Any job can be stressful depending on the type of performance required by your company. The same goes for SEO-related jobs. However, it's not as stressful as IT jobs or other programming-related jobs. My intention is not to tell you which are the right job boards to see; it is to tell you the things that an agency or digital marketing company is likely looking for in an entry-level SEO hire.
When you start to feel like you can't go a day without logging in to Twitter or reading SEO posts, that's when exhaustion can set in. However, this isn't always possible, and despite an SEO's best efforts to present business arguments for more resources, you may not yet get what you need. Basically, when it comes to convincing non-SEOs of the importance of considering SEO when making decisions, the test is in the pudding. Recently, a colleague asked me to introduce students to “How to Start a Career in SEO” in her college-level advertising course.
In the name, the job of an SEO is to optimize websites for a highly sophisticated search engine algorithm that even Google's own engineers don't fully understand. It's not that they can't say anything about search engine algorithms or page optimization, they couldn't say that SEO means search engine optimization. If you like to figure out how things work and can recognize that when you talk about your SEO, your ninja skills should take a back seat to the business needs of the project, then get involved and stay humble. When you consider that organizations immature in SEO account for 86% of all business companies, it's understandable that most SEOs feel like they're completely drowning in work, a common cause of exhaustion.
I also encourage you to reach out to other SEOs you may know to share what they're likely going through (or have been through) some of the same things. An incredible example of how to be inclusive and create a safe space for SEOs is Areej AbuAli and his SEO community Women in Tech. In a perfect world, every SEO could get the resources and time they need, because having more time to devote to their work will almost always produce a better result. These SEOs are integrated into or work closely with content and product teams to ensure that search engine best practices are taken into account before making decisions.
However, without this kind of maturity and organizational configuration, SEO's job is to constantly put out fires instead of proactively seeking growth, a job that can quickly become exhausting.
