Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

I own an SEO company and so my view is usually you should hire an outside expert unless you can find someone who really knows what they are doing and has the inhouse resources to do the job effectively. Resources including funds to do what can't be done inhouse. You will need writing, link research, link building, link buying, researchers and so forth. So hiring one person who can do all these things is a tough position to fill. Hiring an agency to do the work allows all these positions to be part of the company you hire and even better they are experts in the field, especially copywriters.

I can tell you it is also hard to find a good SEO specialist as we just found out when hiring someone for our company last month. We ended up hiring someone we are training. No one really knew all the ends and outs as well as we did.

Finding someone to do your SEO inhouse will probably be a long search and may not turn up a good candidate if only because SEO experts usually like to work with a variety of clients rather than one company, at least I do.

And it seems many SEO experts have an inflated self worth, including me. ;-) It can be cheaper in the long run to hire outside.

The same issue is true with both. However, we can implement PPC campaigns and train clients to properly manage them.

As for which to do?

If you forgo SEO for PPC because the cash-flow is enticing then you could end up becoming a slave to increasingly higher click costs which can erode profits and create a barrier to implementing an SEO campaign. SEO typically has a better ROI. A lot of businesses never get to the SEO and they ultimately suffer for it. As you are well aware, time can present a significant opportunity cost if you are not bringing in revenue.

If you have a tight budget and you're able to prospect through other channels I'd bite the bullet and do SEO. If you can free up some resources to do PPC then I'd stage it so that you maintain some cash-flow while your SEO campaign is kicking in.

My $0.02.

Call me if you wish to discuss. 978-287-0010. I'll be in on Thursday.

Regards & Happy 4th,

Greg Hill

Ari -
I am the president of a creative firm. We are not an SEO firm. We set up our web sites to be flexible for SEO services - we know the tricks of the trade and have even come up with one or two white hat tricks of our own.

We do make SEO recommendations to our clients, but I would never recommend they do SEO in-house if they had the funds to hire out. I don't even really have a SEO company that I would recommend necessarily at this time, but I do know enough about SEO and what needs to be done on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to know it's not something that you can really do properly on your own.

It's sort of like taking a weekend web design class, and then thinking you're ready to create a glorious website for your company, and expecting it to be really competitive in your market. It's just not going to happen, no matter how hard you try or how good of an attitude or work ethic you have. You might make a nice site, yeah, but it won't be the caliber of site you would need to really be competitive. Unless you take the time to go earn degrees --- or at least take a few classes in graphic design, computer science, and public relations or marketing --- by yourself your site will never be what it could be.

We have clients that we do consult with (see our client list) -- for SEO purposes, but on a very limited basis, because they don't have or want to spend the money required to carry a good SEO program. Sometimes they just don't understand. We make it very clear that we are not an SEO firm, but we can get them headed in the right direction. Sometimes it just takes them getting their feet wet and then it will whet their thirst for more. SEO is not a big secret -- but it does take time, time, time and knowledge learned the hard way over time... The kinds of things you get with an established SEO firm. Depending on your market, it can really make or break your site's success. And just in case I forgot to tell you -- it takes a lot of time. Oh, and did I mention the time issue? (Time that is much better spent with you and your peeps running your business operations effectively and efficiently.)

In my opinion, PPC and SEO are so closely tied together, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you did not allow your SEO company to take care of business for you. If you have to pick one, PPC would be the one to take on in-house for a myriad of reasons, but make sure you are constantly communicating your results with your SEOPTIMIST (heh heh) or it hurts both efforts. Sounds like you've done enough research to keep them honest, and if you find an SEO company who does a good job for you and that you end up trusting, let me know.

Some day my company XPRT Creative may dive into the SEO market, but for now, we're just focusing on creating websites that will provide effective solutions and web applications for our clients and that will continue to lay the groundwork for a good SEO company to do their thing when the time is right.

My 2 cents anyway. Hope this helps!

Best,

Jennifer
XPRT Creative

Dear Ari

I rather like the way enigma007 costs the use of resources – I just wish that more bank managers and CFO’s would take a similarly enlightened view.

Let me come clean here. I am at least 50% spoilt by the resources I can call on in-house. SalesVision has Nesh (Neshinator on this site) as our web marketing manager and please believe me, after several of his in-depth tutorials on SEO and PPC optimisation, I thoroughly understood the principals, but that’s understanding in the sense that an occasional pianist like me can understand that Vladimir Ashkenazy is a brilliant exponent of Chopin. It doesn’t mean that I can learn to play as well as he does, no matter how often I dissemble his technique and practice suggested exercises. And I couldn’t manage it even if the master himself were to have taught me! Unimax Solutions has no such wizard and as a consequence, despite having an interesting and informative website, no one in a month of Sundays, looking for a CRM solution would ever come across it.

Acknowledging the desired commercial value of your website might be the key to making you free up the resources and cash needed to make it as visible and accessible as you wish it to be. I used to take a similar view with advertising and PR. In the dark days before CRM and lead tracking were common practice, I used to ruthlessly follow every single enquiry from an advert or published piece of PR and work out what the net margin was on each successful sale. If the campaign paid for itself and showed a profit in line with our planned margin, I judged it to have had a net cost of nothing! Of course, my finance director thoroughly disagreed with this form of creative accounting, but when asked if he would forgo the bottom line results in return for not having me spend the money on campaigns, the answer, gifted with 50:50 hindsight was always no. Then asked if I could spend the same again, he was rather backed into a corner!

I think that you are in a similar position. If you are confident that improving the visibility and the effectiveness of your website will lead to more enquiries and that your sales machine will convert them into orders, you should spend either the time or the money to make it work as you intend it to. If the opportunity cost of having you do the work is greater than the cost of paying for an external expert to do it for you, then the external resource should be used. If having you do the work will produce something which is ineffective because this is not your speciality, then you are both spending your money unwisely and probably doing your company some reputational damage.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
SalesVision and Unimax Solutions