Second Opinion: Why Do Mature In-House Teams Order External Audits?

Over the past 12 months, we have observed a clear trend at Delante: the majority of audit inquiries do not come from companies without their own SEO or marketing teams, but from corporations and large e-commerce businesses that typically have an in-house team of 10-15 specialists.

Why do Marketing Managers, having senior SEO and SEM specialists on board, contact an agency for an audit?

Because a conscious leader knows well that operating only in an “echo chamber” is a direct path to stagnation and overlooking mistakes, even the best team, after working on one project for over a year, can lose its sharpness of vision. This allows incorrect assumptions or overlooked technical errors to creep into the strategy.

Some companies dismiss this topic with slogans such as: “We have great people who know our business best; we don’t need external verification.” This is a direct path to a siege mentality. Not letting anyone from the outside in causes the company to operate in an echo chamber for years and actually lose out because of it, as our case study shows, but more on that in a moment.

Your in-house team is so focused on executing day-to-day tasks that, from a psychological point of view, they have the right not to notice the mistakes right in front of their eyes. Why?

This is due to a phenomenon known in psychology as Inattentional Blindness. It emerged after the Simons and Chabris experiment, in which subjects watched a video of people in black-and-white shirts passing a basketball to each other. The viewers’ task was to count how many passes occurred between the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the middle, stood there for 9 seconds, and beat their chest. As many as 50% of the subjects were so focused on the task that they didn’t notice the gorilla.

The second phenomenon is the so-called IKEA Effect. Internal teams absolutely love solutions they built themselves. It is difficult for them to critically evaluate their own strategy or planned campaigns because they are emotionally attached to them. An external expert has no such sentiments – they look solely at the business effectiveness and efficiency of the implemented activities.

As part of our Second Opinion service, we conducted an audit for the e-commerce store jakawelna.pl (a European yarn and knitting supply retailer). During our verification, we found four “silent” problems. The in-house team was doing great substantive work, but the bottleneck turned out to be tech debt that was quietly choking their results.

What errors did we find and fix?

1. Wasting Google’s resources (a problem with the Crawl Budget):
   • Diagnosis: Googlebot was using up its processing power designated for the site on thousands of worthless URLs with additional parameters (filters, sorting).
   • Fixing the problem: We blocked the mentioned addresses in the robots.txt file. By doing this, we directed Google bots to actual sales pages.
2. Authority leak (Link Juice):
   • Diagnosis: The main menu contained links to duplicated pages. Because of this, SEO power was “leaking” to worthless pages instead of building rankings.
   • Fixing the problem: We improved the internal linking structure by changing the links in the main menu.
3. Purchasing barrier (Mobile Friction):
   • Diagnosis: The mobile search engine opened incorrectly, covering the entire page upon entry. The user couldn’t even see the product.
   • Fixing the problem: We changed the UX in the first view to improve the user experience and better present the offer.
4. Lack of product information in Google results (Schema):
   • Diagnosis: Lack of structured data on products.
   • Fixing the problem: We implemented full Schema markup, which made the product’s price and availability visible in search results.

In cybersecurity and the military, it is common practice to hire so-called “Red Teams,” whose job is to simulate attacks on current systems and security measures. In this way, they look for vulnerabilities that may appear in the code or infrastructure. Such an approach is proof of the highest professionalization of activities, not a vote of no confidence in your existing teams. “Red Teaming” strategies are used as an insurance policy and the ultimate check of adopted assumptions.

A Second Opinion is a great opportunity to validate the in-house team’s arguments in the board’s eyes. If the team has been asking the board for a budget for changes (e.g., new analytics) for a year but has been denied, an independent external opinion can finally confirm the request’s validity.

When an external, reputable agency writes exactly what the employees previously reported, the board suddenly listens and approves the expense (we know from experience 😉). Therefore, a Second Opinion audit can be a gift from a Manager to the team – our authority can help unlock resources the team has been fighting for in vain.