By now most companies have at least dabbled in search engine marketing (SEM).
Whether you’ve stuck your big toe into the SEM pool with a pay-per-click campaign on Google AdWords or Yahoo/Overture or have gone full force with an intensive SEO program to generate top natural listings, you’ve probably started to wonder if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
The In-House Team
If you have an in-house team doing your site optimization, in-bound link generation, and/or running your search engine advertising (SEA) programs, you may be questioning the knowledge base and capacity your team. For example, working on a limited number of websites reduces their ability to see and assess trends in algorithm changes and quickly identify trends in optimization cause and effect.
Unless the staff is sized properly, they will probably be having trouble keeping current on the non-stated algorithms and stated policies of the various engines. If you’re running an aggressive SEA campaign, daily monitoring may be overwhelming for a small staff, requiring weekend work and sometimes long hours into the night.
And if your company is like most, there’s probably a tendency to pull your SEM team onto other time-sensitive projects because they “understand the Web,” diluting the time they can spend on their primary responsibilities.
The SEM Company
On the other hand, if you’ve been using an outside resource, such as your ad agency, web developer, or a marketing company that specializes in SEM, you may be wondering if they are truly on top of the latest information about SEO, SEA, and search engine image protection (SEIP). You may be asking yourself if the fees they are charging to manage your programs are starting to look a lot like a full-time staff’s costs. You may be questioning the attention they are paying to your account and how much of their time your business is really getting. And the biggest question may be lingering at the edge of your very nicely trimmed lawn: are you getting your money’s worth?
So how do you know when the grass is really greener on the other side of the fence when it comes to your SEM programs?
Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Mow
Now as the smart marketer you are, you know it’s not going to be as simple as “you should build” or “you should buy” because each situation is unique and there are multiple factors to consider.
Just like the age-old questions in traditional marketing: outside agency vs. in-house creative services group; PR firm or in-house media relations team; outside market research organization or in-house professionals, search engine marketing is becoming more a question of how identify, deploy, and manage the resources to the strategic advantage of your business and its unique needs.
So we’ve put together some considerations that our company frequently shares with potential clients that you may find useful as you try to assess your short-term and long-term needs for SEM sourcing.
1. Do you have 5 or more web sites to optimize for disparate keywords? If you do, then your in-house team will have enough data across multiple categories to assess patterns and trends in search engine algorithm changes and other changes in the search engine environment, such as how in-bound links are being factored. If you don’t have multiple sites and at least 2 different sets of keyword/phrases, your team may be deprived of the data optimizers rely on for identifying changes as they are cresting. Of course the in-house team can always exchange info with other optimizers and stay abreast of changes via the discussion boards, but they will be lacking first-hand data in many cases, making them more reliant on others’ points of view.
2. Is your annualized, fee-based expense for SEO and SEA (not including media spending) higher than the $80,000 you can expect to compensate a senior optimizer to keep your site(s) optimized and to run your SEA campaigns throughout the course of the year? If it is, you may want to think about the potential savings associated with bringing the functions in-house, provided the workload isn’t more than that person can handle. It is important to note that because SEO is a blend of disciplines requiring strong marketing communications and programming skills, it is difficult to find individuals with strengths in both of these areas and so it is common to need several people to manage a robust SEM program for your site.
3. If you would like to bring SEM functions in-house and can afford the talent, are you confident that your organization will be an attractive place to work for optimizers and SEA experts? Many of them are younger professionals who have a keen need for work/life balance, flexible hours, and the freedom to work when/where they feel most productive-can your business environment and culture support this type of employee? Do you have the means to hire, manage, and grow this type of talent?
4. Do you have only a few mission-critical target keywords-15 or less-and your competition isn’t actively driving up SEA click charges. This suggests a low-maintenance campaign that you can afford to let someone in-house learn to manage and grow. Larger, more aggressive campaigns require SEA experts who can either be in-house or outside professionals who use advertising management tools to help them stay on top of multi-faceted campaigns. Don’t forget to factor in weekends and holiday work schedules for the people monitoring and managing these campaigns. Search engines never sleep and your campaigns can be live 24/7-make sure your resources are available to keep your programs optimally performing for you.
5. Does your site have strong anchor text links coming into the site compared with your competitors? (Remember to include all sites showing up in the top natural listings as “competitors” because your site competes with them for visibility even if you don’t compete with them for customers.) If this is the case, you won’t need to invest heavily in generating links from other sites, a labor-intensive process requiring site researchers to identify sites from which to request links, writers to generate and repurpose optimized content, and communicators to send requests to webmasters and monitor their responses. If your in-bound links are anchor-text deficient, you will need a robust program to generate links because links from other sites are one of the most influential factors in getting top rankings via SEO. Make sure you have a team with the depth and breadth to manage the whole in-bound link generation process. An in-house team will be really knowledgeable about your products, competitive strengths, and the competition, but an outside resource might have more sophisticated processes in place for generating anchor-text-rich content and getting it placed quickly to help drive quality in-bound links.
Ready to Mow?
Many organizations are finding that they have enough activity going on with their website(s) to warrant bringing the SEM functions in-house. They gain control over the programs and their management and enjoy cost-savings over what they are charged by outside experts.
And many organizations are jumping the fence to the out-source-it side as they find their successfully run in-house programs outgrowing the organization’s ability to find and motivate the talent needed to keep the programs performing against increasingly aggressive, sophisticated competitors.
As with everything in life, the grass often appears greener on the other side of the fence. We hope this review of considerations helps you decide if you should keep the green lawn you have or hop the fence.
Veronica ‘Niki’ Fielding is a 20-year marketing industry veteran. Digital Brand Expressions (www.digitalbrandexpressions.com), which Niki launched in 2002, is her third consecutive new media services/interactive marketing venture.
