Professional SEO: Outsourcing

It’s usually a question if SEO or search engine optimization can be carried out from in-house work. And ‘yes!’ you can achieve professional SEO results using existing talent. However for some that have succeeded in it, there are those that failed in their in-house efforts. We’ve also discovered the companies that have succeeded share some common traits.

For in-house SEO, there are some factors to consider before proceeding.

-        Consider Proper Resources to achieve professional SEO results. – SEO takes time, and your internal SEO expert will need to have a great deal of it at his or her disposal, especially when everything is first being established. After the initial optimizatiob, SEO still requires the user to spend ample time in keeping up with the trends and monitoring progress and everything in relation to it. 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. Risks are dangerous here since it can get your site penalized. 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. But remember that time is still a very crucial thing.

-        Know the departments of your computer that are involved and if they’ll work with an insider. – SEO involves marketing, sales, and IT. The SEO expert needs to work with marketing in finding out types of offers and initiative and working offline to help translate them in an effectively online. Working with sales is a must to identify the types of leads that are most valuable so that you can target the right people in the key phrase selection. Also, the 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 on the site. Be advised of adversarial relationship as well. It is the duty of the SEO expert to act as a project manager and coordinate the efforts of all three departments. No professional SEO project can be completed in a vacuum.

-        Know if someone is accountable for results – This seems like a small consideration but it can have a great impact on the probability of success. 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 not, someone still has to take responsibility for showing the progress, in explaining setbacks and continually improving the results. Without this accountability, it is very common to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed.

-        How do I afford delayed results based on a learning curve? - Professional SEO expertise has a abrupt learning curve. While the information in performing basics is freely available on the web, much of the information can also be contradictory. 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). Basically, if the person you’re putting on the job has no experience, it’ll take longer to get results. This may not be a consideration if you aren’t counting on new business from SEO any time soon. Time might be a larger factor though if you have many competitors.

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