SEO : in-house or outsource? | Search Engine Optimisation

Developing an SEO strategy that not only works but is also affordable is becoming increasingly difficult. The more SEO your competitors invest in, the more competitive, and expensive, the market becomes. An obvious way to maximise the return on your investment into on-line marketing would be to bring it in-house. But is that really feasible?

In this article I will look at the benefits and disadvantages of outsourcing your SEO and then look into the alternative of bringing it in-house.

Outsourcing your SEO

Pros

Having an external team of professional on-line marketing experts handle your SEO works for a lot of businesses. In order for this to work well for you, it is still important that you understand the main concepts behind SEO and request regular reports and summaries of the work being carried out. Ensure that all the work you are paying for is being carried out.

Employing the services of an experienced SEO team can make a big different in a competitive market.

Cons

The issue with outsourcing your SEO is cost. On-line marketing can be expensive due the the sheer amount of time required to achieve a significant position in the market. The competitiveness of your market sector will determine the time investment required to achieve success.

How can I bring SEO in-house?

Let us consider each different area of SEO.

Content Creation

Creating content helps keep your website fresh. In order to update your content in-house you need a Content Management System (CMS). For ease of use, you need a front-end editing system that employs the basic concept of: login, navigate to the page you wish to edit, click on the edit icon, save your changes, publish, done.

Keeping your content fresh by constantly updating your website is time consuming and can be a frustrating task for one person alone. To help solve this problem, you could involve all of your staff in the content creation process by granting them editorial rights to the website. Editorial rights should allow your staff to create new versions of the content but not actually publish anything until you, the administrator (or webmaster), have verified and approved their changes.

A capable CMS could,  for example, encourage your staff to share their authoritative views and experiences of your industry via a news section. There may be quiet times of the year where you struggle to keep your staff busy, so why not get them thinking about the industry in which they work!

Content and Keyword Optimisation

Optimising your website content towards specific keywords requires a small amount of training. Understanding how a search engine indexes your pages is critical. Every web page consists of a title, some meta data (description and keywords), text (headers, paragraphs, lists, tabular data), images, and links to external pages/documents.

All the elements that make up a page are considered by the search engines in determining keywords relevant to that page. Don't expect a search engine to index your page under a keyword(s) unless that keyword(s) appears in the title, meta description, and throughout the content of a page.

The rules governing each search engine are different. Google, for example, will not consider the keywords found in the meta data of your page and Google will only use the meta description in the search results. Yahoo on the other hand WILL consider your meta description when indexing your website.

To make things interesting, search engines are constantly changing (improving?) the way they index pages and may also punish tricks such as duplicate content (multiple pages with the same content), cloaking (feeding different content to the search engines than to the end user) and keyword spamming.

Link Building

The concept of link building is very simple. Create links to your pages from other websites around the internet. The text of links is important as well as the content of the page that contains the link. Links from relevant sources with similar content (and hence keywords) are worth a lot more than links from non-related sources.

Consultations

Maintaining a good relationship with an experience on-line marketing consultant to guide and provide training along the way is key to achieving your long term goals.

Conclusion

Dedicating a few hours a week to on-line marketing and involving all your staff in the content creation process will save you money. By publishing forward thinking articles and comprehensive guides you will gain a far more authoritative position within your market sector.