Gerrid Smith

I have been building SEO teams since 2005. Every lesson in this thread came from a hire that went wrong. Follow me for more frameworks built from 20 years of real experience.

The best hire I ever made asked me three questions before answering one. That told me everything I needed to know. Hire for curiosity. Hire for ownership. Hire for proof. Certifications are the weakest signal in SEO hiring.

Most SEO hires look great on paper. Most of them underdeliver in the first 90 days. After 20 years of building SEO teams I finally know why. Here is the hiring framework that changed everything👇

@AlessandroLavis Visuals

@Creatextravel Million

Day 4 of scaling to $1M a month in 30 days Will probably do $15k today minimum Using Claude code instead of shopify makes the ui superior, aov is over $120 some customers spending $170 with the cascading upsells. Going to be launching a community on exactly how I’m doing this at the end of the 30 days If you want to be on the wait list comment “million” for the super sauce

You can have the best content on the internet. If Google does not trust the source it will not rank it. E-E-A-T is not about what you write. It is about what the internet says about you.

SEO will keep changing. The fundamentals underneath it never will. 20 years. Same principles. Still building. If you found this useful follow me at @iamgerrid.

Lesson 7: The best SEO agencies sell outcomes not deliverables. Clients do not want a report. They want more leads, more calls, more revenue. The agencies still talking about rankings while clients ask about revenue are losing accounts.

I have been running an SEO agency for 20 years. The SEO changed every year. The business fundamentals never did. Here is what actually survived every algorithm update, every hard year, and every industry shift. 🧵