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

Most advertising works as follows in larger organisations, right?

• Identify requirements re target market, product etc.
• Develop campaign to meet requirements
• Pitch to client
• Plan media
• Buy media
• Run campaign through proposed media
• Measure success
• Celebrate
• Ad agency wins award

Traditionally, Media = television, radio, magazines, newspapers and more recently banner advertising, paid search maybe given budgets in certain sectors SEO (Search engine optimisation) or social media such as Facebook or Youtube.

Everything is generally measurable for the campaign, everything is short term, switch on and switched off and budget driven. Run the campaign, get the exposure, drive sales. Unfortunately its not always that simple. Social media requires ongoing genuine conversations to be of value, natural search rankings require changes to the website which may need to be planned and take time, taking longer to get results than the campaign itself. So we have some ongoing or longer term solutions interacting with shorter term, campaign driven ideas.

So, why not build your own media instead of buying it? As a large organisations with advertising and marketing budgets why invest all of this into shorter term campaigns? You no doubt have a website with vast information on your products, their benefits and features? Why not extend this and build your own media, including information, tools, communities? In the past many news organisations have morphed into this area, they have a newspaper, add a baby site, dating site, car site etc etc. Guess what, more media for you to buy.

Theoretical case study in point

Theoretical case study and I labour the point, theoretical. Any relationship to actual events, individuals or organisations are purely coincidental. I promise. But consider this. I am say a CEO of a large food company with numerous brands. One of my brands makes breakfast cereals and snack bars for the health conscious professional females aged 25-35 years old, single or married with no children. I know she generally does the household shopping, goes to gym and cares how she looks, feels and takes care of herself.

My website is all about product, how great they are, low GI, good to eat after exercise, handy for snacking and so on. My site ranks well for product names and the brand which delivers some but not a lot of monthly traffic, my last campaign increased traffic to the site but with a lesser increase in sales.

My issue is that I am in a highly competitive market, competitors are doing deals with supermarkets for better shelf space. Supermarkets are 80% of my channel. When customers come in, they are often overwhelmed, time poor and will make a decision based on brand recollection and association or convenience and perception. Great!

Firstly I decide to get rid of focus groups, they are small, not representative of anything in many cases and the results are often influenced by the questions asked and the facilitator. People are naturally polite, especially when being paid and also generally relate to the what is known rather than what could be.

I get detailed keyword research done, understanding what the masses want and are looking for. I realise there are few searches in search engines for my products and some are on brand but that bounce rate is high, unles I have promotions, free give-aways or competitions. Fickle bunch…

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Business online, Internet, Online marketing, Search Marketing Advertising, Digital Strategy, Marketing, Media, Online