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.

Sounds like a silly question doesn’t? No actually it doesn’t.

It’s an easy mistake to make, you’re chatting away with your webdesigner/business partner/internet management company and you say “let’s get that domain name”, “sure”, they say, “its only a few pounds/dollars I’ll do it”.

And then you forget about it, the site goes up or you shelve the idea to be addressed in the future.  Time goes by and you make a success of your internet idea or the domains you bought start to become more valuable on their own.

So the time comes that you want to make changes within the company or relations between you and your partner/designer become tense or your internet management company goes bust.  Then you realise, YOU DON’T HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR DOMAIN NAMES.  Whoever bought the domains has registered themselves as the owner (and yes, I have seen IT management companies do this as well).

As anyone who has been to court knows it is an awful, costly process and one that is best avoided and if the company you were using goes bust and they all magically bugger off, who are you going to take to court to regain control?.  Also there is no need for it.

If you can, always make sure you are the one who is down as the registrar (tell them that you’ll handle all the annoying domain stuff and register it in your name) .  If that is not an option you should have an agreement drafted by a professional, a commercial or corporate law specialist.

Don’t let it sneak up on you.

As more businesses go online and those that are online increase their efforts the problem of web management becomes evermore relevant.

The internet is steeped in myth and misinformation. This is partly because anyone can get involved and set themselves up as an “expert” and partly because of the fast moving, everchanging and highly complicated nature of the technologies involved.

The business of doing business on line is loaded with unfamiliar and potentially very expensive terms like SEO, web 2.0, ASP, JSP, PHP, Ruby, AJAX, CPM, CPC, PPC, XXS, SQL injection, Organic, usability accessibility, Linux, IIS, Blackhat, Whitehat etc etc. More familiar terms like affiliates, ROI, overheads, advertising, branding, hacking, security etc are also mentioned but how do they apply to the online environment?

What is going on? Who is doing what? What technologies are involved? Are we as competitive as we should be? What are the latest developments? How do we measure things? What can we measure? How do we know who to hire? What constitutes relevent experience?

These questions go on and on and in most companies no one is able to answer all of them. Even if there is a substantial online effort the people involved are often contained in disperate groups with poor communication and collaboration systems in place.

As the internet matures and we move further from the wild west internet of a few years ago we find that there are best practices and effective methodologies emerging. Yes the internet moves at an alarming rate so you need to kept up to date by people who know where to look. Yes there are a bewildering number of technologies available but there will be a best fit for your efforts once all your needs are taken into account. Yes there are angencies that will provide a very poor service for a great deal of money but likewise there are true professionals who provide excellent ROI.

As the web grows and becomes a more professional environment the role of the web manager is one that becomes ever more necessary.