Phoebe Conner’s journey to Digital Marketing started like many others, with a degree worlds away from tech. Phoebe’s passion for her blog and curiosity in increasing blog views with SEO gave her the confidence to leave a well-paid job as a Mortgage Advisor to work in SEO.
My route into the industry I currently work in, Digital Marketing, could be described as convoluted at best.
At the age of 17, whilst beginning the process of applying for university, I became aware that I might need to start deciding what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. That’s a pretty overwhelming thought for a teenager.
For as long as I can remember, I have been completely in love with writing and literature, it was what I felt confident and passionate about at school and it was what I wanted to find my future career in; so I applied to do English Literature at university and hoped (very naively) that a career path might unveil itself along the way.
I felt very aware of the shift into an ever more digital era that was happening around me
Fast forward to graduation and I was about as clear on what my future should look like then as I was whilst writing my UCAS application all those years before. I was still confident that writing was a big part of what I wanted to become, but I wasn’t sure of what career that looked like in the world I was emerging into post-university.
Having started my degree in 2009 and graduating in 2012, I felt very aware of the shift into an ever more digital era that was happening around me. However, having chosen quite a traditionally academic course, I was also aware that I didn’t feel my degree had provided me with all the skills I would need to start a career in the digital industry.
One thing that does stick out for me during my time at university was a module with a lecturer that liked to do things a little differently (certainly when compared to all my other English Literature modules). It was during this module that I first got to use Wordpress and became familiar with blogging - something that I don’t think I would have the career that I do have today without.
After graduating, with the pressure of minus funds to my name (hello student overdraft, oh how you served me well), I began applying for jobs. At this point, I’d had to move back home to Norwich, where I’m from, and just needed to start earning money whilst I worked out how to actually start a career. It was then that I created my own blog (sarcastically named yesihaveablog, as I felt like just about everyone was starting one at the time).
Initially I started it to keep up the momentum with my writing, part of me desperately hoping that someone would stumble across it, discover my potential and hand me my dream career. But as the years (and career moves) went by, finding myself more and more unhappy in each job I was in, my blog became more of a passion project, as well as a necessary outlet.
I not only loved the writing side of it, but I became more and more interested in the search engine optimisation (SEO) side of things too - maybe my blog hadn’t been discovered and my dream career handed to me because I wasn’t high up enough in the search results. I spent a lot of my spare time writing for my blog, but also researching how I could make it better, something that I was really proud of.
At this point, my career changes had seen me working in education, e-commerce and product writing and ending up as a qualified mortgage advisor. But I’d had enough. I’d been working incredibly hard at, and giving a little bit too much of myself to, a career that I didn’t really want. At the same time, I was exhausting myself spending all my spare time on a career that, at this point, I had convinced myself I couldn’t have. That very nearly broke me.
What I would say about breaking point is that, if you have very little else to lose, you will likely become very clear about what you want to gain; that’s how it worked for me anyway.
What I would say about breaking point is that, if you have very little else to lose, you will likely become very clear about what you want to gain; that’s how it worked for me anyway.
I left a very well paid job in exchange for a digital marketing internship with a local agency in Norwich (that didn’t exactly have the promise of a full time job afterwards). But it was probably my smartest career move to date.
So here I am now, working as an SEO executive at the agency I interned with (Further Digital Marketing). I completed my 3 month internship and was offered a role in their outreach team, working on link building and digital PR.
If I’m honest, I think I could have gone straight into the SEO team from my internship but I (stupidly) convinced myself that still, I wasn’t qualified for it. I won my place on the internship, I assume, not because of my qualification in mortgage advice or my ability to write product descriptions, but because of the SEO skills I’d been teaching myself without really realising it.
It took 3 months of working in the outreach team, a niggling interest to learn SEO from the professionals, my manager having a bit more faith in me than I did myself and, eventually, a bit of self-bravery in lieu of self-confidence and voila, my career as an SEO began.
Agency life is both a melting pot of working with really great, intelligent and inspiring people and a baptism of fire when it comes to learning the fine art of SEO - I’m not sure I’d have it any other way.
In some ways I would have loved to have found a career that gave me satisfaction straight out of university, and in other ways I know I would never have got there without the journey that I’ve been on.
I currently work alongside colleagues who are very well versed in Technical SEO. Whilst I’m hell-bent on trying to learn at least half of what they know about SEO, I’m also developing my own career trajectory in on-site optimisation (as opposed to technical optimisation). For me, this is my skill sweet-spot, bringing together my love of writing and my increasing knowledge of SEO.
In some ways I would have loved to have found a career that gave me satisfaction straight out of university, and in other ways I know I would never have got there without the journey that I’ve been on.
To this day I still run my blog; it remains a really useful tool and source of motivation to learn and develop my SEO skills. If I hadn’t have been tinkering away with it over the years, albeit with the goal of becoming some sort of a writer, I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today.
Perhaps the world of academia has caught up a little since I left it in 2012; essay writing is certainly a valuable skill to learn but, in my opinion at least, it’s definitely not the only one that’s going to get you a career.
What I would say is that, even if you don’t leave university with the perfect skill set, there’s still the potential to find your way into a digital career. If you have a passion, follow it, see where it takes you and definitely create some of that experience yourself.
Have a story to tell that will inspire others to get into digital? Get in touch at [email protected]
