The 5HITS

As I work in an SEO agency we are constantly recruiting SEO staff. The challenges we have include:

• Recruiters do NOT understand our business, no matter how much they say they do
• People overstate their own capabilities

I always joke and say when I see a resume, the person looks so good I feel I should report to them. When you interview, you get about half of what the resume said, thanks to the resume writers and online resume tools. Then what you end up hiring is about half of what was represented in the interview. So 25% of the initial resume. The other side of this I accept is that with all the resumes this way, we take the best looking ones, which may be a somewhat flawed approach, but it is hard selecting from multiple applications.

Don’t get me wrong we have great staff, who are loyal and who field calls from recruiters at least once per week. Keeping up with rising salaries is also a challenge. Nobody calls me though, cannot understand why. Put it this way, we hire people with little or some experience, train them heavily, pay them increasing market related rates, and give them a performance based bonus, and all this time adding serious value to them, through skills, experience and education. Should they not be paying us for the opportunity? I ask myself everyday? Just kidding.

On average what we consider to be a senior SEO person for hiring is not what gets presented as a senior SEO person. In fact most of the so called 1-2 years experience people we hire are good as analysts and where he have hired managers this has ended in tears.

The impact on our industry is as follows:

• Agencies hiring in, to fill a competency, often do not know the ins and outs of SEO and are reliant on this person to deliver
• Companies hiring SEO’s are buying their past experience which is often small websites and expecting them to pull top rankings out of the hat for large dynamic websites
• There are few very experienced SEO people out there who have worked on and succeeded with large dynamic websites. I can probably name around 15, but hey maybe my SEO circle is small.

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Internet, Online marketing Digital Strategy, In-house SEO, Marketing, Marketing managers, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, SEO Training

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…

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Search Marketing In-house SEO