Highly skilled mundane and repetitive work
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.
[...] comes down again to highly skilled yet repetitive work and who you get to do it. Ideally you need an expert in your area who can really add value to the [...]