| 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. |
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