Hi! 👋 We’re so glad to feature you on SEOjobs.com. Please introduce yourself to our site’s readers.
Hey all! I’m Jeff Collins. I’ve led SEO from every seat: in-house at large brands, agency-side, and now as an independent consultant providing SEO services working from an office shed in my backyard. Been at it for 9+ years!
Please share your current role and what you’re focused on right now with JLC Launch Digital / SEO Study Spot (and any consulting or fractional work).
As an independent consultant, I help brands turn search into their most profitable channel (mostly work with Ecomm brands). From a high level, I serve brands in two different ways depending on what they need:
- Brands that need strategy/guidance. I research/provide brands with the strategy and guidance they need to give them the confidence they’re making the best use of their time and resources to grow SEO. I act as their SEO lead
- For brands that need strategy plus execution: If work isn’t live on the site it doesn’t grow. I execute to remove that burden from them. To make sure they’re getting things done efficiently, and the right way. Also help their internal team think and act differently on how to approach SEO for growth.
Brands work with me directly from start to finish, no junior handoff, and the person on the sales call is the person doing the work. It means I can only take on a handful of brands at a time, but it also means each one gets the attention to detail they need.
How did you start to learn SEO? What are you currently doing to keep up with the ever-changing SEO industry?
I learned SEO because I got tired of knocking on doors.
I started a car detailing business and was selling the services door to door, then noticed the same handful of companies kept showing up on Google Maps and Yelp. So I studied their profiles to figure out how they got there and built my own. Once it started producing leads, I stopped knocking doors and was thrilled.
After college I got a job at an agency and was on a mission to learn everything I could, asking questions of anyone who knew more than me, rotating through departments that had different skill sets. At night I’d watch YouTube and build affiliate sites to test things. Then I started a newsletter to share what I was learning, which turned out to be a great networking move. Writing it publicly got other SEOs sharing their strategies back with me, and I learned faster from those conversations than from anything I read.
Twitter and LinkedIn are useful for spotting what’s changing, but another valuable method is from other people running SEO services, we trade findings and figure things out faster together than any of us would alone.
You led SEO at Purple and helped grow the brand into a top organic market-share leader in the highly competitive mattress and bedding space (even ranking for terms like “mattress”). What were the biggest systems, processes, or strategic shifts that made the biggest difference, and what are you most proud of from that time?
Two shifts made the difference
The first was ruthless prioritization. In a space that is competitive, you can stay busy indefinitely on work that was never going to move market share. We got disciplined about what we said no to.
The second was drastically reducing the time from idea to live on the site. That’s where most SEO programs quietly die, in the weeks or months a recommendation spends waiting on approvals, design, dev, and legal. We built a system that filled all the bottlenecks for us and cut approval-to-launch time by roughly 90% while still maintaining quality. Over time results compound with more work going live
What I’m proudest of is the team win. Mattress & bedding is a brutal category, you’re up against not just brands with big budgets but affiliate sites with enormous budgets whose entire business model is ranking. Competing there meant working across product, legal, customer service, and paid media etc, and getting people whose jobs had nothing to do with search to care about it anyway. The results followed from that. Grew organic contribution from 17% to 40%+, and organic traffic doubled, but the reason that happened is that the process worked and the org was bought in.
You’ve also worked agency-side (including roles at Boostability and THG), and now run your own consulting practice. What are the biggest differences you’ve experienced across these paths, and how has each shaped the way you approach SEO strategy and client work today?
I took something different from each.
The agency path brought rapid learning. You’re across a lot of accounts in a lot of industries at once, and the volume compresses your learning curve. You see the same problems in different formats often enough that you start recognizing patterns instead of guessing. I don’t think there’s a faster way to learn early in your career.
In-house was about navigating resource restraints and red tape. Knowing whose buy-in you need before you’re in the room. Realizing that being right about a recommendation and getting it shipped are two completely different skills, and the second one is what determines whether anything happens.
In-house I was also on the other side of the table – hiring agencies. That was probably the most useful thing that I was able to experience professionally. I got to see what it feels like to be the client:
- How to shape SEO services in ways that not only drive results but fill holes in brands resource constraints
- The soft skills needed to provide SEO services so people are bought in and you stay in the important rooms
- Various strategies that work and don’t work
- Importance and how to reduce time from idea to work being live onsite
Now, running my own SEO services, I am fortunate to take all those years of failures and successes to build the kind of service I would have wanted to hire myself.