In the latest edition of the Digital “day in the life of” series, Liam Harvey caught up with Harry Sanders, Founder at StudioHawk to learn about his experience running a successful SEO agency, and advice to candidates looking to forge a career in this space.
Q: So Harry, can you tell us a little about StudioHawk?
“I founded StudioHawk which is a dedicated SEO agency, with direct access to SEO talent without account managers in between. We have about 80 staff across AU and the UK.”
Q: Why did you found StudioHawk, and where might you take the agency from here?
“I started the business because I saw a massive gap in people that were ‘SEO hustlers’ and not many people that were actually ‘SEO masters’. Basically people trying to do too many things and not delivering results as a consequence.”
Q – What kind of skills do you feel people need to be effective in this role?
“In my role you need to be very forward thinking, able to come up with strategies and both lead and adapt to where the industry might be in 5 years time.”
Q – Tell us about a typical working day…
“A typical day for me involves checking in with the different departments heads across client success, operations, and HR to make sure our clients and staff are happy. Mostly, my day involves a lot of phone calls with different industry people and a whole ton of emails across the US, AU, and UK.”
Q – What do you love about your job? What sucks?
“I love that I get the opportunity to build and shape our industry. I get to help develop junior programs to hire and train wholesome nerds to become SEO masters. I also get the final say on how we do things as a business as we are independant and don’t have investment or a parent brand.”
“What sucks about my job is more the weight of the responsibility. My life is dictated by the business, everything from personal relationships to where I am located.”
Q – What kind of goals do you have?
“I’m a very goal oriented person, I have goals around making Lawrence & Anthony (two early hires) super successful, I have goals around making a social and community impact, I also have growth goals for StudioHawk across a US expansion and our growth in the UK & AU.”
Q – What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?
“I live on my emails and I’m a massive inbox zero person, so Gsuite (including Google sheets as I love a good spreadsheet) for sure. Hubspot is also a system we use a lot for measuring our clients success. AI is helpful, but still early.”
Q – When you first started out in SEO, which tools, software’s or resource’s do you wish you had access to now, that you didn’t back then?
“Man so many. Getting access to enterprise licences to tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, dedicated screaming frog computers and instances, as well as proper learning and progression are all thing I wish I had. We actually built an entirely free solution for people looking to get into the industry or upskill called Hawk Academy. The reason was I wanted people to have a proper learning pathway as there is so much information out there, and this is a fun gamified way of learning.”
Q – What new technology are you most excited about (if any)?
“AI is always exciting, but excited in general about how we can best bridge the gap between clients and delivering a person that is both creating strategy and executing strategy. I’m excited to see how technology enables people to spend more time and the exciting stuff that moves the needle, rather than working in the weeds.”
Q – How did you get into the SEO space and do you have any advice for people who want to work within SEO world?
“I got into the SEO space about 12 years ago reading forum posts, but I think it’s a super exciting field that is only going to get more exciting with AI search and other related emerging technologies. My best advice would be to lose the ego, always approach SEO as a continual growth and learning exercise, and don’t go too deep down the rabbit hole on things when there are simple changes that will make a massive difference to someone’s traffic and sales!”
If you’d like to know more about StudioHawk you can visit their website here and to discover more about the free learning tools through Hawk Academy you can visit the site here.
