What roles must we perform SEO in-House, and what can we outsource?
In actuality, certain chores must be completed in order to be effective with content and SEO. These tasks are then transformed into jobs that carry them out.
At the end of the day, we need someone to do the following:
Project Strategy And Content Strategy
What are we attempting to accomplish and why? What is our distinct point of difference or a topic that can help us stand out? This includes determining where there are content shortages and opportunities for our sites and the market. In my Alexa.com essay on how content writers and SEO strategists can collaborate, I used the example of targeting Keywords 2-5 rather than Keyword No. 1.
Someone has to conduct the analysis and then interpret the results.
Creating Content
Companies must choose which material will be most effective for their specific projects. This might be podcasts, landing sites, blog entries, white papers, and so on. It’ll most likely be a combination.
Distribution
Although content is king, distribution is in charge of the day-to-day operations. This is when distribution – also known as syndication or promotion – comes in. It includes:
- Sharing on social media
- Search engine optimization rankings
- Marketing via email
- Paid advertisements
- Content repurposing on other channels
Repurposing content also entails finding the next optimal channels. Assume I’m writing an article on a specific topic. It could be worthwhile to explore making a podcast on the same subject. While podcasts are growing in popularity, there are still fewer of them than blogs, and podcasts are now being indexed by search engines as well.
Consider the keywords again before doing another podcast on the same subject. Should the podcast focus on a different keyword phrase? Or is it the same? If the answer is to target a different phrase, just make sure that the podcast host and guest utilize the term for which you’re attempting to rank.
The Benefits of Having an SEO in-House Strategist
Although one individual can perform many tasks, adding the slash isn’t always a smart option. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?
There’s certainly something to be said for digital marketers who can dabble in a number of methods. If jobs must be combined, you may wind up with an SEO strategist who can also create content (i.e. write) or a writer who can also handle SEO research and strategy. Just remember that all of those chores take time.
- It takes time to write.
- SEO strategy takes time to implement.
- It takes time to distribute.
- It takes time to analyze.
- Most things take longer than we anticipated.
On a well-rounded team, at least one person is responsible for SEO strategy, another for content generation, and so on.
Complete Concentration
The most significant benefit of an in-house SEO consultant, in my opinion, is that your project will receive its entire attention. Even when working on many projects, the in-house employee focuses solely on the company’s tasks. Their attention is not divided among several clients.
Consider this scenario: an in-house SEO strategist arrives and expects to perform an eight-hour day fully dedicated to SEO techniques for the organization.
The hallway collaboration potential, particularly for co-located teams, can be enormous and beneficial to projects. Slack or other messaging technologies can still be used for distributed team collaboration in the hallway.
The Budget
Assume you pay your SEO strategist $70,000 per year.
a year of 2,080 hours
Minus three weeks of vacation (120 hours) Minus ten holidays (80 hours)
minus time spent doing nothing or routine administrative tasks – 100
That leaves us with a total of 1,780 hours.
Effective hourly fee for SEO tasks: $39.30 (or $70,000 divided by 1,780).
What company do you know that charges $39 per hour?
The Information
People with more historical knowledge work on a team – for a firm – for any consistent amount of time. They understand why something was or was not done.
This is a problem that no amount of documentation can solve:
- The documentation may be incomplete in any case.
- We have no idea where it was saved — think folders deep on a lettered drive.
- No one is reading it.
There is a benefit in having someone on the team who works on the projects and develops institutional knowledge in-house. This is also why it can sometimes be beneficial to reassign other in-house professionals to a new SEO function.
For example, an in-house writer who has dabbled with SEO – and writers should definitely dabble in SEO – can make the transition with training. Institutional knowledge can be beneficial.
Productivity
Schedules exist for in-house teams. They will work on these projects for the next eight hours. There is no switching back and forth between organizations. There is no checking of deliverables, as is common in agencies.
Deliverables could include:
- Search engine optimization studies for two articles/products/etc.
- SEO optimization for two articles and two phone calls
That is extremely particular, as it should be in an agency model. However, if you decide to flaunt your content and convert it into a podcast, you will be out of scope and will incur additional costs.
With an in-house staff, you just add it to your day’s tasks and possibly re-prioritize some things. However, there is no additional hard expense.
You Are Familiar With The Team
Some outsourced services are provided by corporations that also outsource or by unidentified freelancers – termed non-client facing contractors. You can certainly stipulate in your contract with the outsourced partner that they cannot outsource themselves.
Even if the non-client facing employees are inside to the vendor, understanding who you deal with might help with teamwork.
The Benefits of Hiring Outsourced SEO Services
There are now additional benefits to hiring outside aid. If you only require occasional assistance, purchasing a few, albeit pricey, agency hours may be less expensive than hiring someone full-time.
Working with a good agency can also provide you with access to information that is difficult to obtain when everything is kept within an in-house team.
Good agencies get knowledge through their diverse portfolio of projects and clients. They take what they learned from Project 1,322 with Client 222 and apply it to additional clients. That is the expertise that cannot be simply replicated by all-in-house teams. In-house teams learn from their own projects, but they don’t have any other clients to learn from.
While in-house teams can study industry experts and literature, they are often high-level and difficult to replicate. The best teacher is actually running campaigns and learning from the results. On the other hand, the more campaigns they do as a group, the more they learn collectively.
Wrap
I’ve seen significant benefits to having in-house teams, but I’ve also seen value in bringing in actual expert firms for specific areas of a project. I’ve also worked on both ends of the spectrum. All circumstances and configurations have advantages and downsides.
In order to develop a true Content Performance Culture, I believe that as many duties as feasible should be completed internally. Moving material from happening to performing is a full-time job, or more accurately, a series of full-time tasks. To make things function properly, we’ll probably need full-time competent personnel in those roles.
Read on How SEO Strategists and Content Creators Can Collaborate to Get Results
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