Women in SEO: Hannah Andrews - SEO Account Director, MediaCom

MediaCom SEO Account Director Hannah Andrews gives us some insights from her career in SEO, discusses gender representation in her industry, details the effects of the pandemic on the world of work, and shares her career secrets that every woman should know!

Hannah Andrews - SEO Account Director, MediaCom

My Career Path

I’ve been working in SEO since 2016 and actually took a content/SEO hybrid job at a small agency back in my hometown after a big career shift from hospitality. I dropped out of university after completing my second year studying Philosophy and World Religions and was in a real panic of what I was going to do! After writing content for some websites I became really interested in what made my copy rank, and then picked up SEO and was hooked!

Since then I’ve worked for both agency and brand side and with some huge international clients, something that I didn’t think I’d ever do back when I first entered the space. That’s something that should be told to anyone who’s looking into entering the marketing industry – if I could do it after where I started anyone can. The resources out there that are free are incredible and in a lot of areas I taught myself. I’m currently an SEO Account Director at MediaCom and manage a team of 4, we work with well-known brands known across the world!

Gender Representation in my Industry

In our team in the Manchester office, there’s currently 6 women in a team of 18. This is extremely high in comparison to any other team I’ve been a part of. Seeing women achieve in my space is amazing, especially when SEO is such a male dominated area. I joined an online community, Women in Tech SEO around 4 years ago and being able to troubleshoot with the people in that community really made a difference. There a are a lot of women I follow in the industry on twitter, and I constantly see more and more so it’s great to see the numbers increasing!

How the Pandemic has Affected Work for Women

I think the pandemic has been really tough for everyone, I really struggled working from home all of the time as I couldn’t find a balance between work and relaxing. My living room became my office so switching off became a real issue. Alternatively, it showed a lot of employers that people can work from home and produce great work. A lot of the places I’ve worked didn’t entirely trust team members to work from home and would constantly be micromanaging, I think with everyone working from home made some brands trust their teams more. I now work in a hybrid way with 2 days in our office in Manchester and this balance is great.

Career Secrets that Every Woman Should Know!

Find likeminded women in your industry, whether that’s devs/SEO/PPC or other fields, it’s amazing when you can find other women who share the same highs and lows as you. In my role, my friends don’t work in the same industry, so complaining about a website migration will land on deaf ears.
YouTube tutorials can teach you anything and everything you could ever want to know about any subject, I use these all the time for problem solving at work and just day to day tasks. I spent such a long time trying to wrap my head around high level excel issues and now I’m (almost) a pro!

Thank you Hannah!

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