GOP Debate – Newt: ‘Outsource E-Verify To AMEX Or Visa’

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Think You Have To Outsource SEO To An Expensive Firm? 5 Things You Can Do In House

Once upon a time, I had a lot of faith in SEO firms. I sought out top companies in the industry and paid thousands of dollars. What I got in return were minimal results, and what turned out to be minimal effort.

If you’re an e-commerce manager, you might be surprised to find out how easy it is to save money on the “low hanging fruit” of SEO by shifting part, or all, of your SEO efforts in-house.

There are 5 major parts of SEO that you can move in-house, and save your company between $20,000 – $120,000 dollars a year.

When I used an SEO firm, I was charged between $200 to $500 dollars a month just for keyword analysis. Looking back, it seems wasteful: especially considering the free and inexpensive resources available online that help you select an optimal list of keyword phrases, like Google’s keyword tool. This tool is part of the Google AdWords suite, but it is just as useful for SEO.

Let’s say you have a business that sells real estate. You enter “real estate” into Google’s keyword tool and you will see huge traffic levels. By default, once you enter your keywords, the tool does a broad match. Click the box in the top left-hand sidebar that says “exact match.”

After that adjustment, the column that says “local monthly searches” (this really just means searches in your country) shows 301,000 searches per month for the exact phrase “real estate.”

If you try a more specific phrase, say “Philadelphia Real Estate”, you’ll see that the volume drops to 3,600 searches a month. Play with the tool a bit more to get comfortable, and then you can begin expanding your keywords.

Another good place to start expanding your keywords is by glancing at your competitors’ websites. Although meta-keywords are often times viewed as worthless by the SEO community at large, having meta-keywords is still a common practice. Your competitors are likely to have their targeted keywords for each page exposed to you in their HTML code and you’d be a fool not to take a look.

Simply right click on the page, select view source from the context menu, and your browser should load the HTML of the page. Once you’re looking at the HTML, press ctrl+F on your keyboard to activate the ability to search the text. Search for: “meta name=”keywords”", and if your competitor uses the keywords meta tag, your search tool should jump to it.

While you’ve got that HTML open, take a peek at your competitor’s title tags (“meta name=”title”). Make sure you don’t copy their tags. If you look at the top three ranking sites for the keywords you’re analyzing, you’ll probably see that they have the same (or strikingly similar) title tags.

Once you have a good list of keywords, you’ll want to use Market Samurai, a tool you can purchase for $99. This tool will allow you to determine how heavy the competition is for each keyword phrase and select keywords that have both a high volume of traffic, but also a low level of competition. Do your best to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and think of how they’d approach looking for your product.

Competitive analysis is a service most SEO firms provide (I was charged $100 monthly, on average) to provide you reports on how well your competitors are ranking for the keywords you’re targeting. There are a few tools, paid and free, that will also provide you with similar reporting, namely SEOMoz and SEO Quake.

For about the same price as I was paying just for competitive analysis, SEOMoz (about $90 monthly) will allow you to enter three competitors and a list of keywords you want to examine. (It has a host of other tools I’ll discuss in a bit, too.) When you run the comparison, SEOMoz will show you how you rank for each keyword compared to your competition.

Another free approach to examining your comparison would be to use a tool such as SEO Quake, which is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to instantly view an array of statistics. This plugin will display a website’s Google page rank, the number of pages they have indexed in each of the major search engines, Alexa rank, the number of inbound links, even the age of their website.

I also recommend plugging your website and your competitor’s websites into Compete.com to get a general idea as to how much traffic they receive each month (but be sure to keep in mind that this is just an estimate). When examining your target keywords, be sure to logout of Google and erase all of your cookies  in order to get more neutral results.

I personally like to track ongoing rankings using Web CEO, although Market Samurai works as well. Web CEO will provide you with a report each month that shows any increase or decrease in your ranking. If you want a very basic overview of how your competition is doing, try websitegrader.com and woorank.com. These sites will also give you some helpful tips on how to improve your own SEO.

One of the most essential parts of a good SEO strategy is content creation. Most SEO companies charge around $100 for a piece of content, and often, unbeknownst to you, outsource the writing anyway. Content, in this case, includes any written articles targeting specific keywords being generated for your website, newsletter and blogs.

Why would you have someone else pay someone else to write about your business? When you think about it, who could write better content than people who know it best—your own in-house team? Be sure to focus on keywords when writing any articles or blogs. Using your target keywords 3 or 4 times in the article and hyperlinking them to the appropriate page on my website.

Writing content for your website and product isn’t very difficult or time consuming, so I recommend bringing content creation in house as much as possible. If that’s not possible, however, use a service like Content Network. This website will allow you to pay a fee per word for copywriting. I was able to find someone with a master’s degree in English from University of Michigan who charged 5 cents per word for their services.

Be sure to follow coding standards, and use your markup semantically. Basically, this means using only one ‘H1' tag per page, and making sure your content is using the appropriate markup for what the content is. The web has millions and millions of free resources on basic HTML markup, and my personal favorite is the W3C, or W3Schools.

What is the relationship between markup and SEO? Spiders use your markup to determine the significance of the keywords it finds; a ‘H1' tag, for example, means ‘This is the most important content on the page–this is what the page is about!’

According to SEOMoz: “Although employing targeted keywords in the H1 tag does not correlate well to high rankings, it does appear to provide some slight value. It’s also considered a best practice for accessibility and to describe a page’s content, hence our recommendation.” That’s just one example, but each piece of your code helps to tell the search engines the importance of the content on your page, so it’s critical to make sure that you use markup properly.

When it comes to SEO, I’ve found two factors to be most important: strong content and good links.

As I mentioned above, content can be handled very effectively in-house, though content creation and proper markup.

The second portion is link building. A significant portion of link building methods employed by SEO companies today are frowned upon by Google. Some of these questionable methods include spamming blog comment sections, buying links through link farms, submitting your website to 1000 directories, and so on. These methods are risky and can cause you to lose ranking or even get blacklisted.

Amazingly, plenty of SEO companies use exactly those old-school tricks to get short-term results for their clients. SEO Book wrote a great article on 101 link building tactics. If you have a low budget, this is a good way to get started.

Link building, however, is a complex and constantly evolving game, requiring time and dedication. I’ve found a number of ways to get quality links for little or no cost. One of the best methods that i can give you is to give away your own product to bloggers and get reviews from relevant websites. In exchange for reviews get text links for the reviews.

It can sometimes be frustrating and annoying to wait so long for links but it is the cheapest and easiest way to get links. I have also had confirmation from some of the top link builders in the industry that this is the best way to start.

If you’re considering bringing your SEO efforts in-house, you don’t have to do it alone. There are resources online, and in real life, in your local area, where you can get support and discuss your issues.

Some of the best advice I have ever gotten was in SEO related Meetup.com gatherings and SEO blogs and forums such as the High Rankings forum, the Seer Interactive blog and the SEOMoz Pro Q&A forum. All free advice. Their tips alone could help save you up to $20,000 – $30,000 dollars a month.

You don’t have to do it all at once, either; start off slowly, maybe focus on content creation and markup optimization, and continue paying for Link Building until you’re ready to take it on.

Ultimately, you know your business, your customers, and your keywords best, so try to bring your SEO efforts in house whenever possible. You’ll not only save money, you’ll get better quality content, and learn more about your website and your customers.

If you have questions or want some advice–just ask! Let me know your thoughts or questions in the comments below or contact me directly.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: In House | SEM Industry: In House

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Professional SEO: Hand Off to Bob or Outsource the Job

We are often asked if professional SEO (search engine optimization) can be done effectively utilizing in-house talent. Despite our obvious self-interests on the subject, our answer is always a qualified "yes"- you can achieve professional SEO results using existing talent. However, for every company we have known that has met with great in-house SEO success, we know of many more that have seen their in-house efforts fail. We have also discovered the companies that have succeeded share some common traits.

If your company is considering doing SEO in-house, there are some critical questions that you should address before you proceed.

Do I have the proper resources at my disposal to achieve professional SEO results?

Search engine optimization takes time, and your internal SEO expert will need to have a great deal of it at his or her disposal - especially at the project's outset when target audiences, keyphrases, and optimization schemes are first being established. Even after the initial optimization effort, the nature of SEO will require this person to spend ample time keeping up with industry trends, monitoring campaign progress, performing A/B testing, and expanding the campaign as new product and service areas are added.

Perhaps even more important than time, achieving professional SEO results requires a unique set of aptitudes. The person responsible for your internal SEO initiative must possess the ability to learn quickly and to look at your website from a macro-perspective, marrying together the needs of sales, marketing, and IT. He or she can not be an aggressive risk taker, as this is often a surefire way to get your website penalized and potentially removed from the major search engines. These gifted people exist in many companies, but given the unique attributes that these individuals possess, their time is often already spent in other crucial areas of the business.

Without enough time to invest in the project or the right type of person to execute it, an internal SEO initiative is likely doomed to fail.



Do I know which departments of my company should be involved, and will they work with an insider?

As mentioned above, professional SEO, by necessity, involves marketing, sales, and IT. The SEO expert must work with marketing to find out what types of offers and initiatives are working offline to help translate them effectively online. He or she must work with sales to identify the types of leads that are most valuable so that you can target the right people in the keyphrase selection process. And, finally, your SEO expert will need to work with IT to determine any technical limitations to the SEO recommendations, learn of any past initiatives based on a technical approach, and get the final optimization schemes implemented on the website.

Sadly, in many businesses, these departments have a somewhat adversarial relationship. However, it is the duty of the SEO expert to act as a project manager and coordinate the efforts of all three departments if you are going to get the most out of your campaign. No professional SEO project can be completed in a vacuum. For whatever reason, it is often easier for an outsider to get adversarial departments on the same page, in the same way that a marriage counselor might convince a woman of her undying love for her husband while the husband is still grimacing from a well-placed knee in the parking lot.



Will someone be held accountable for the results?

This may seem like a small consideration, but it can have a tremendous impact on the success of the campaign. If you have added this responsibility to some poor soul's job description with the direction that he or she should "do the best you can," you'll be lucky to make any headway at all (especially if the person is not enthusiastic about SEO). Whether SEO is done in-house or outsourced, someone will have to take responsibility for showing progress, explaining setbacks, and continually improving results. Without this accountability, it is very common to see an initiative fade as the buck is passed.



Can I afford delayed results based on a learning curve?

It's a reality - professional SEO expertise has a steep learning curve. While the information on how to perform the basics of optimization are freely available on the web, much of the information out there is also contradictory, and some of it is actually dangerous. It takes time for someone unfamiliar with the discipline to sort the SEO wheat from the SEO chaff (on a side note, a "quoted" search of Google reveals that this may actually mark the first occasion in human history that the phrase "SEO chaff" has been used - we're betting it's also the last). Simply put, if the person you are putting on the job has no experience, it will take longer to get results. This may not be a consideration if you aren't counting on new business from SEO any time soon. However, if you are losing business to your competition due to their professional SEO initiatives, time might be a larger factor.



Will it cost me less to do it in house than it would to choose a professional SEO firm?

Often, companies will attempt this specialized discipline in-house in order to save money, and sometimes this works out as intended. However, accurate calculations of the cost of in-house labor that would be involved versus the price of the firm you would otherwise hire should be performed to make an accurate comparison. When making this calculation, also factor in the opportunity cost of the resource - the tasks that your in-house people are not able to perform because they are involved in SEO.

In addition, if worse comes to worst and your in-house SEO expert is led astray by some of the more dangerous "how-to" guides available, it can cost even more to repair the damage than it would have to hire a professional SEO firm to perform the optimization from the outset. And an internal SEO campaign gone wrong can cost even more than the stated fee - websites that violate the terms of service of the major search engines (whether intentional or not) can be severely penalized or even removed, costing you a lot of lost revenue when potential customers can not find your website for a period of time.



Do I believe that the end result I'll get in-house will be equal to or greater than the results I would have gotten from a professional SEO firm?

Search engine optimization can create huge sales opportunities, and slight increases in overall exposure can have not-so-slight increases in your bottom-line revenue. If you believe that your talented in-house resource will, given enough time, achieve results equal to or greater than those that could have been achieved by the professional SEO firm you might have chosen, it may make sense to do it internally.

However, in addition to a better knowledge of industry trends, one clear advantage that search engine optimization firms have is the benefit of the experience and macro-perspective that comes from managing many different websites over time. Professional SEO firms can watch a wide range of sites on a continual basis to see what trends are working, what trends aren't, and what formerly recommended tactics are now actually hurting results.

This macro-perspective allows professional SEO firms to test new tactics as they appear on a case-by-case basis and apply those results across a wide range of clients to determine what the benefit is. It is harder for an individual with access to only one site to perform enough testing and research to achieve optimum results all the time, something that should also factor into the equation.



Do I have at least a slight tolerance for risk?

Neophytes to SEO can make mistakes that can lead to search engine penalization or removal. This happens most commonly when they have an IT background and treat SEO as a strictly technical exercise. We are often called in to assist companies who have had an internal initiative backfire, leaving them in a worse position than the one they were in before they started. The simple truth is that you cannot perform effective SEO without marrying your efforts to the visitor experience, but this is not something that is intuitively understood when people approach SEO for the first time.

However, professional SEO firms are not perfect either. Some firms use those same optimization methods that violate the search engines' terms of service and can get your site penalized. So, if you do decide to outsource, educate yourself on SEO and do some research on the firm. Know the basics of the business, find out who the firm's clients are and how long they've been in business, and ask for professional references - just like you would do with any major business purchase.

If you have considered all of the above questions, and your answers to all seven are "yes," your company may be uniquely equipped to achieve professional SEO results in-house. If you answered "no" to any of the first three questions but "yes" to the rest, it does not necessarily mean that you can't perform SEO in-house - just that you may not be in a position to do so at this time. Taking the actions required to get you in the right position to answer in the affirmative might be worth your while. However, if you answered "no" to any of the last four questions, you may want to consider outsourcing the project to a professional SEO firm.

A professional SEO firm has the resources, the time, the expertise, and, most importantly, the experience, to launch an SEO initiative for your website that will have a positive effect on your bottom line. Whichever option you choose, it is important that you fully embrace the channel. A half-hearted initiative, whether done internally or outsourced, can be as ineffective as taking no action at all.

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing. He has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, SEO Today, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue, an Atlanta search engine optimization company, serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DuPont, and Georgia-Pacific. To receive internet marketing articles and search engine news in your email box each month, register for Medium Blue?s newsletter, Out of the Blue.

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