COMMENTS
Couldn't agree more, Ellie.
I like to tell people that there are two kinds of SEO. The kind you pay somebody a few thousand dollars to do once, which may or may not help you generate more leads and business. As you point out, if it doesn't involve your input and activity, it'll probably NOT produce results.
And the kind that requires ongoing work in order to generate ongoing and compounding ROI from it.
You talked about the latter. SEO should be like any other "prospecting" activity that a sales and marketing team does.
I say "prospecting" and not "marketing" because if you get good at it, it's just like being good at prospecting. It hand delivers sales leads into your pipeline.
Ellie, interesting post. Small business owners know their businesses the best and can write and talk about them like no one else. SEO compliments this perfectly.
Taking a bit of time to learn the principles you outlined can help demystify the challenges of SEO and make it a more manageable part of any companies repertoire.
If you can't find a company to outsource completely to, you haven't found the right SEO company. An excellent SEO company will address all the points listed above. The business owner should be focused more on strategy and broader-scale projects than SEO. For the business owner, spending your time in SEO is a poor ROI on time.
Oooh. Oooh. Debate.
@Haz. I don't think Ellie is saying that an SEO firm shouldn't be involved with the process. I think she's suggesting that there are certain parts that an internal resource should be involved with.
And since SEO produces leads and sales for companies, I fail to see how it'd be a poor use of a small business owners or marketing professionals' time.
Thanks, guys, for all the comments.
I'd also add that there's a lot of experimentation that should go on in marketing and SEO in particular, where you try optimizing around particular keywords, see if they generate qualified leads for your sales team, and keep trying out new initiatives to find what provides the best business results.
I agree business owners should try to do their own SEO. I have learned a lot just by doing this myself. I have gotten better at this and as a result I have a lot of traffic to my website which keeps increasing. I make changes and update my sites frequently.
@Caputa: if you're a marketing professional, then yes, SEO is where you should be spending your time. However, if you are *the* business owner, you should be hiring somebody to do the SEO, so that you can spend your time managing strategy, HR, finance - the higher level, more strategic components. Many business owners end up working *in* their business, when they need to be working *on* their business.
I am debating the contention that "You can't fully outsource SEO". You may need to pay a premium price for it, but the fact is, you *can* fully outsource SEO.
Great post! Above and beyond what you have outlined there are other issues with outsourcing SEO.
- You may have to let a 3rd party into your system (servers and site) if they are performing the optimization for you.
- Your web personnel could feel insecure about their position and not cooperate
- A lot of the success of the 3rd party vendor is contingent on you helping them by approving, delivering or updating the content, keywords, server side changes, etc. Be prepared to work as hard as your SEO vendor.
- If you are project managing both the SEO consultant and your web team you have to put in a lot of effort to facilitate the seamless exchange of information.
But in the end it is worth it!
Oh yeah, one more point: Depending on your site, you may want to:
A) create a CMS for constantly updating/tweaking keywords, and
B) Have the whole process be database driven.
These are requirements that save a lot of time and effort in the long run but will require internal resources and efforts to make happen!
@haz Agreed that business owners should work on and not in their business, in a perfect world.
However, most solopreneurs and small business owner's primary responsibility is generating new business.
If the business owners can write well, they should blog. If they're blogging, they should take the 2 extra hours and learn how to use the right keyword research tools in order to do on-page SEO, in order to generate leads for the business.
Once a company gets past 25 employees or so, I agree that they should have another person take over the SEO work. But, I think it should be an internal resource with support from an SEO consultant when needed, not a completely outsourced $2k+/month SEO consultant. The primary role of the consultant should be to provide the proper content management system, blogging platform, keyword research tools and training to the content producer, and advise on strategy on a periodic basis after reviewing SEO ROI data.
SEO is a long process but it can pay huge dividends when it's done properly. There are so many so called SEO EXPERTS who use unethical methods of optimization that I decided to learn SEO myself.
Best Regards
It is true that we can't outsource 100% our website or business. Its only the owner that should have the fully access of certain site. Like on my part, I don't have any access on its site when it comes to on-page optimization and I have nothing to do with it since its my clients decision. This is good for us to avoid hacking and scam on this kind of industry.
I don't know much about SEO. I get many inputs from above comments. Thanks for all.
IMO an SEO company should consult the business owner to better understand the mission to be accomplished. This is really just marketing 101. Great post.
@peter: Agreed. I think at this point we are debating over the "Should", vs the "Can" or "Cannot". However, I do agree with you on your last point!
I respectfully disagree! The cost factor is a MAJOR factor that will always drive business owners to outsource. I am dealing with a prospect that has a team of 6 SEO professionals on his payroll. We are estimating he is paying 10 times more than he would if he worked with us. We have close relationships with our clients and feel that the generalization that SEO companies cannot have the relationships that an in-house person is ridiculous in my opinion. Both have pros and cons for either choice. What I would recommend is to outsource, and have ONE qualified person on staff to manage the on going campaign on top of other related responsibilities. This will keep costs down, while having the best of both worlds! The cost will only increase when you now need to hire an in-house SEO team to produce commercial or informative marketing videos for one of the newest breakthrough SEO strategies……….. VIDEO SEO!
SEO technology will always evolve!
http://www.anargroup.com/solutions-seo_video.htm
@Andy G - I've actually found that hiring an outside consultant is actually much more expensive than taking on SEO in-house. I think one of the most appealing factors of hiring an outside consultant is the saved time, and that's why many companies try to do this.
Ellie, I believe you. Although I think you may be basing your opinion on the TOTAL cost. The painful reality is that we typically have 8 hour work days. There is just so much one SEO can do in that time frame. Yeah it may look less expensive, but in this highly competitive market you should consider the time it takes to complete each SEO related task. What I am trying to point out is that Anar Group for example has a TEAM. Not one, two or 3 people. Try to figure what the cost would be if they were on your payroll. When I say seo “TASKS” I am referring to what I have listed below:
• Article Generation
• Article Submissions
• Social Bookmark Submissions
• Directory Submissions
• Blog Install and Integration
• Blog Submissions
• Local and Industry Search Evaluation & Submission
• Page Rank 2 Back Links .
• Page Rank 3 Back Links
• Page Rank 4 Back Links
• Press Release
• Initial Offsite SEO Report
• Quarterly SEO Reports
• Extensive Onsite Optimization
• Video Commercial Edit &Production
• Voice Over Edit & Production
• Scripting
• Video Site Submission
• Video Social Bookmark Submission
• Video Blog Submission
• Ping feed aggregators
• Audio Conversion
• Audio podcast & iTunes Submission
• Audio Submission
• Total Media Tracking
You may say… “yeah I can do that in-house” I will then ask at what duration and at what price. There should be one person for each responsibility! So just imagine the cost of hiring one person for articles, blogs, video, video production, directory submissions, social networking, reporting, etc……..
Give us a call if you’d like. 603 548 7834 – We will give you a FAIR quote!
http://www.anargroup.com/solutions-seo.htm