Does an In-House SEO Have a Fool for a Client?
By Mike Moran. Filed in Organic Search |Tags: Business, Internet marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search engine optimization, Web Design and Development, Web search engine, Website
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As a long-time in-house SEO, you’d probably expect that I did not consider myself a fool at the time I was doing that. But I have recently gotten that question from a lawyer who wonders if he should do his own SEO, which reminds me of the old joke that a lawyers who represents himself has a fool for a client. But is it a bad idea to do your SEO in-house? I think it depends on how you go about it. If you think you’ll pick up everything you don’t know without any help, you’re probably looking at a rough ride
When I ran the search marketing at IBM, I think I was a bit unusual in a few ways. First, I had a deep knowledge of search technology going back 15 years at the time, so a lot of the concepts were easy to me. Also, I had an education in marketing, including direct marketing, so I understood the business side, too. In addition, I had worked at IBM for over 20 years at that time, so I intimately understood the products and services as well as the potential clients, being an IT person myself. Looking back on it, I was an ideal candidate for the job.
But I didn’t do it all by myself. I not only attended conferences and read up on everything I could find, I also hired a search consultancy to tutor me in everything that I did not know. That is how I met Bil Hunt and how we ended up writing a book together.
So, you might also be an ideal candidate for your own in-house SEO, but it would probably help you to take advantage of whatever help you can afford. And it’s worth asking if SEO is even your biggest problem at the moment.
So when that lawyer told me he was a newbie at Web sites who had a lousy experience with an SEO consultant, and then asked if it was a “pipe dream” for him to do his own SEO, this is part of what I told him:
I don’t think that doing your own SEO is a pipe dream if you have enough technical skills to maintain your Web site. If you don’t, then your goal needs to be to get someone who does. But you need to ask yourself whether you are ready for SEO. I’d focus first on the Web site itself and later on the SEO. It’s not the advice that I would give to everyone, but there are so many skills that you are trying to pick up at once that I think you need to set priorities. I think that the two places to start are analytics and site building. Pick a site builder and create your site, enabling it with the analytics to see what people are actually doing. Start to tweak your site to improve the number of people converting and track that it is really happening. At that point, it makes sense to focus on SEO, so that you attract more people to come to your site. I know that you are in a hurry, but that is the order I would prescribe. If you are in a big hurry, you are probably better off trying again to hire someone to do things for you while you bone up on your new skills. It all depends on how expensive it is to get the work done vs. the opportunity cost of taking six months or more to have everything done by doing it yourself.
Before becoming your own SEO client, you need to ask yourself whether you are the ideal candidate to do it yourself, and if you are, how you’ll get the help you need (because no one knows it all). If you are trying to pick up many skills at once, you need to prioritize which ones are most important, but also ask yourself whether this is really worth the time you’ll put into it, instead of doing a better job of getting an expert to do it.
Friday, October 29th 2010 at 3:14 pm |
Among other things, the most important question that one should ask himself is the ROI. Recently a doctor approached me with similar requirements and i told him that if he wanted to do all by himself, and by all i mostly mean seo here, then you should first know what the value of your time is. You invest time into seo and that time won’t come from your leasure, you will be wasting/investing valuable work hours. Be practical when you make this decision because if you are someone important with professional skills, you should rather invest your time and energy into something that you are already good at.
What i really suggested him was that he worked on the content aspect of his site, that way he will research his content which will get him better on and off site content and it will be helpful as this knowledge will help him with his patients and what ever he does in the medical field.
Your case in this article is a bit different because you were already into marketing etc. so you doing this was pretty much on the field, but for a lawyer, to spend his time on something like seo which is not his field, is a more like trying to learn something that is quite alien. he should much rather try and focus in which he is good at, fighting cases in the court for example.
Saturday, October 30th 2010 at 12:08 am |
Said better than I did, there Directory. (Hope I can call you by your first name.) That is what it is about–is this worth your time? He’d probably be a fairly unsuccessful lawyer if it was.
Saturday, October 30th 2010 at 4:32 pm |
Great information. I agree with you if a person feels that he can do it and he has confidence in himself he should definitely go with that option; but if he is not sure whether he will be able to do what ever he is planning then hiring some one to do it for him will be a better option.
Monday, November 1st 2010 at 2:10 pm |
I think the biggest issue with doing your own SEO is that you are likely to have a very limited portfolio of sites on which to practice.
No site has exactly the same SEO requirements and there is no single best strategy for SEO that can be deployed cookie-cutter style everywhere. For sure this can be done, but ROI witnessed would be much less than a tailored strategy to suit the market and setup of that site.
An in-house SEO, unless they have many personal side projects, or their company has a number of microsites, will have limited exposure and it will find it difficult to best tailor SEO practices to the site under their control.
Tuesday, November 2nd 2010 at 7:56 pm |
I don’t think one needs a huge portfolio of sites to learn good SEO skills at all. In fact, many people with large portfolios tend to be rather mediocre SEOs. They substitute volume for quality.
Whether a business owner should do it for himself really depends on whether he can afford to find someone reliable to do it for him within his own budget.
Time may be money, but we don’t yet have a sompul to convert our time in to money. The practical decision often has to incorporate many compromises into its process.
Tuesday, November 9th 2010 at 5:38 am |
I learned a lot of SEO on blog post of reliable person and for me it helps. In-house SEO for me is okay.
Friday, April 8th 2011 at 5:42 am |
I agree with you if a person feels that he can do it and he has confidence in himself he should definitely go with that option.so you doing this was pretty much on the field, but for a lawyer, to spend his time on something like seo which is not his field.Nice presentation!