicked email lands in your inbox — traffic is down — and the client wants a detailed explanation yesterday. You then dive headfirst into the SEO weeds, reviewing search trends, monitoring ranking shifts, and combing through Google Search Console to uncover what’s going on. You double-check every detail. Polish every insight. You tidy up the report so it’s client-ready. Then you send it off. After that, you might field a few follow-up questions. There’s a bit of back and forth, but generally, your role in that “emergency” wraps up there. From the agency standpoint, you’ve done what you can. Time to move on to the next client in your portfolio. In-house, this scenario plays out very differently…