Dafydd Lewis | In house SEO

In an ever increasingly competitive marketing environment companies are taking extra steps to ensure that they are successful online.  One of these steps is to bring their online marketing efforts inside the company rather than using an SEO agency.

This comes with several advantages but also has problems of its own.

The advantages are obvious.  An in house SEO is able to fully understand the company and the market they are in.  They are able to establish working relationships with key departments and decision makers and can also see how the dynamics of the company function.  This can be key in securing funding for the online marketing efforts and for convincing the management of the direction and spend that is necssary for success.

Activities such as link building and PPC are almost always best done in house because they require a solid understanding of the market, blogsphere (for want of a beter word) and product/service that you are in.

With an internal SEO you have someone who is fully accountable for results and who can make informed descisions about what needs outsourcing and what doesn’t.

However, only working on one site or sites in a certain field can mean that the SEO doesn’t get the same kind of perspective that an agency SEO does.  Working on many and varied projects means that you are constantly having to reevaluate the way you approach a sites promotion.  This means constant study and experimenting with your techniques.  Obviously from this comes a wealth of knowledge and understanding and can mean that you are able to see a project with fresh eyes.

Personally I like to remain in house but to liase extensively with other SEO’s about projects that I am doing and that they are involved with.

If you are choosing to move your SEO in house don’t expect that you will no longer need or use external expertise.  What you will be able to do is leverage their expertise and gain the maximum value.

Running a website brings with it its own set of requirements and idiosyncrasies.  The one that often raises its ugly head is the need for very repetitive work to be done by a highly skilled and often expensive member of staff. Indeed there are times when I do certain tasks not a million miles away from basic data entry. But it is the subtleties in that data that make the job so much more demanding. For example each Meta description (assuming that you are optimizing that page for the serps) needs to be a highly targeted accurate description of the pages content and (sometimes) it requires something to get their juices going.

Meta tags, spreadsheets for sites that will sell your products, content writing, PPC campaigns, link building, competitor analysis all require an excellent grasp of the subject (both SEO and industry specific) but also have to be done over and over ad nauseam. They require attention to detail, good enough is never good enough because each time that information is read it may mean a sale or a subscriber is just around the corner (or not). It may mean that your items are not listed in quite the right category and therefore may as well not be on the site at all.

You can worry about your link building and your reputation or the design of your site but you also need to know who is looking after the detail. Too many companies that I have worked  with are unable to appreiciate the need for above average staff for these tasks. The damage that can be done may take weeks to correct once it is discovered.  This then creates two requirements, firstly the hiring of suitably able staff and secondly your web manager/seo needs to maintain their vigilance over the work that is done on site. If the details are not taken care of you may one day find the devil lurking.

Not sure why i did this search but a search for search engine on google gives this result:

Big G can’t be found till the 3rd page.  Obviously we can see why this happens but it does show a relevancy gap that Google is unable to address even when it comes to itself.  Afterall if I were to ask you for a search engine what would you reply with?

It’s unlikely to be Dogpile.