Professional SEO: Hand Off to Bob or Outsource the Job?
by Scott Buresh
Published on this site: July 1st, 2005 - See
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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.
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 optimization
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, at
www.mediumblue.com
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