The 5HITS

The ongoing saga of firstly whether to build an in-house SEO team or outsource and then how to best structure this team to work across marketing, legal, sales and IT.

As always, onesize does not fit all and there are factors such as organisation size, geographic location, culture, maturity of the web presence and also the role the web presence plays in the marketing mix. Organisations whose website or sites are there key channel to market obviously would rate this a higher priority than say an offline retailer who does not sell online but merely provides information.

Approach it logically

Having said that, consider the following.

• If you are doing search engine optimisation (SEO), you are more than likely doing or considering doing paid search or search engine marketing (SEM).
• If you are doing either of these you are hopefully also running some form of Analytics
• SEO and SEM although different skill sets, SEO is specialised while SEM is more process driven, but still converge when it comes to landing pages, on-page content and quality scores and conversion
• Finally, these numbers all need to agree, the traffic numbers from SEO need to be reconciled with the numbers form SEM and SEM spend to other marketing campaigns.
• Marketing folk from all over the business need to give input on keywords, campaigns and initiatives. Make sense. Read on…

SEO Teams

Finding experienced SEO staff in the current market is not easy. Keeping them can be even more of a challenge. Understanding what they do and the calls they are making on your website can present risk to the organisation. For example: You may have a large website with 100k + pages which ranks well for a number of key terms and drives around 40% + of your web traffic through search engines. Your SEO says you should rel=nofollow a large number of links off the homepage and place some of the navigation into a Javascript to focus Pagerank. You have to make the final call on whether to do this, or not….

Some considerations for the SEO Team

Structure, Process, Education

• Consider centralising this team, this will help build a core centre of knowledge and skill and allow you in most cases to have dedicated resources
• Set an overall SEO strategyincluding traffic objectives and time lines. Communicate this to the organisation and ensure you get senior management buy in
• Find a SEO training partner who can train your staff consistently and allow them to apply a consistent SEO methodology. Avoid the shotgun, or knee-jerk approach to SEO
• Set clear accountability around traffic primarily but also certain core rankings and white hat SEO or ethical SEO practices
• Link members of the team to on-the-ground, product based or geographic based marketing teams, each with a key point of content to understand offline campaigns, new initiatives, product releases etc. Ensure these points of responsibility are clear.
• Link members of the team to IT if separate and ensure the detailed technical side of the site is properly managed from an SEO perspective. Ensure these points of responsibility are clear from both sides
• Link members of the team to Copy writing, if different from marketing to ensure relevant keywords are used and that the people responsible for copy writing understand the importance of keywords. Matrix management is more of an art than a science but very difficult to avoid.
• Set up sign-off processesto avoid junior resources making significant calls on the site which may affect rankings, to ensure recommendations that may impact on rankings are properly considered
• Find a SEO partnerwhich has the detailed technical expertise to not only support your team with the “big” SEO calls but also to handle any overflow work and to keep you updated regularly from a technical perspective. Make sure the partner has sufficient experience and a good track record in SEO
• Do a simple Business case on a quarterly basis estimating the value of traffic obtained from SEO efforts during the last quarter and what that traffic would have cost to buy if the keywords were bought. Tell anyone and everyone who cares within the organisation.

My next post will cover structuring SEM in the same team. Please share your experiences on building an in-house SEO team. Spammers need not apply. All comments are moderated.