SEOhaus Reviews

Okay, settle in guys and girls, this is going to be a long one. I mean it, grab a snack and make sure your chair's comfy. I worked at SEOhaus for almost two years and was there during their transition to PRhaus and Brighthaus and the creation of Creativehaus. They were without a doubt, the worst two years of work I have ever endured. It's possible that things have changed since I left but everything I've heard from those who have left since I did leads me to believe that they haven't. If you're looking for a job, let me tell you, it's not worth it, keep looking, you CAN do better. Now, for some specifics about why working here sucked so hard, read on. 1 - A total lack of infrastructure. - While I worked there our IT department (including all programming, hosting, e-mail and domain support) consisted of three people. Now, don't get me wrong, Nick is an amazing guy and really, really knows his stuff. But you could six Nicks and they still wouldn't be able to keep up with the amount of work. I'm not kidding when I say that at some points the tech support queue was six weeks long. That meant if something broke on a client site it stayed broken for six weeks or until the account manager was able to figure something else out. What's that you say? Client's will have webmasters, we're only an SEO company. Well read on... 2 - Totally unrealistic promises - Clients were promised the world to get them to sign up. We'll not only provide you with SEO, we'll also fix coding errors on your website, help you implement new design features and widgets, heck, if you need it we'll even design you a whole new site to make sure you're SEO friendly (see point 1 to get an idea of how smoothly most of this went). We were encouraged to lie to clients about this process in order to preserve them as clients when they (justifiably) got angry over the fact that implementation was taking weeks or more. 3 - Blame culture - Here's the blame culture, you get blamed. As an account manager an unhappy client was your fault no matter what, why or when and don't think for a moment that blame was doled out privately. I can't count the number of times I saw the management publicly berate someone right in the middle of the open plan office. It's like they were trying to embarrass and make an example of people. This is not something that's rare. It was standard operating procedure while I was there. 4 - Expected to lie - I know I mentioned this earlier but I wanted to bring it up again because it really deserves its own point. If the business practices of the company were not able to match the promises made to clients or the expectations set by sales, we were expected to lie to clients and make up stories in order to calm them down and stop them from quitting. We used link builders in the Phillipines but were instructed to tell clients that all of our staff were based out of our office. When penguin 2.0 came around and started to devalue all of those links we were again instructed to lie to clients about what was causing their rankings to suddenly drop. If a client had completely unreasonable expectations and we knew there was no way they would actually see good results from their campaign, we were expected to lie to keep them on for as long as possible to get as much money as we could before they wised up and quit. A big part of why I left was because I just felt dirty every time I spent a day in the office. I felt like a con-man. 5 - Ridiculous Workloads - While I was an account manager there each of us had almost 80 accounts that we were expected to talk to on a bi-weekly basis. That meant that each week we needed to report to and work on 40 accounts, that's 8 a day. Some of these clients were paying us over 1000 a month and we were given an account load that meant we could spend less than two hours a month on them. It was normal for people to stay 30 minutes to an hour late on normal days and even though they say you can leave at noon on Fridays it was also normal for people to stay until 3 or 4 o'clock simply to try and catch up. 6 - Horrible work-life balance - When you join they'll tell you that they really value work-life balance and make a real effort to maintain a great balance here. And they do, for the management. It was standard practice for the owners to come into the office 30 minutes to an hour and a half later than everyone else and leave an hour or more before the employees. The employees on the other hand would be harangued if they were ten minutes late and forget trying to leave early. Like I mentioned before, the work load means that it's simply not an option. Oh, and I don't know if they still do this but while I was there they gave each account manager a phone. Oh, that's nice we thought. Except we were expected to give that number out to clients and remain available to them on evenings and weekends. Let me repeat that. As an account manager you were expected to remain available to clients and management on evenings and weekends and even on PTO. Now, honestly, I could go on. I really could. I could keep writing about the problems this place had all day but I've moved on with my life and I suggest you do the same. There's other jobs out there, better ones. Go get one of those instead.

Before I begin with the "cons" I wanted to talk about the most recent positive review. My first reaction when reading it was "wouldn't that be nice if it was true?" What I imagine happened is that the owner of the company was randomly googling "SEOhaus" came across the negative reviews here and either decided himself or someone else needed to write a nice review in response. It has reputation management written all over it. I'd also ask anyone who is thinking about working at this company to consider one more thing - even if that latest review is true, if you look through all of the other negative reviews (and this one, if you keep reading) is that the management is inconsistent and tends to make rash decisions without entirely thinking through the consequences. If the owners' history has taught anything it's that even if that positive review is 100% truthful, there is every likelihood that everything will go back to the same crap again in no time. So. The cons: - Abominable work/life balance (more on this below) - Ridiculous/impossible workload - Inconsistent and rash owners that publicly humiliate their employees (highly developed blame culture where everything is always your fault. Always.) - Owners that are completely out of touch with the actual work of their employees, but who make short-sighted and often completely illogical decisions that directly impact those employees (who are then supposed to suck it up and deal with it) - Complete lack of management support or follow through on their own policies when it comes to client interaction (you will do whatever the client asks, regardless of how reasonable a request, how much time or flexibility in your work schedule, or how much infrastructure there is to support you) - Practically ZERO benefits (a stipend that doesn't even cover half the cost of the required insurance coverage for Obamacare is NOT the same as getting insurance covered by your employers) - A culture that supports misleading and / or completely lying to clients. - Absolutely zero advocacy for the employees and their working conditions. - Backhanded friendship with owners (they do everything they can to convince you that you are in a place that you can call your bosses your friends, but they seem to only do this in order to make you feel guilty about not liking the conditions they have you working in). - Ridiculous/impossible workload (I know I've said this before. But you really have no idea.) - A complete lack of training for new employees (At SEOhaus, they tell you it's a sink or swim culture, but what they don't tell you is that they will tie you to a couple of anchors before throwing you in) and a complete lack of managerial training for either the owners or anyone that has been promoted. - Outdated / stupid SEO policies and procedures. (This may have changed since I left, but we had people in the Philippines building shady links when I left last year. That's just embarrassing. Also, when clients asked, we were encouraged to leave that bit out when talking about all of our SEO efforts. I wonder why?) - Almost no opportunity for career progression or professional training. - Unbelievable stress. All of these things above add to it, but one of the worst things about working here is knowing that if you make one little mistake (likely from being exhausted), you are probably going to be yelled at in front of your colleagues by a man who has shown literally no interest in helping or supporting you. And the truly sad part about that is that being yelled at would have been the "best of all possible outcomes" as the other one would be that he could just fire you. A note about the abominable work/life balance: When you get hired there, they tell you that your working hours are Monday - Thursday, 8:00am - 6:00pm and then on Friday from 8:00am to 12:00pm. The reality is that - because of the amount of work they expect you to do and because of the constant threat of being berated or blamed if you are unable to keep up with your work - almost everyone in the office would regularly be in at least thirty minutes early and wouldn't leave until 7:30-8:00pm on M-Th, and people were regularly working well past 3:00pm on Fridays. No they did not pay over time for any of this. No they did not even see it as a problem. (If they knew, that is. They never worked that late.) Remember, if you can't deal with your impossible work load, that is your own fault and if you don't improve then you will be fired. In addition, all account managers were issued work cell phones to make them more easily accessible to clients. As an account manager, you are expected to answer and/or return phone calls whenever you receive them, including on weekends and during any paid time off you take. I am going to say that again, because it bares repeating. As an account manager, you are expected to answer and/or return phone calls whenever you receive them, including on weekends and during any paid time off you take. This was actually discussed in a company meeting where the owner said that they expected this of us and if we didn't like it then we don't belong at seohaus. Now I understand that there are some jobs out there that make these kinds of demands on their employees (lawyers, bankers, etc.), but those jobs generally make up for it in perks for the employee such as a generous salary and benefits package. This job offers neither of those things. It's just not worth it. You can find another job.