After yesterday's post about the 10 Great Resources regarding Bringing SEO In House got me thinking, wouldn't it be useful if I got insight from some of the Top In House SEOs (amongst other Industry professionals)? I asked a few SEO Experts the same 2 questions:

1) What is the biggest advantage for an organization to bring Search Marketing In-house?
2) What is the biggest challenge in accomplishing a transformation to In-house SEO?

The first expert up is Chris "Silver" Smith the Lead Search Strategist from NetConcepts who wrote an excellent post which listed some of the Top In-House SEOs. Chris had this to say:



The biggest advantage in bringing search marketing in-house is the combined synergy from: long-term cost savings, long-term revenue/conversion improvement, and having readily-available expertise and advocacy on all stages of online marketing projects from inception to project launch.

The biggest challenge in attaining in-house management and development of SEO is in terms of politics. Not only must an organization have search channel managers, but those managers must also have support and prioritization of their projects at the executive level, along with the cooperation of the IT department to make it happen. As a best-practice, an organization should also build-in some sort of process management to insure that their in-house team will not become too incestuous or myopic. In-house projects should have some amount of auditing, either from outside agency experts, or from a peer review of practices and plans if a company has multiple internal experts. As a further indication of the political support for the search marketing program, there needs to be some amount of budget set aside for it. Not only could tools be purchased to assist with the program, but agency consulting could be available to be brought in for special projects, and the internal staff need! to be able to attend a couple of search marketing conferences every year in order to keep their education up-to-date.


Stay tuned next week as I get some thoughts from some In house SEOs (from companies such as Time Inc., Classmates.com, Business.com and ResortQuest). If you're interested in sharing your thoughts, send me an email: mjasra@gmail.com

Labels: Search Marketing In House, SEO In House