Loading...Inhouse SEO in a small company
At first, employing SEO specialists in your company seems to be a perfect solution. They are always available, you can monitor what they do and benefit from their assistance whenever you need. Theoretically speaking, they should focus solely on your website and consequently achieve outstanding results. However, it turns out that it's a utopian vision and implementing it in real life isn’t a piece of cake. Why? The list of reasons is pretty long and below you can see a few of the obstacles:Inhouse SEO employment
Your company probably lacks a person who knows the SEO industry. However, finding a well-versed professional is quite difficult. In this situation, it’s best to take advantage of assistance from someone who has some expertise in the field. On our blog you can access a separate article discussing the recruitment of an in-house SEO specialist.Tools
Finding an SEO specialist with the right knowledge is just the beginning of the journey. The skills aren’t enough to achieve the objectives. Every professional needs special tools that are indispensable and quite expensive. What tools? Let’s start with solutions necessary to analyze your market rivals and keywords they use. Some necessary tools are used to analyze your competition and its links. Notable solutions include com and MajesticSEO. The cheapest variant of the first one costs as much as 990 dollars a year. The second solution is cheaper, but still involves a significant expense - 470 dollars if you choose to pay for the whole year in advance. The specialist also needs access to a program such as Screaming Frog which analyzes on-site factors. There’s a free version of this tool, however, it allows monitoring maximally 500 subpages. If you don’t want to be restricted by any limits, you have to pay 149 dollars a year.Remuneration
Hiring a good SEO specialist requires having an adequate budget to pay for the work. If you want to employ an experienced person, you need to get prepared for high amounts on your payroll. The remuneration depends on many factors, including the city in which you operate.Operational budget
Are you overwhelmed by the costs of SEO tools? Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the expected expenditures. Moreover, it’s impossible to avoid most of them if you want to achieve satisfactory results. Let’s start with on-site SEO. Of course, SEO specialists should know HTML and CSS, however, it may not be enough to implement all the necessary changes. Some of the updates will need to be deployed by a web developer. In this case, the costs won’t be so high as it’s usually a one-time commission, repeated every time the SEO specialist comes up with other modifications that might be effective. Nevertheless, other expenses will be much higher. You may need to hire a copywriter responsible for writing quality company blog articles, service or product descriptions and sponsored entries. This is an indispensable element of your actions if you want to achieve impressive results. Link building is another noteworthy issue. It’s difficult to determine website linking needs, however, in most cases it’s crucial to obtain links from sponsored articles, guest blogging, forums, comments, advertisements and many, many more. So what’s the cost of all these activities? It’s impossible to state it unanimously. It may be 1000 dollars but it may also be a lot more. It all depends on the competitiveness of the industry you operate in and the activities that need to be performed on the website.Algorithm updates and changes
The job of an SEO specialist aims at increasing website visibility on Google as much as possible. The problem is that the algorithms are constantly modified and updated. So even if an inhouse SEO professional achieves very good results, any algorithm updates may have a negative impact on the website visibility. In this case, SEO specialists start analyzing what modifications were introduced. If they work on their own, they have a tough nut to crack. They need to draw conclusions based on the websites they manage or wait for special analyses published on industry blogs. So why do SEO agencies have an easier task to do? Because in most cases they monitor hundreds of pages and cooperate with numerous professionals, that’s why they’re able to quickly determine what updates were introduced. In the case of inhouse SEO, the time needed to re-reach expected positions may be much longer. The constant changes of Google algorithms necessitate need for continuous development. Therefore, a company should have special funds which enable SEO specialists to take part in industry events, trainings or conferences. And it’s not always about speakers, very frequently usual conversations with other specialists are extremely valuable.Verifying the work of inhouse SEO
Hiring in-house SEO specialists involves the risk that their work won’t bring the expected results, even despite the impressive job interview and expertise. You invest in various activities, however, they don’t translate into higher visibility. Does it mean that you employed the wrong person? Not necessarily. It’s very important to realize when to expect results and what results can be achieved. There are websites whose positions improve after a few weeks of implementing modifications, however, there are also pages that require long months of work to deploy all the necessary updates, get rid of duplicate content, optimize metadata or improve linking. The task of an SEO specialist is to outline the situation and operational plan to the employer. Find out what results you can expect and how long it will take to see the first positive changes. It’s also important to remember about competitiveness, for some phrases it’s possible to reach high positions in a few weeks, however, some keywords are more demanding and time-consuming. On the other hand, it may also turn out that you hired the wrong person who doesn’t have sufficient knowledge. This is the gripe of many businesspersons who decided to recruit in-house SEO specialists without the support of someone familiar with this field. It’s crucial to establish a plan at the very beginning, then, when subsequent activities aren’t implemented or don’t bring the intended results, it may be a good idea to terminate the cooperation and find someone else. The point is that this way you can waste a lot of time and money and don’t gain any benefits. So was hiring an in-house SEO specialist profitable in the case of the abovementioned scenario? Probably not, moreover, the invested money can have been spent much wiser. To verify the effectiveness of the work of an SEO specialist, you can use Google Search Console. Pay particular attention to the total number of clicks. Website impressions are one thing but you, as a business owner, usually aim at selling products or services. If the page traffic increases but sales stay the same, it may mean that the selected keywords aren’t the most accurate. However, there may also be other reasons behind this state of affairs, maybe your market rivals offer similar products at much lower prices?
Is an SEO agency a better solution for a small company?
As you already know, hiring an inhouse SEO specialist may generate high costs. If you want to attract more potential customers with the use of organic Google search results, you should first check whether starting a cooperation with an SEO agency isn’t a more beneficial solution. Take into consideration:- The costs of hiring inhouse SEO specialists, tool fees, outsourced services, training and many, many more.
- The monthly cost of cooperating with an SEO agency. After the first interaction, the company should provide you with a reliable plan of activities and determine what amount will be enough to achieve the expected results.
SEO agency - principles of cooperation
The activities carried out by the agency may bring excellent results, but the most important thing is to make a conscious decision. Both parties should know their responsibilities which guarantees that conducted activities translate into greater website visibility. It’s necessary to determine:-
- The operational budget.
- Reporting principles - what information will be included in the reports? How often will the client receive them?
- The scope of activities - should the agency have access to the website and implement necessary changes? Moreover, the company shouldn't deploy significant modifications in the page code without discussing it with the agency.
- Contact persons - only people who are familiar with the project should talk to the company owner.
I think it all depends on the company’s profile and its resources. For us, it was most beneficial to hire an SEO company to cooperate with our in-house employee responsible for SEO, but for others, it might not work. It’s a really individual matter. You explained the matter nice tho! 🙂