If you do a little cursory reading about SEO best practices over the past five years, you might get the impression that as Google has closed some organic ranking loopholes, companies with good domain history and some basic SEO built into their site should have no problem ranking well. In fact, they can probably have someone in-house check off a few basic SEO tasks on a part-time basis and call it a day. Unfortunately the rankings marketplace tends not to work that way for most companies and while your CEO may not be talking about rankings and keyword density in weekly meetings, they may be talking about how much the website cost to build and what the return on that investment is.
From an SEO perspective, handing your SEO tasks to an in-house part time resource is probably going to bring in mixed results, unless that resource is an online marketing professional by trade. We’ve seen many cases where an SEO task list is handed to an offline marketing pro or a sales and marketing team member or even a web developer and while they are surely an expert in their field, the growth in online conversions doesn’t usually recover under their care. After all, if you have a part-time resource and they are relying on quick research to optimize your site or build your rankings you might inadvertently follow bad advice like the blog article we found (below) on a reputable website which couldn’t be a worse suggestion! Google is pretty transparent about what they like to see in a website and keyword packing isn’t on the list.
So who can benefit from hiring a professional online marketing resource? Anyone struggling to meet their online marketing, lead generation or revenue goals should at least ask the question, “are we dedicating the right resource to the problem”? A good online marketing partner will be able to point out pretty quickly if there is room for improvement, or if you’re even looking in the right direction…and an honest online marketing partner will—in some cases—even tell you not to hire them. If the barriers to success are design or development related, a sharp online marketing company will let you know.
To sum, it never hurts to have an in-house resource learn about how SEO or conversion optimization works, but if you’re not seeing the results you hoped to see…you should probably call in a professional online marketing company rather than adding stress to a team member that may not have the experience necessary to turn your numbers around.
If you’re wondering how to solve an online marketing problem or relieve internal workload, get in touch, we’d be happy to review your situation and find a solution.