An SEO specialist needs a budget. Doing SEO without one is much more challenging than doing it with. My guess is that this is often overlooked when hiring your first SEO specialist.
Sometimes in-house SEO efforts succeed really well, but more often than not, they flop as badly as Friends in Need. The times they succeed, in my experience, are when there is a serious commitment. A well-balanced SEO team with all the necessary skills for successful SEO work, and a budget that isn’t just limited to their salaries. If we temporarily forget about large-scale SEO investments and instead look at the attempts that fail, I see two clear trends.
A poor beginner
The first type of failure I often see with in-house SEO is companies hiring some poor rookie who doesn’t have much experience with SEO and is expected to work magic from nothing. There’s a characteristic of search engine optimization that makes this doomed from the start. There’s a threshold for SEO knowledge. Until your skills have passed that threshold, you’re not helping the company. Either you achieve poor results, or you expose the website you’re working on to too many risks. This can be avoided if you get to work in an environment where there are more experienced SEO experts who can guide the work, in a larger team, or at an agency.
Assigning a poor teenager to try and hack together good SEO for an important website might seem like a cheap solution, but more often than not, it’s neither cheap in the short term nor long term. A salary, along with all associated costs, is often larger than many budgets at most SEO agencies. Additionally, over time, if SEO is done recklessly, it could lead to filters and manual actions.
I will defend myself, your honor
The second type of failure is when people think they can do it all by themselves. Sure, there are examples where this has worked out fine, but in my opinion, it’s such a strange decision. SEO is complex, even if it’s not always easy to see just how complex it is. Writing texts and changing headings might seem simple, but it’s not those things that will make the difference. I always get the feeling of the Hollywood courtroom phrase, “I will defend myself, your honor,” when I hear someone say they’ve looked into SEO a little. If you’re not also keen on being your own legal counsel, how on earth can you choose to handle your own SEO? The risks feel very real.
Despite my reputation as an SEO expert and my ability to become completely obsessed with what I do, my view is that I wasn’t an SEO professional to be reckoned with until at least a year of hard work. We should also remember that it was much easier back then, and the risks were smaller. Today, under no circumstances would I unleash a beginner on my websites, and you shouldn’t do that either.
If you’re determined to do it yourself, at least get someone you can ask for advice. Whether it’s someone you know or a retainer with an agency doesn’t matter too much, what matters is that you don’t take unnecessary chances.
For anyone interested in more reading on the topic, there’s another article: Why Your In-House SEO Fails.
Magnus Bråth
Consultant & Adviser
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.