We are often asked if professional SEO (search engine optimization)
can be done effectively utilizing in-house talent. Despite
our obvious self-interests on the subject, our answer
is always a qualified “yes”– you can achieve professional
SEO results using existing talent. However, for every
company we have known that has met with great in-house
SEO success, we know of many more that have seen their
in-house efforts fail. We have also discovered the companies
that have succeeded share some common traits.
If your company is considering doing SEO in-house, there are
some critical questions that you should address before
you proceed.
- Do I have the proper resources at my disposal
to achieve professional SEO results?
Search engine optimization takes time, and your internal SEO
expert will need to have a great deal of it at his or
her disposal – especially at the project’s outset when
target audiences, keyphrases, and optimization schemes
are first being established. Even after the initial
optimization effort, the nature of SEO will require
this person to spend ample time keeping up with industry
trends, monitoring campaign progress, performing A/B
testing, and expanding the campaign as new product and
service areas are added.
Perhaps even more important than time, achieving professional
SEO results requires a unique set of aptitudes. The
person responsible for your internal SEO initiative
must possess the ability to learn quickly and to look
at your website from a macro-perspective, marrying together
the needs of sales, marketing, and IT. He or she can
not be an aggressive risk taker, as this is often a
surefire way to get your website penalized and potentially
removed from the major search engines. These gifted
people exist in many companies, but given the unique
attributes that these individuals possess, their time
is often already spent in other crucial areas of the
business.
Without enough time to invest in the project or the right type
of person to execute it, an internal SEO initiative
is likely doomed to fail.
- Do I know which departments of my company
should be involved, and will they work with an insider?
As mentioned above, professional SEO, by necessity, involves
marketing, sales, and IT. The SEO expert must work with
marketing to find out what types of offers and initiatives
are working offline to help translate them effectively
online. He or she must work with sales to identify the
types of leads that are most valuable so that you can
target the right people in the keyphrase selection process.
And, finally, your SEO expert will need to work with
IT to determine any technical limitations to the SEO
recommendations, learn of any past initiatives based
on a technical approach, and get the final optimization
schemes implemented on the website.
Sadly, in many businesses, these departments have a somewhat
adversarial relationship. However, it is the duty of
the SEO expert to act as a project manager and coordinate
the efforts of all three departments if you are going
to get the most out of your campaign. No professional
SEO project can be completed in a vacuum. For whatever
reason, it is often easier for an outsider to get adversarial
departments on the same page, in the same way that a
marriage counselor might convince a woman of her undying
love for her husband while the husband is still grimacing
from a well-placed knee in the parking lot.
- Will
someone be held accountable for the results?
This may seem like a small consideration, but it can have a
tremendous impact on the success of the campaign. If
you have added this responsibility to some poor soul’s
job description with the direction that he or she should
“do the best you can,” you’ll be lucky to make any headway
at all (especially if the person is not enthusiastic
about SEO). Whether SEO is done in-house or outsourced,
someone will have to take responsibility for showing
progress, explaining setbacks, and continually improving
results. Without this accountability, it is very common
to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed.
- Can I afford delayed results based on
a learning curve?
It’s a reality – professional SEO expertise has a steep learning
curve. While the information on how to perform the basics
of optimization are freely available on the web, much
of the information out there is also contradictory,
and some of it is actually dangerous. It takes time
for someone unfamiliar with the discipline to sort the
SEO wheat from the SEO chaff (on a side note, a "quoted"
search of Google reveals that this may actually mark
the first occasion in human history that the phrase
“SEO chaff” has been used – we’re betting it’s also
the last). Simply put, if the person you are putting
on the job has no experience, it will take longer to
get results. This may not be a consideration if you
aren’t counting on new business from SEO any time soon.
However, if you are losing business to your competition
due to their professional SEO initiatives, time might
be a larger factor.
- Will it cost me less to do it in house
than it would to choose a professional SEO firm?
Often, companies will attempt this specialized discipline in-house
in order to save money, and sometimes this works out
as intended. However, accurate calculations of the cost
of in-house labor that would be involved versus the
price of the firm you would otherwise hire should be
performed to make an accurate comparison. When making
this calculation, also factor in the opportunity cost
of the resource – the tasks that your in-house people
are not able to perform because they are involved in
SEO.
In addition, if worse comes to worst and your in-house SEO
expert is led astray by some of the more dangerous “how-to”
guides available, it can cost even more to repair the
damage than it would have to hire a professional SEO
firm to perform the optimization from the outset. And
an internal SEO campaign gone wrong can cost even more
than the stated fee – websites that violate the terms
of service of the major search engines (whether intentional
or not) can be severely penalized or even removed, costing
you a lot of lost revenue when potential customers can
not find your website for a period of time.
- Do I believe that the end result I’ll
get in-house will be equal to or greater than the
results I would have gotten from a professional SEO
firm?
Search engine optimization can create huge sales opportunities,
and slight increases in overall exposure can have not-so-slight
increases in your bottom-line revenue. If you believe
that your talented in-house resource will, given enough
time, achieve results equal to or greater than those
that could have been achieved by the professional SEO
firm you might have chosen, it may make sense to do it internally.
However, in addition to a better knowledge of industry trends,
one clear advantage that search engine optimization
firms have is the benefit of the experience and macro-perspective
that comes from managing many different websites over
time. Professional SEO firms can watch a wide range
of sites on a continual basis to see what trends are
working, what trends aren’t, and what formerly recommended
tactics are now actually hurting results.
This macro-perspective allows professional SEO firms to test
new tactics as they appear on a case-by-case basis and
apply those results across a wide range of clients to
determine what the benefit is. It is harder for an individual
with access to only one site to perform enough testing
and research to achieve optimum results all the time,
something that should also factor into the equation.
- Do I have at least a slight tolerance
for risk?
Neophytes to SEO can make mistakes that can lead to search
engine penalization or removal. This happens most commonly
when they have an IT background and treat SEO as a strictly
technical exercise. We are often called in to assist
companies who have had an internal initiative backfire,
leaving them in a worse position than the one they were
in before they started. The simple truth is that you
cannot perform effective SEO without marrying your efforts
to the visitor experience, but this is not something
that is intuitively understood when people approach
SEO for the first time.
However, professional SEO firms
are not perfect either. Some firms use those same optimization
methods that violate the search engines’ terms of service
and can get your site penalized. So, if you do decide
to outsource, educate yourself on SEO and do some research
on the firm. Know the basics of the business, find out
who the firm’s clients are and how long they’ve been
in business, and ask for professional references – just
like you would do with any major business purchase.
If you have considered all of the above questions, and your
answers to all seven are “yes,” your company may be
uniquely equipped to achieve professional SEO results
in-house. If you answered “no” to any of the first three
questions but “yes” to the rest, it does not necessarily
mean that you can’t perform SEO in-house – just that
you may not be in a position to do so at this time.
Taking the actions required to get you in the right
position to answer in the affirmative might be worth
your while. However, if you answered “no” to any of
the last four questions, you may want to consider outsourcing
the project to a professional SEO firm.
A professional SEO firm has the resources, the time, the expertise,
and, most importantly, the experience, to launch an
SEO initiative for your website that will have a positive
effect on your bottom line. Whichever option you choose,
it is important that you fully embrace the channel.
A half-hearted initiative, whether done internally or
outsourced, can be as ineffective as taking no action
at all.
About the Author>
Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue
Search Engine Marketing. He has contributed
content to many publications including Building Your
Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs,
ZDNet, SEO Today, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews,
ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue,
an Atlanta search engine marketing company, serves local
and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DuPont,
and Georgia-Pacific. To receive internet marketing articles
and search engine news in your email box each month,
register for Medium Blue’s newsletter, Out of the Blue.
