In a Twitter conversation between Aidan Beanland, the head of Yahoo's SEO team and Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, someone asks Aidan why they need an SEO when they themselves are a search engine.
He responds that Yahoo Search is just one area of Yahoo. He should have said, Yahoo no longer runs their own algorithm, but either way, even when they did, they had SEOs. Yahoo is a huge content site, tons of articles, content, media, etc - that needs proper SEO.
This is how Aidan responded to the question:
@HeshDon Yahoo creates millions of pages of media content. Search is just one of the many services offered.
— Aidan Beanland (@gridkid) May 20, 2015Then Gary Illyes responds, in a joking manner, that maybe Google should hire SEOs.
@gridkid @HeshDon maybe we should also hire an SEO -_-
— Gary Illyes (@methode) May 20, 2015Truth is, they might want to. There are plenty of examples of poorly designed and 'SEO'ed' pages on Google's properties. The Webmaster Trends Analyst team truthfully should be able to handle it, but there job is helping webmasters, not helping Google with SEO.
In any event, the topic has come up before where SEOs analyze Google's SEO efforts and typically, there are plenty of places where SEOs can keep busy providing on page SEO services for Google.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for SEO
