TL;DR Summary:
Build Before Applying: Breaking into SEO now means creating real evidence of your skills before waiting for an employer to give you a chance.Launch Something Real: Build a small app, product, or service with an audience, using content to support a useful project rather than relying on publishing alone.Document Every Lesson: Share experiments, mistakes, and measurable results through a blog, portfolio, or newsletter to prove how you think and improve.Turn Proof Into Work: Join communities, contribute useful insights, and use small paid projects to transform relationships and documented results into career opportunities.How do you get into SEO when AI is doing the entry-level work? That question is driving a real shift in the industry right now, according to Andrew Holland, Director of SEO at JBH, who published a career framework on October 7, 2026 arguing that breaking into SEO no longer starts with a job application. He says it starts with building your own evidence before anyone hires you.
Why Breaking Into SEO Now Means Building Before Applying
Holland spent 17 years as a police officer before leaving at age 36 with no formal SEO training. He could not get hired at an agency. Instead he wrote blogs after shifts, did free marketing work, and turned that into paid work and eventually his own agency. He argues the same approach works today even though the market has changed. You do not need an employer’s permission to start learning and producing work that proves your ability.
Breaking Into SEO Starts With a Real Project, Not Just Content
Holland recommends building something small with an actual audience: an app, a product, or a service in a sector you understand. He says this forces you to answer real questions. Who is the customer? What do they need? Why would they pick you? He warns against making content publishing your entire plan. Instead, build something people can use or buy, and let the content support it. You also need to test your work against AI systems, checking how they describe your business and whether your site stays accessible to search engines. This is where a platform like Labrika’s site audit tool becomes useful, since it can check your project against the technical standards search engines actually use, giving you concrete proof points rather than assumptions about how accessible your site really is.
Publishing Your Mistakes Builds Authority Faster Than Advice Lists
Holland still writes and speaks at conferences, but he also builds apps and runs his own projects as proof of ongoing learning. He suggests starting a blog, newsletter, or portfolio and documenting what you tried, what failed, and why. He says an honest account of a failed experiment tells more about your ability than another generic list of SEO tips. This record becomes evidence you can show in applications, communities, and client conversations.
Community Work Is a Practical Step in Breaking Into SEO
Holland credits the SEO That Works course, now free through Semrush, and its community as central to his early progress. He recommends joining Slack groups, forums, or local meetups, and contributing specific answers and useful findings rather than just posting. He also points to a concrete example: he advised Josh Peacock, founder of the recruitment business formerly called SEO for Hire, to launch a podcast called Agency Growth Club. Peacock has publicly credited that advice for helping grow his business. Holland says creating content that gives you a reason to interview people you want to work with is a direct route into relationships that lead to work.
Turning Free Work Into Paid Opportunities
Before leaving the police, Holland did free marketing work for others to build evidence that someone had trusted him with responsibility. He suggests offering a small, clearly scoped project such as fixing a technical issue or improving a page, then documenting the baseline and the result. He is clear that this should lead toward paid work and not turn into months of free delivery. He also names Alex Hormozi’s work on lead generation as a resource for learning to sell your skills once you have evidence to show.
The single thing to take from Holland’s framework is this: stop waiting for a vacancy and start building a project, a record of what you learned, and relationships through communities and small paid work. If you’re building a project to prove your SEO skills, running it through a tool like Labrika’s AI-led site audit can surface the kind of technical errors that make for honest, documented learning instead of guesswork. Watch for how agencies and recruiters respond to candidates who show real experiments rather than credentials alone. That shift, more than any algorithm change, is what will decide who gets hired next.
