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Burned out after 5+ years in SEO. What are some do able career pivots?
Posted by on February 1, 2026 at 4:26 pmMy friend has 5+ years of experience in SEO but is completely exhausted. The work feels poorly defined and unstable, largely due to Google’s frequent and unpredictable algorithm updates.
He currently works at a small agency, manages a team of three, and collaborates closely with Paid Media, Sales, and Product teams.
His main concern is that if he switches to a Senior Manager or Director role, he’ll likely end up with the same responsibilities—just with more pressure, more meetings, and more headaches.
If you were in his position, what would you do?
Have you (or someone you know) transitioned from SEO into Marketing Science, Analytics, Product, Growth, or any other field after 5+ years in SEO? How realistic is that move, and what skills helped the most?
What would you suggest in his case?
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1 Reply
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He could teach others how to use SEO by creating simple online courses.
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Lol bro if SEO has you bent…. Try paid? If you land somewhere with an agency support, I swear paid search managers do not do shit.
Every other marketing role is harder.
Have you considered bussing tables?
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Yes. I started as an SEO marketer and later switched to data analytics. The transition was quite easy. Many SEO skills transfer well into analytics, such as working with data and building dashboards. The data analytics field is also more stable overall. BI tools and workflows have stayed largely the same for the past 20 years, with SQL used for data extraction and dashboards for visualization.
I’m still doing SEO for my own business (saas) though. Couldnt leave it completely haha.
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Same situation So I am switching from SEO to meta ads
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Look for an in-house role at a company with an seo team (ie not a solo in-house role). Pay is way better, the work is more directional and you don’t have an agency director trying to squeeze every billable hour out of your soul with the ever-present threat of redundancy if a client walks. 5+ years experience should be enough to get into a decent company, may as well see if they prefer it before throwing the experience and knowledge they’ve built up away.
But if that doesn’t work out, they can absolutely look at pivoting. I worked in graphic design and print production for 8 years before restarting my career from scratch in an entry level SEO role. It was out of necessity as the company I worked for went out of business and I really didn’t want to go back to working in print, but it’s paid off in the long run with a solid career and income.
The thing to do is for your friend to sit down and make a list of all the hard and soft skills they’ve developed so far and then convert them into ‘generic’ skills (ie rewrite them without a specific reference to SEO). This’ll help them understand what transferable skills they have which could apply to other jobs outside of SEO, then they can go looking for job descriptions which ask for those skills as a starting point to get an idea of what jobs they might be able to transfer into.
From there they can make a short list of jobs that they like the sound of or think they might enjoy, and look at what other skills, qualifications or experience those roles also ask for. Some of the jobs they may already be qualified for, whilst others they might need to take some extra training or courses etc, or seek a more junior version of the job to get the experience. But at least that gives them a roadmap to follow and goals to work towards. They may even be able to build some of those skills by volunteering to help people in other departments in his current agency, which could also give them a taster of adjacent disciplines to decide if they like them or not.
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I’ve also been thinking about migrating into a paid ads role. Burnt out from SEO and Web Dev related work, watching people do less than me while earning more. Also could be a plus for the experience would make me a much more well rounded in the digital marketing game.
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Go inhouse or do data analytics. Paid is basically Google ads and meta as others mentioned. Agencies are seeing their paid budgets cut as clients hold back budget from uncertainty. CPCs and CPMs are climbing higher every year and ai is taking over bidding/optimizations making it harder to justify your pay in paid
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AEO/GEO
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