Tips for Managing an SEO Team and Avoiding Burnout with Sergio, Head of Search at Minty
Agency life is quite a fast-paced environment and it’s widely known it can be quite stressful especially if things escalate quickly. Managers need to balance the challenge between escalating and ensure the team remains motivated, healthy and engaged. Burnout is not just a personal struggle. It’s also a productivity killer and a sign of systematic issues within a team’s workflow.
Common Pitfalls:
Managing an SEO Team isn’t as simple as assigning tasks and checking off boxes. Some common pitfalls include:
- Unrealistic Deadlines: We need to ensure our team has enough time to dedicate to each task otherwise this can affect the quality of the work.
- Wrong time allocation: This is quite difficult to predict. We all have failed doing this specially with new clients, industries or completely new tasks.
- Lack of proper training: We need to make sure our team is 100% on board with the task in hand. Employees need to be confident enough to tell superiors if they don’t feel ready to perform certain tasks due to lack of expertise. It’s ok if they need some extra training. SEO includes many different sub-angles and it’s impossible to know everything.
- Frequent shifts in priorities: This is something that can happen with clients who want quick results. It’s our responsibility to properly manage client’s expectations from the very beginning so we don’t have to change our strategy.
Reframing Your Approach:
In order to maintain a healthy team, we follow some of the below strategies:
- Encourage Regular Feedback: This might sound obvious but it is not. Its super important to have regular feedback sessions and a culture of recognition. This is something I learned back in Macmillan Cancer Support and I’ve implemented since we discussed it in a webinar. This is something that we all have to do horizontally and vertically. It´s free and it´s one of the best professional and personal motivators.
- Create a Supportive Work Environment: Sometimes Managers can look unapproachable, but in my opinion the team needs to feel they are supported. There are no silly questions, only dumb answers.
Practical Takeaways:
- Distribute Workloads Wisely: A good idea to distribute workload is creating a monthly capacity sheet. This should include all clients and the team’s hour allocation. This ensures nobody overdeliver and reduces stress.
- Encourage Work-Life Balance: Make it clear that breaks and time off and not only allowed but encouraged. We have implemented flexible working hours so each person decides when to start and finish the day and even take a long break if they want to go to the gym or any other activity.
- Use Efficiency-Boosting Tools: Apart from encouraging using AI to support with our work or repetitive tasks, we do use tools to help prioritising tasks. A tool I recommend to prioritise work is Focus Matrix.
- Set Clear Boundaries: Respect working hours and discourage after-hours emails or requests. Encourage the team to fully disconnect when they’re off the clock.
- Foster Team Collaboration: Encourage team members to share their work with the team or ask for a different angle. For example, we all spend some time reviewing content audits or quick wins deliverables. Several brains work better than 1.
Conclusion:
A healthy, engaged team is not only more productive but also more creative, motivated, and invested in the long-term growth of your agency. As a leader, the effort you put into preventing burnout will pay dividends—not just for your team’s morale, but for your company’s results.
