What we want: a head of SEO who yearns for a career-defining opportunity.
Hi there, we’re ContactOut.
We have a database with everyone’s email in it. So B2B professionals use ContactOut to get conversations going with key people.
Our mission: fix cold email — to make sending and receiving it a good experience.
Building the products to achieve this audacious goal will cost a lot. That means we’ll need to generate more customers via SEO.
So we’re looking for a head of SEO who can 3x our organic traffic in the next 2 years.
This will be one of the most important hires our company ever makes. If that pressure excites you, you’re probably the right person for the job.
Over the first 2 years, you will be expected to:
- 3x organic traffic to our directory pages from 870k to 2.6M monthly unique visitors by improving our technical SEO, increasing our number of indexed pages, and adding new types of valuable directory pages
- Develop and execute a product-led SEO strategy around three new outreach products we will launch
- Lead our content strategy, building a blog from 0 to 200k monthly unique visitors
- Assemble the team, including the editorial, link building, and any freelancers or consultants needed to do the job
This will be a career-defining role for the person who takes this challenge — cementing your legacy as one of the world’s top SEOs.
Background
So far, ContactOut has had a great run. We were founded in Silicon Valley in 2015 with the backing of 500 Startups and Blackbird Ventures. Since then, more than 500,000 people have made use of our Chrome extension to connect with the candidates who mean most to them — including B2B professionals from 76% of the Fortune 500.
We’re a profitable SaaS on pace for $4.5M USD ARR in 2021 tracking 40% annual growth.
(By the way, ContactOut runs on top of LinkedIn. You click a button and get the candidate’s email and phone number. It looks like this:)
We’re also launching some game-changing tools, such as a search portal where B2B marketers can create their own lists with LinkedIn-level data:
Product-market fit
Customers highly value our product, because it helps them build extremely targeted lists in a fraction of the time they would use with other tools:
Business goals
We’re targeting 2–3x annual revenue growth for the next four years to reach $100M ARR by 2025. To support this, we need to reach parity with competitors, who achieve 5–10x our organic traffic while using the same B2B data we have. This is why we want to hire a highly ambitious, growth-minded head of SEO.
What You’ll Do
There are three main SEO challenges to meet:
- Improve the technical SEO for our directory pages
- Implement a product-led SEO strategy
- Launch and develop our blog
You may have direct expertise in one or two of these. For whatever parts you don’t, you will rely on your ability to build a crack team of specialists, managers, freelancers, and consultants.
The head of SEO will:
- Improve the technical SEO for our directory pages. Review our site structure, sitemaps, and internal linking architecture vs indicators from Google Search Console and Google Analytics to identify opportunities for optimization. Make hypotheses based on user behavior through analysis of event and conversion reports using tools like Google Tag Manager and Hotjar to implement technical solutions to improve behavioral metrics. Optimize on-SERP CTR via meta tag improvement and on-page performance with page speed and tech stack. Build out new types of long tail directory pages our audience need (example: rankings for job title + company, job title+ city, job title + company, skill + city, etc.)
The goal: 3x organic traffic in the next 2 years.
Why we think this is achievable: Our competitors get 5–10x SEO traffic to their directory pages with the same data we have access to.
- Implement a product-led SEO strategy. Work with the engineering and product teams to strategize and launch new products to create new streams of product-led SEO user acquisition. Run customer discovery interviews and do research with third-party tools to identify “blue ocean” products that represent a gap in the market. Provide the content and design for these landing pages, and work with the design team to create them. Use judicious internal linking to rank the associated keywords and win the SERPs.
The goal: Reach 45k organic visits per month from keywords related to the products we launch over the next 2 years.
Why we think this is achievable: Competitors (keywords: email finder, email verifier, email warmup) get about 50–100k per month, and we get about 15k visitors per month for keywords related to the ContactOut brand. There are plenty of keywords around list building that haven’t been capitalized on — you’ll find and dominate these niches.
- Build our blog. Analyze the organic search landscape and identify key opportunities to drive meaningful traffic. Conduct keyword research and competitive gap analysis to inform strategic content plays, including new content, content optimization, new content formats and innovative experiments that quickly grow traffic on relevant, high-value search terms. Choose a CMS and advise our engineering team on optimal design and UX. Oversee the editorial team and ensure best practices are used for both technical and Google E-A-T Quality standards.
The goal: Reach 200k unique visitors per month to our blog within 2 years.
Why we think this is achievable: there are tons of keywords related to sales, marketing, and recruiting and we can do better than the current quality out there. We also have a good amount of link juice pointing at the site, and a good link building playbook in place. We just need to scale up the team, and we have a good framework for hiring and training VAs to do that.
- Set key metric benchmarks for the performance of these pages. Indexed pages, organic traffic, signup conversion rate, custom event occurrence, paid upgrade (self-checkout) conversion rate, etc. Identify keyword patterns and opportunities and work with the engineer and product teams to improve landing page UX. Measure and report on performance in Google Data Studio or similar.
- Manage a multi-disciplinary team of in-house experts (anywhere from 2–10 employees), specialists, freelancers, and consultants to meet business goals. A large contingent of this team will be the link-building team, which alone may grow to 10+ members. You will use a management system (cadence of weekly staff meetings, our monthly operating review, and quarterly board meetings) and informal systems to create clarity and accountability for the team on how to execute this plan and win the market.
- Work with our recruitment team to acquire talent, provide outstanding leadership, and create a positive culture.
The Opportunity
ContactOut has the traction, resources, and mindset to support a quality head of SEO’s vision for all the above goals. What we need: someone who can utilize the resources below to turn us from a popular, profitable SaaS company into the unicorn that fixed cold outreach for the world.
Resources
Website: You’ll be working with a website that has 45 DA, 2.2k referring domains, and 5M indexed URLs. It generates 15k new signups a day off 830k unique monthly visitors, so there’s a lot of capacity to run A/B tests.
Budget: You’ll manage an annual budget of up to $500k. This company thrives on SEO because our founder, Rob Liu, relied on it to build two multimillion dollar businesses (first a daily deals site, and now ContactOut.) You won’t have to convince us of the importance of SEO, and you’ll have direct to him.
Side note: while both he and the head of growth got their start in SEO, YOU will be in charge of SEO. They will be there as a resource for you.
We follow the philosophy best described by Steve Jobs:
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to.We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
Rob is also a partner and investor at Hustle Fund and Australia’s two largest VCs: Blackbird Ventures and Startmate. So we ever want VC, it won’t be hard to get.
Your team: You’ll have the authority to assemble it yourself, with the dedicated support of A.C. Agustin, our new head of talent acquisition who helped build the Airtasker (ASX: ART) growth team responsible for their IPO.
Link building: We intend to expand the link building team under you to 10 people — we use the playbook from our advisor Andre (former head of growth from Canva, who scaled their site to 100M/mo unique visitors.)
Content: You’ll build the editorial team yourself, hand-in-hand with Jeff Deutsch, the head of growth. He’s blogged extensively on SEO topics like zero-click search/BERT, Google Shopping, and SEO for Ecommerce. Here’s some praise for his work from people in the SEO world:
Design: Your design team is led by Denis Zubkov, a co-founder for another Silicon Valley SaaS, RecruitLoop. He built our beautiful website, brand guidelines, and the new skin for our extension:
Product: You’ll work directly with Joseph Louis Tan, our new head of product, who is a mentor for 500 Startups and built the online UX for Singapore’s #1 bank, DBS. Together, you’ll create the strategy for our product-led SEO by designing and marketing the tools that will fix cold outreach.
Engineering: You’ll be the top marketing priority for Albert Jou, our head of engineering. Albert was a Sr. engineer at REA, the largest real estate website in Australia. He was also CTO for a social network that gets 3M visitors a month.
Sales: Your leads will be handled by a team run by our head of sales, Doug. He who was one of the first sales leaders at Glassdoor, Entelo, Beamery, and Comparably. Doug bleeds SaaS and startups, and is a Silicon Valley veteran who worked with organizations like SaaStr in the early days.
Your Mindset
Below is a description of the perfect person for this role.
You are someone looking for a career-defining role. One where 5–10% annual growth isn’t enough — you want to create 2–3x annual growth with tens of millions of dollars of revenue attributable to your success.
For you, 2022–23 will be the years where you ascended to the next level. Where you were the tip of the spear for a massive product-led SEO strategy, working with experienced experts at the top of their game in product, engineering, design, and growth. And created an engine that passively attracted thousands of backlinking domains, amid millions of people using those tools to level up their lives with newly improved cold outreach skills.
You’re ready to play bigger. You want a bigger challenge than simple page-by-page content optimization and basic keyword research.
You want an end to the bureaucracy and red tape. You may be at a big company that takes weeks to get multiple levels of financial, legal, and compliance approvals. You want to have direct access to the top leadership so you can get rapid approvals for audacious projects. And then you want them to get out of your way.
You’re analytical. You thrive on data analysis, digging into search console data and identifying patterns. You can clearly tell the CEO and head of growth what tools you need to get the job done, or what we need to build. You have ideas for how to get the most out of Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console.
You’ve been doing this at least 3–5 years. You may be leading a team at an agency, used to working with specialists and freelancers, or working under a maestro or mentor. But now you’re ready to take the reins yourself.
While you’re comfortable being an individual contributor at the start — working directly with engineering and product — you’re ready to lead a massive team. You’ll quickly transition to the role of conductor, coordinating teams in a rapidly growing company worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
You are fine with overseeing the hiring of the link building team, the editorial and content team, SEO managers, specialists, digital PR people an outreach team, and multiple virtual assistants to execute your vision. You have the will and judgement needed to responsibly manage a $500k annual budget.
You want to be the top priority in the dev queue. You may be frustrated by log jams, tired of a lack of autonomy or authority reducing the impact of your SEO ideas. You’re comfortable having dedicated developer resources, and working collaboratively to share the credit when the wins come pouring in. You’re of course comfortable with standard web frameworks and might even have a little Python or PHP up your sleeve.
You consume SEO content obsessively and follow minds like Mike King, Bill Slawski, Cyrus Shepard, Eli Schwartz, Dr. Pete, Marie Haynes, and Paul Shapiro. You subscribe to newsletters like #SEOFOMO and #SEOforLunch, stay up to date with SEroundtable and discuss, debate, and connect with like-minded thinkers on communities like TrafficThinkTank and BigSEO.
You may even want this in your future (not necessary, but this is the level we want our head of SEO to play on):
Culture & Values
Our CEO and head of growth appreciate SEO, because we started our professional careers doing it. We both got our start with two $1M+ projects dependent on SEO — the CEO with a coupons site and the head of growth with a link-building SaaS you may have heard about on Hubspot’s blog.
Better yet, because we have a good sized war chest, we don’t need to rely on funding from shortsighted VCs who don’t get the long game of SEO. (We practice what Rand Fishkin calls “chill work.”)
Our ultimate goal is to reach $100M ARR by 2026, exit at $1bn, and use the money to build EdTech products that empower rapid P2P learning for millions of people. (See our side project promoting personal growth here.)
The company’s cultural values, in order of priority are:
- Rapid learning. Rob founded ContactOut because he loved reaching out to mentors who could help him with his startup projects. (He writes about that in his post about finding your purpose here.) Rob’s habit continues today. Most of the senior leaders who work at ContactOut first acted as advisors who we learned from. Our gauge for a “good interview” is, “how much did we learn from the candidate during our chat?” We have a flat hierarchy here. It’s not people who rule. Good, informed ideas rule.
- Transparency. You can see in this post that we’re not afraid to share our sales and traffic numbers, or our intention to change the world. That transparency exists within the company. We share the things we think and feel with each other. It’s how we learn. Hiding bad results or negative feelings just prolongs the pain and loss. So we value transparency.
- Authenticity. We believe burnout at work comes from pretending to feel one way (usually to placate the leadership) when in fact, you don’t. On the other hand, being able to express yourself and be ourselves at work fills us with energy. We like working with people who are full of energy and inspiration.
Here’s a piece from our CEO, Rob’s website about authenticity, written by TedX philosopher Samar Habib. And this is my favorite quote:
- Accountability. We invite people to critique our product, our leadership, our attitude. We want to be held accountable for what we do. And we hold everyone who works at ContactOut to the same standard. Have the curiosity to pick at things and find out what’s broken. Then tell us your ideas on how to fix them. How do we avoid the urge to get defensive? We practice self-compassion (Rob’s favorite book.) No amount of money or fame is worth compromising your own self-care.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: above market rate. For the right candidate, we won’t be beaten on compensation.
Equity: options available, in the 0.2–0.4% range with additional equity grants in the 0.1% range annually. Current valuation for ContactOut is around $70M USD.
Location: fully remote.
Work hours: flexible. Rob and Jeff were both digital nomads for 5+ years, and plan to be again once this pandemic is behind us. Our team operates using time tracking software. You manage your own hours, and we aren’t fussed about when you work so long as you average 30 productive hours a week.
Time off: flexible. So long as you’re completing your work as planned and averaging 30 productive hours per week, you’re good.
The Hiring Process
Our process takes about 4 weeks to complete:
- Stage 1: application review. We will look at your resume and links to relevant SEO projects you’ve been part of in the past.
- Stage 2: phone interview. You will spent 20–30 minutes on the phone with our head of talent acquisition, A.C. Agustin, where she will evaluate your mindset and interest in the job, as well as your desired compensation.
- Stage 3: hiring manager, first interview. You will have a 30- to 40-minute chat with Jeff Deutsch, our head of growth. He will also evaluate your mindset and values, and ask you STAR style questions about your experience specific to the job.
- Stage 4: challenge. You will receive a challenge related to the needs of the job and design your solution. There is no requirement in effort, but the longer you spend, the better your foot forward in the process. Usually candidates put in four to eight hours of effort to complete this challenge.
- Stage 5: chat with the CEO. You’ll have a 20–30 minute chat with our CEO, Rob Liu. He will ask you questions about your background and experience in SEO, and evaluate your fit based on how much he learns during this final call.
Starting the Process
Email your resume and links to the SEO projects you were directly involved in (outlining your exact involvement) to our head of talent acquisition, a.c@contactout.com.
Good luck!
