Pros
Really nice people to work with. Atmosphere among internal staff (within your department - not between departments) is friendly
Cons
Believe all the reviews saying that there is intense favoritism in this place, because it is real. The harder you work, the more they take advantage of you, and if you're not one of the favorites, you will be overworked to the point of committing late nights and none of the managers will care in the slightest. They act like they're open to feedback, but they take absolutely no action on this feedback and their honest response to any feedback along the lines of "this is an unfeasible workload" is "so is everybody's". They'll consistently say that they'll move accounts off of you and then will never do it. The leader of the SEO team along with her direct subordinates (3 in particular) on the SEO team are protected from unmanageable workloads, and action is actually taken when any of those subordinates complain about how many clients they have to deal with as they are allowed to have their clients transferred off. Anyone below those direct subordinates are completely screwed unless they're one of the favorites. Essentially all the junior SEO specialists are hired to relieve those direct subordinates (but the junior SEO specialists are unaware that that is their role), and if you are in one of the non-senior positions, you may think that you can work as hard as possible in hopes of receiving similar treatment when you're more experienced, but you'd be wrong because if you are not one of the favorites you will be treated like dirt no matter what, even after proving yourself for 1+ years. There is one particular direct subordinate of the SEO leader who had several juniors/seniors working under him (around 8) who plays favoritism like crazy. His favorite reports were allowed to use the new hires for help on their clients and were even allowed to transfer clients off onto the new hires while everyone else was consistently overloaded. He will use anyone who is not his favorite as a mule just so that his favorites' and his own workloads are relieved. People have been quitting the SEO team very rapidly for about years now and yet no one is doing anything to break this pattern despite HR and the SEO leader being aware of what's going on. Account managers are treated like Gods even though they do practically nothing for the calls, and the leader of the SEO team is too scared to say anything against them. Seriously, the number of calls that specialists have led due to the account managers being on vacation is endless, and they were able to lead these calls because the account managers' absences on these calls made absolutely no difference to the clients as that is how little they do for their clients. There were also so many account managers that would not even bother communicating through any issues with the clients despite that being their one job. That role fell to the specialists (despite this not being the specialists' jobs) because the account managers knew literally nothing. Fortunately many of the laziest account managers quit but there are still a handful of lazy ones working there. There was one particular account manager who was allowed to transfer practically all of her clients off in a heartbeat just because she was her boss's favorite and many specialists on the calls were left screwed because of it. She's also arrogant enough to act as though she's the specialists' boss and nag the specialists to send her stuff by a timing of her liking (her favorite is 4PM) that the client would have absolutely no problem waiting for. If the SEO team leaders allowed this sort of transfer ability to the SEO specialists, maybe SEO specialists would stop quitting the company so much. Don't even get me started on the clients. Some of the clients are the most disrespectful and arrogant people you will ever meet, yet we are still expected to cater to them hand and foot despite the way they talk to us. When I say that they treat the specialists like dirt I mean that in every form of the word. The clients start to think that they own us and it's because this company gives them that impression. There's a ridiculous sundown rule that demands everyone reply to all emails by the end of the work day and because of that many clients end up emailing specialists multiple times a day for no reason just as an excuse to take advantage of us (tons of the emails have nothing to do with the services we offer). No one in sales ever clarifies to the clients that they are supposed to have a decent humane respect towards us, and the specialists therefore never experience it. This is a problem because unlike other customer service jobs, this job requires us to sell our souls to these clients (I'm exaggerating only a little here). We will work late hours trying to keep them happy and replying to their millions of emails, and after all that they show up on the call to start cursing at us without even an ounce of gratitude for the fact that we devoted far more hours to them than they were paying for or for any of the problems we were successfully able to solve for them despite their low budgets. Deciding to not reply to the latest email at 5:10PM after already responding to the same client's other 5 emails earlier in the day is not an option because either the account manager or the leader of the SEO team will start teams'ing you to reply even though both of those parties could easily step in and actually do us a favor and reply themselves (Aka actually act like a team player). And the reason this behavior exists is because the company cares more about the clients than the specialists, and while that is understandable given that the clients are paying something, this company will 100% fail without the specialists, and it is the specialists who are getting the shortest ends of the sticks here. The failure is already apparant from the fact that so many clients quit when the specialists get swapped but stay when the account managers get swapped. This problem with disrespectful client behavior can easily be solved if management simply moves the clients that specialists are having difficulty with to specialists that the clients like (since these clients are very biased, racist, sexist, etc., and often change their whole attitude just by receiving a specialist who fits their bias), and subsequently cancel clients that are displaying poor behavior with three or more specialists, but that will never happen because the SEO team refuses to address the needs of any specialist who is not a favorite. If you have no experience and are looking for a job then feel free to use this place as a stepping stone because you will learn a lot but after that get tf out. You should especially make sure to leave if you end up being hired for the SEO team because the SEO team leaders will never ever allow you to explore your career or have a manageable workload. It's sad that the SEO team is consistently understaffed, but that shouldn't be an excuse for the leaders to treat the junior SEO specialists like prisoners and slaves.