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The Down the Mountain framework comes to life

Written by: Noah Learner Tags: community, jobs-career

Published: Mar 17, 2025

My personal framework for getting ahead in one's career, that I call the Down the Mountain framework, is something I've been working on for the past 3 years.

It's based on my own career and those of the folks I really look up to in our field.

I have shared it publicly a few times, and will do so again on March 27 as part of the SEO for Paws Charity event. You'll definitely want to register for that event here, and if you can, I urge (and I mean urge) you to donate to the charity here.

The framework is based on four pillars:

1. Going wide
2. Going deep
3. Going big
4. Giving back

The throughlines of the framework are threefold:

• Developing the hard skills to excel at the craft. This is the baseline expectation of you as you make your way. If you don't seek to excel, you'll eventually be automated out of a job. Going wide and going deep are all about developing these skills in the earlier phase of your career
• Developing the soft skills that will be necessary to motivate others to act. The Going big and giving back portions are all about developing these skills which will be the primary thing that determines your success in the later phases of your career.
• Increasing the surface area of those who know about your hard and soft skillsets. The more people who know about them, the more opportunities you'll get.

Going wide

Going wide is how one should spend the early part of one's career.

It's all about gaining experience in as many different parts of our industry as you can.

It's about learning as much as you can about technical SEO, local SEO, e-commerce SEO, content, and how AI and LLM's work.

It's about learning and developing real competency with foundational concepts like critical thinking, data analysis, and clear compelling writing.

It's about learning how to leverage the different tools that we use in our everyday work life like Screaming Frog, ahrefs, Google Sheets, project management tools, and many others too.

It's about learning how webpages are constructed (HTML, CSS and Javascript) and learning a bit about the plumbing of the web.

In essence, your developing context awareness for what you encounter on the job day-to-day.

It's really a phase of one's career where you're developing the hard skills that you'll leverage throughout your career.

Going deep

In the process of going wide, you'll be exposed to a ton of different aspects to our industry. In that process, you'll find yourself naturally gravitating towards a few if not, one particular topic or sub specialty.

This is 100% normal and expected. You'll know that this is happening when you start to focus on blogs, articles and authors writing about a specific topic area.

This is your inner self guiding you towards where you should focus.

This is the thing that you should invest time and energy into learning.

The reason why is that down the road this is likely to become your superpower.

The earlier you start reinforcing that superpower the faster and stronger it will become down the road.

Go deep.

Read as much as you can on the topic. Get as many projects that focus on the topic. And start to follow the people who are the best in the world at that particular topic.

This phase is about developing the hard skills necessary to gain real expertise in your topic area of choice.

Going big

In the process of going deep, you'll start to build a little bit of a name for yourself inside your organization, in your city, regionally or even internationally around that particular topic.

This is exactly what you want.

And it's going to happen through the process of going big.

And here's what that means:

Going big is all about figuring out how to increase the surface area of people who know about what you're capable of and also know like and trust you to execute on that thing at an extremely high level.

How you increase that surface area is entirely up to you.

Here are some ways that I found to be extremely powerful. Please keep in mind, however that every single one of us is built differently and you're gonna have to find what works for you.

Some of these ideas work extremely well for those of us who are extroverted. They might also work extremely poorly for those of us who are introverted.

Leverage what works for you.

Writing

If you like to write, jump in with both feet into the world of creating helpful useful articles around your topic area of choice. Each article will be an opportunity for you to go deep into the topic area that you love. You'll learn more and more as you share information with our industry. In so doing you'll build up an audience of folks who know like and trust you.

Articles can even become books. Books become powerful assets that you can use to drive your career. Eli Schwartz has done a masterful job of this.

This is perfect for those of us who would describe ourselves as being introverted.

YouTube channel + podcasting

Having your own YouTube channel is an extremely powerful way to get known in the industry. It's kind of magical because it's a way for you to meet the folks who are working at the highest levels on the topic area that you care about.

This means that you can build relationships with the folks who are already doing the thing that you wanna do with your career.

And by shining the light on them and their dreams and goals, you'll be able to build your network of people who care about you, your career, and your future.

This is incredibly important.

Learning how to host will also teach you critically important communication skills that you'll be able to leverage in your day job.

You'll learn how to become a better listener, and also how to communicate more while saying less.

And for giggles, this might also lead to a knowledge panel.

YouTube channel visibility can often lead into speaking opportunities as well.

Speaking

Speaking in public is one of the scarier things that any of us can do. It's also one of the most powerful accelerants on one's career.

Start small.

Find a local meet up that has five people in the room.

Before you give your talk, learn about box breathing so that your first few speaking engagements set the tone for future engagements.

Why is this important?

The concept of speaking in public fills most of us with high levels of anxiety when we enter a sympathetic response which feels a lot like the fight or flight response.

Box breathing allows us to turn a scary response into something calming, relaxed and enjoyable known as the parasympathetic nervous system.

According to the Healthline.com:

The [Box Breathing's] slow breath holding allows carbon dioxide (CO2) to temporarily build in your blood, decreasing your heart rate and stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system, according to the American Heart AssociationTrusted Source. This produces a calm and relaxed feeling in your mind and body.

Box Breathing is THE cheat code.

Once you master this, the rest will fall into place.

The benefits of speaking are that you'll be exposed to a lot more people who will know, like, and trust you to do the work you want to focus on.

This also means your value will grow inside your organization and also outside it too.

Raises become easier to get because your driving tangible results (leads), and also giving your organization a halo effect.

And it's likely you'll be recruited more often too.

Community

Becoming active in community is the most powerful way I know to radically increase the surface area of people who know, like and trust you.

Reach out to folks and find ways to help others.

Your relationships are a lot like a garden in that if you keep watering it, it will produce massive amounts of nourishing food.

The more you put into others, the more opportunities will come your way.

If you don't see the community you want to join, build your own.

This was what I did when I founded The SEO Community.

Giving Back

Giving back comes in many shapes.

It could be coaching.

It could be mentoring.

It could be creating your own community. This has become my way to give back. It didn't start that way, but I've come to find that it's my vehicle to live out my mission, which is to positively impact the lives and careers of as many people and their careers as possible.

Give early and give often and in so doing you'll discover what giving will be the most enjoyable for you. And put as much energy as you can and you'll find that your career will be enjoyable because it will be filled with meaning

Summing Up

This captures the essence of the Down the Mountain framework. One thing can easily lead to another. It's organic and semi structured. It's a lot like making your way down a ski mountain. You just need to get Down the Mountain. One trail will lead to another. One phase will lead to another. You might fall. Get back up. Keep skiing.

In my next article I'll share the stories of a few folks who are actively putting the framework to great use to both make their way up and maybe even out of SEO into Data Science, Growth or whatever's next.