Below are three aspects of your SEO Program to analyze and improve to ensure that your SEO investment is generating website visitors, prospects and ultimately leads and customers.

Track Rankings…But As A Secondary Metric

Too often, B2B SEO programs are focused solely on increasing search engine rankings, and success is measured via ranking software and some type of “visibility score”.

In my opinion rankings should be tracked, but only as a secondary metric. It’s fine to track and report position (or rank), by keyword, and by engine — in order to understand the impact of your specific SEO efforts, but the ultimate goal of any B2B SEO Program is traffic, leads, customers and sales.

I’m not suggesting that search engine ranking scores are a bad thing. Our agency uses this type of analysis as one data point in a comprehensive SEO solution. The point – organic search rankings are a contributing factor, not a primary success indicator.

Even more importantly, I believe that ranking metrics allow B2B search marketers to use as a way to gauge whether or not their efforts are having a positive or negative impact and to find out if the pages they’re optimizing for a certain term are actually ranking, or is it another page on the site that’s ranking well, but isn’t the most ideal page for conversions.

Improved Visibility, But No Traffic?

The real question is: if your SEO Program is generating increased search rankings yet you’re not receiving any additional traffic, what might be the problem?

If rankings are increasing but organic traffic is not, here are three aspects of your SEO program to analyze:

1) Are you focusing on the wrong keywords?

This should always be one of your first considerations. Are you targeting internal “marketing speak” words and phrases versus the words people actually search for?

For example, one B2B firm insisted on targeting the keyword: ‘claims re-pricing’, which is how everyone in the organization described their business.

However, keyword research indicated that virtually no one searched for this phrase. Rather, there was 10 times the search volume for the phrase: ‘medical claims re-pricing’.

This insight alone allowed us to refocus the SEO program and generate not just visibility (on a non-used phrase) — but traffic and results (on the words people actually search for).

Think outside your “marketing box”. You have one way of describing your products and services, but potential customers may have a different way of thinking about what they need. Survey your customers and ask them how they would go about finding you online.

2) Analyze search query volume and intent

The way people search, and the words they use, definitely changes over time. Make sure you are analyzing search query trends.

One aspect of B2B SEO that’s very challenging is conducting keyword research and understanding the intent behind search queries. This is particularly true for B2B firms with long, complicated sales cycles. PPC campaign data (if available) can help you gain a better understanding of which keywords convert, and which keywords are more research oriented.

As another example, one firm wanted to target the keyword: ‘business satellite internet’. This is exactly what they provide, and they have been referring to their business this way for years.

But, an in-depth analysis of searcher behavior shows that overall volume for search terms related to ‘business satellite internet’ has been steadily decreasing over the past 5 years, and new search queries including Mobile, Broadband, and Wireless-related terms are on the rise.

There is a fundamental shift taking place in this industry and the way customers think about these services. This firms SEO program needs to be revised to reflect this shift in buyers’ behavior.

A couple of useful tools you can use to conduct this sort of research are Google Trends and Google Insights. Do you have suggestions for more market research tools? Please post in the comments below.

3) How does your listing appear in the SERPs?

It’s easy to become fixated on SEO metrics such as visibility and traffic, but don’t forget to review the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)! Is your organic listing accurate, unique and compelling? How does it compare to the other listings on the page?

Here is one example. If you are searching for:’B2B Search Marketing Agency‘which of these listings would you click on?

-or-

The second listing is much more readable, unique and compelling.

B2B SEO experts must utilize the Title tag to optimize for keywords you’re targeting, but also make sure your title is captivating and entices a click-through. Same for your Meta Description tag - though there’s very little optimization benefit to the Meta Description anymore, but the description is still very important in terms of how searchers perceive your firm. Utilize these 155 characters to their fullest potential and make sure your listing is captivating and entices action.

In Closing…

An increase in search rankings should translate to an increase in organic traffic. But, if this is not the case, B2B marketers should analyze:

A) Keywords

B) Search query trends

C) Your actual listing as it appears in the SERPs.

My final thought on why improved rankings might not be correlating to increased traffic is how searcher behavior has changed in the past several years. Today, not only do most searchers not visit pages 2 and 3, evidence is suggesting that most people don’t even scroll down the first page.

What that means is if you’re not listed in the top 1-5 results, you’re probably not getting the clicks. So, even if your SEO efforts have taken you from oblivion to the bottom of Page 1, you’ve still got a mountain to climb to get in the top 3!

B2B search marketers should continue to track visibility as a contributing factor…but remember — the success of your SEO programs will ultimately be judged based on ROI metrics related to leads, customers and sales.

B2B marketers, if you think your firm’s website is immune, or incapable of being sent to the abyss by Google, think again. I’m sure you’re aware by now the latest penalty by Google that dramatically saw many of J.C. Penney’s much coveted search rankings plummet. A few years ago, it was BMW. The message is clear — follow Google’s guidelines, or get in the back of the line.

There’s much debate on this, and I tend to want to see the good in everyone first, but I believe J.C. Penney hired what they thought was a reputable SEO firm and trusted they’d get the job done. Once they started rising to the top… who cares how they got there, right? After all, they’re making a lot more money than what they’re paying their vendor. It’s the perfect love story. It’s what one would call a true return-on-investment.

Whatever the truth is behind the J.C. Penney story is, the takeaway from the story is this. Your website goals as a B2B marketer must be long-term. Don’t risk shady SEO practices for short-term benefits that could have a much longer negative impact on overall business results.

Google’s Most Common Algorithmic Updates/Filters

Let’s take a look at current and past algorithm updates, as well as common penalties that can cause your website to plummet in search rankings and make sure your B2B website doesn’t repeat the same mistakes.

PANDA (aka ‘Farmer’)

The Panda update went live back in February 2011 and the sort of sites that were affected were mainly scraper sites and content farms. What I find most interesting about this is that Google created its own monster. Most of these scraper/content farm sites were developed as MFA (Made For Adsense) sites.

How does this work? You launch a website, “scrape” content from other web pages, display Google ads that are relevant to that content, visitors click on the ads, and you get paid via the Google AdSense program.

B2B marketers should stay away from sites that provide a high volume of inbound links, but have no real value to business marketers or buyers (i.e. you and your customers). If you were getting links from these sorts of sites, their visibility is now much reduced in Google results, and you might have seen a significant loss of traffic.

BLOOP

If you ever wonder why SEO experts preach so much about quality, relevant links, and ramping up backlinks gradually over the long-term vs. quickly over a short period of time, welcome to the BLOOP! Otherwise known as the Backlink Over-Optimization penalty/update. If you’re currently undergoing a massive effort to build back links…beware.

B2B marketers, be careful not to garner too many reciprocal links too quickly, and not to solicit links from unrelated or low-quality sites that are completely irrelevant and off-topic. For example, a B2B software company should seek links only from software-related sites vs. general web blogs and sites that contain information about a multitude of topics.

-6 Ranking

Another update dealing with links (and who says PageRank and link building aren’t that important?) The -6 update went into effect a few years ago. From what most can tell, if you were over-optimizing your site, you might have all of the sudden seen your listings drop by about 6 positions. It seems that Google is not focusing on this as much as in the past, but Google could re-instate this at any point in time.

B2B marketers should avoid over-optimizing websites and make sure link building efforts are growing steadily over time. Don’t write content specifically for search engines. In general, on-page text should sound normal, be easy-to-understand, and resonate with your audience.

-50 Paid Links

Surely you’ve heard that buying links is a bad thing according to Google, right? For example, a B2B software company might be inclined to buy a directory listing (aka links) on BtoBOnline.com. If you’re doing so only to influence PageRank and increase rankings, then yes, Google will see to it that your site disappears (well, not completely) but if you’re on page 5 or 6 of the search results, are you really going to be found?

There is an ongoing debate as to how Google would even know that you’re buying links. Google is not opposed to purchasing links for traffic and brand recognition, but they highly recommend (and so do I) that these paid links use the ‘rel=nofollow’ tag to indicate the intentions are good and the links should be clearly labeled as Sponsored Ads.

-30 Suppression

Many websites that saw their rankings plummet to position 30 or greater in recent years were the MFA (Made For Adsense) type of sites. Heavy on ads, weak on content. Other sites that used some of the old SEO tactics such as doorway pages or used an excessive amount of keyword-stuffed anchor text also woke up to a new, not so desirable, search ranking one day.

Google -950

This truly was the Abyss. Talk about being at the end of the line. As others in the industry have noted, there’s not much known about what causes your site to fall into this category. And, interestingly enough, it seems to apply to a particular page on a site, not the entire site. Speculation around this update and how it can affect your site again revolves around over-optimization and too much linking to one particular page.

This is by no means the complete list of Google updates that have occurred over the past several years, but should be enough to keep you on your toes. Bottom line, make sure your website (and SEO program) is focused on prospects and buyers first.

Keep your eye on adding value, following best practices for organic SEO and improving website usability and you’re not likely to run into problems with search engine algorithm updates.

Link Building Methodology

That said, the approach to increasing the popularity and importance of your B2B website and the tactics used to build meaningful inbound links has dramatically changed over the years.

Creating the “ultimate” piece of B2B content, or application, or widget – that everyone will want to link to – is a terrific idea. But let’s face it, this is very difficult and can be quite time consuming; and honestly, only very few websites rise to the top with this approach.

Previously, many marketers have relied on two primary tactics for raising content visibility:

1. Come and get it. Not too long ago, B2B search marketers would create a piece of content or an application, place it on their website, and politely ask others to link to it. This approach was very time consuming and typically didn’t lead to many inbound links. (How many link requests do you ignore?)

2. Mass Submission. B2B marketers submit a single piece of content to 100’s or even 1000’s of business-related websites to obtain back links. It was easy!  Heck, there was even software that automated the process. However, those days are gone. Submitting one piece of content to multiple sites is no longer an effective SEO method. Why?  This mass submission approach causes issues with competing, duplicate content.

The New Way: Unique Content Development

Today, it’s necessary to actually create a unique piece of content for every industry site you distribute information to.

No, I’m not talking about MFA (Made For AdSense) sites that contain tons of meaningless information — designed only to generate ad revenue.

Rather, this process involves creating uniquely written content that is educational, informational, and engaging to the target audience and syndicated out to a network of high-quality, relevant sites — mostly blogs focused on your B2B sector.

The content provided to each site across the network can be similar… but must be unique and different enough to appeal to each site’s specific audience.

Build Your Own Blog Network

This approach is time consuming and labor intensive, but well worth the effort. It’s a win-win situation. You need links and blog owners need relevant, useful, unique content.

B2B marketers should create a “distribution network” by reaching out to blog owners in related areas and ask to syndicate your content to their site. Have you ever maintained a blog? Developing new content can be challenging. Most blog owners welcome the content and therefore your contribution.

The question asked most often in this approach is, how do I build my own network?

First, start with the obvious blogs or industry leaders you’re aware of and follow for relevant information. If you already receive daily RSS feeds or emails from these blogs, this is the obvious first place to start. Either comment on blog posts they’ve made and begin to develop that relationship over time, or simply contact the blog owner directly, tell them who you are and who you work for, and ask if they’d be open to syndicating your content.

The next best method is to simply go searching!

Let’s say your organization provides ‘ERP Software’. Simply go to Google, type in ‘erp software’ as your search query, then click on the ‘Blogs’ link you see listed in the left-hand column:

You can perform this same search for all of the keywords you’re trying to target and come up with literally hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs who very likely would welcome your content.

Optimize Your Inbound Links

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could, to some degree, control which sites link to you, where they link to on your site, and choose the keywords in the anchor text? Of course it would!

By creating unique (but related) content and proactively distributing it to a network of relevant sites/blogs you are able to directly influence and optimize anchor text and drive links to your most critical, internal website pages.

Boost Your ROI

By capitalizing on the right blog networks, you can dramatically increase the number of inbound links, increase your site’s deep link, improve rankings, drive qualified traffic and boost return-on-investment for your SEO/link-building program.

Consider your business’s website for a moment. In your effort to optimize your website, you are competing with literally thousands of other sites. Your blog is no different. Simply posting new content will not generate a surge of new traffic. Rather, the B2B blogging success formula requires multiple steps and goes something like this:

1. Publish new blog post 2. Tweet title of blog post to your Tweeple 3. Update your Facebook fan page with new blog post 4. Post blog post to your LinkedIn updates 5. Send video excerpt to your YouTube channel

Automation is key!

If this seems like a lot of work, don’t worry. For many of the steps above, there are several tools and plugins that can automate the process for you, especially where Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are concerned. A few tools that come to mind are:

• www.SocialOomph.com
• www.HootSuite.com
• www.TwitterFeed.com
• www.Ping.fm
• www.TweetBeep.com

Currently, the YouTube process is less automated and will require a few more tools of the trade. For this reason, many B2B marketers are not automating updates to their firms’ YouTube channel at this time. That said, YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine in the world, above Yahoo and Bing, so don’t assume it’s not worth your time and effort to include YouTube in your B2B social media strategy.

Make it easy to share, bookmark & discuss content

Search Engine Land does a great job on their site of encouraging readers to ‘Share, Bookmark & Discuss’ the articles written on their site. Scroll to the bottom of this article. See the icons for Like, Tweet, Buzz and Share? Go ahead, click on the Tweet. Instantly, this article is sent to your friends and followers on your Social Media network; all that with 1 click of a button! B2B marketers should follow this approach and make it easy for those following your blog to share with their friends, business associates and online network.

Develop your own viral marketing network

As defined by Wikipedia:

“…viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.”

So, although every blog post may not “go viral” in the sense that most of us think of it, blog content is indeed spread and shared if you’ve spent the time and effort to build out your social media network.

Instead of waiting for new prospects to visit your site and stumble upon (no pun intended) your blog, be proactive by sharing content with your target audience who in turn will share with others in their network if they find the information unique, compelling and engaging.

Implement a “Social Media Boomerang”

The “Social Media Boomerang” is a term I coined this past year in developing Social Media strategies for many B2B marketers. It’s actually a very simple idea with 3 main process steps:

1. You publish new content on your firm’s blog,
2. You toss the boomerang by promoting this content via Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and You Tube, and:
3. The boomerang comes back when prospects visit your site to read the entire post and join in the conversation.

Benefits of this full circle approach

Use Social Media to gather interest, find new customers, help increase links to your site and more. However, make sure you also bring prospects back to your site and capture their information by offering valuable information and assets.

For example, prospects are usually willing to complete a short, simple registration form to receive a whitepaper, eBook, industry research, webinar, demos, or a discount on services. Remember you want prospects to register on your firm’s site… not Facebook or YouTube.

Start reaping the benefits of your social media boomerang today:

1. Create unique, compelling blog posts
2. Promote this content using your social media network
3. Drive prospects back to your website
4. Capture prospects’ registration information
5. Engage!

B2B blogging challenges

Questions and assumptions that often come to mind for B2B marketers include:

1. How do we manage and control the blog?
2. Who writes the content for the blog?
3. What should we write about?
4. Our required compliance process causes posts to be bland and not timely.
5. Blogging doesn’t really fit our business model.
6. Sure…we blog (last post was in September 2009!)

Consumer empowerment

Why have Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn become so popular and well accepted by the public? It’s because these sites finally empower the consumer. They have a voice; they have opinions; they want to share their thoughts, ideas, complaints and experiences. Of course, that’s not the only reason people are using Social Media networks, but certainly these are the sort of places people vent.

A more acceptable label

Because of this strong consumer focus, I believe that the term ‘blog’, in and of itself, creates a problem for most B2B marketers.

Business marketers should focus on what they are trying to achieve with a blog. Isn’t it really all about Reputation Management and/or Customer Relationship Management? These are likely two efforts that most B2B marketers are already actively involved in. Blogging should be viewed (and labeled) as an extension of these accepted programs.

Build customer relationships

No matter what business you’re in (B2C or B2B) your success is measured and defined by obtaining, keeping and growing customers. In order to do that, your organization must:

• Build sustainable, trusting relationships with those customers

• Develop brand loyalty amongst your customers so they continue to purchase from you and keep coming back

Blogging (oops, I mean Customer Relationship Management)…allows you to connect with your customers at a personal level.

Connect with your customer

To be perfectly honest, many B2B sites I review are nothing more than corporate jargon or a marketing brochure turned into a website. The information is somewhat dry. Meaning, these sites discuss their products, their services, their solutions…it’s all about them, and has very little to do with the end-user and their needs.

The battle for the marketer who wishes to transform the entrenched corporate message is no small task. It’s a lot easier to talk about what you’re good at versus how your solutions solve a real problem.

That said, blogging can help bridge the gap between your corporate brand identity and a real personality that connects with your customers online, on a personal level.

B2B blog content

Your blog posts are designed to speak in a natural language. Blogs allow people to “join the conversation” already taking place about your organization. Some posts will be about internal happenings, others will address common complaints. For example:

• Notify customers and prospects about upcoming events.
• Encourage people to join your User Groups.
• Respond to comments about recent press releases.
• Summarize key points from discussions with industry experts and thought leaders (both inside and outside of your company).
• Become your industry’s own thought leader by providing some informational, educational, and even sometimes, provocative content to engage your audience.
• Summarize your case studies. Write a 200-300 word post that quickly shows how your solutions solved a client’s problem.
• Are you involved in email marketing or do you have a monthly newsletter? Take existing content and slice it up into several blog posts.

The possibilities are endless. Think outside of the box!

Capitalize on Real-Time search results

Search engines are committed to integrating real-time conversations and fresh content into search results. This presents a huge, immediate opportunity for B2B marketers.

Here is a simple 4-step process that combines the power of B2B blogging with social media channels to maximize your results.

1. Create a blog post
2. Post the blog headline on Twitter
3. Update your status in Facebook and LinkedIn. In case you don’t know, this is just a snippet of text letting your friends and followers know what you’re up to. It’s similar to posting on Twitter.
4. Post related video (if available) to YouTube.

Reach far, reach wide – but do pull your audience back to your website. Remember, you own the customer, not the Social Media networks.

Create a Social Media boomerang

When you combine the power of your B2B blog with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. you’ve got Social Media on steroids! It’s literally like throwing a boomerang that comes full circle.

In essence, tying your blog to the Social Media outlets creates an iterative engagement process. If you only post to your blog, those comments are not likely to be read by the target audience you want to engage. Sure, you’ll probably enjoy a temporary boost in search rankings for those posts, but you can’t rely on your blog alone.

The idea of the boomerang is that it reaches out, it’s proactive, and you’re inviting those not yet involved in the conversation to come take a look. And hopefully you’ll have the final, most important piece of the puzzle which is to capture their contact information at your site.

So what are you waiting for? Go toss the boomerang, engage with your customers, and communicate more often. If you don’t, your competitors will!

A full-blown B2B Search Engine Marketing (SEM) program starts with a well thought out strategy and typically combines all of these approaches to create total online market domination. However, if you must crawl before you run, in this article you will learn:

• when to use SEO
• when to use PPC
• when to use SMO
• when it’s time to get serious and combine ALL of them!

Prioritize marketing goals

This may seem oversimplified, but the first thing you must do before deciding on the best strategy is to determine what your goals are. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Are you primarily interested in generating leads?

Do you sell directly to the consumer or do you wholesale to retailers?

Do you have an informational site where you want someone to download a whitepaper or something similar?

What is your end goal? Phone call, email, download, live chat?

Have you clearly identified your paths to conversion on your site?

Is it clear to the site visitor when landing on the home page who you are, what it is you provide, and is there a clear call-to-action that causes them to click to the next page?

3 steps to get started

Step 1: Determine the best strategy to accomplish your business and marketing objectives. Lead generation, sell direct to the consumer, live chat, download, etc.

Step 2: Determine the actions (conversions) that make the most sense for your website, deliver value to customers, and move you closer to your goals.

Step 3: Determine your available budget. Let’s look at a few instances of when you might use SEO vs. PPC vs. SMO…vs. the full enchilada!

Best times for B2B SEO programs

Here are some perfect examples of when to focus first on SEO:

You have a new website

SEO should be one of your first considerations when building a brand new website! Please do not consider SEO as an afterthought. It pains me to have to inform new clients of mistakes they’ve made in their site development or, worse yet, choosing the wrong CMS, and now it’s going to cost them a lot more time and money just to get their site to be considered “search engine friendly.”

When you’re building a brand new site, be sure to optimize it correctly from the very start. The important thing to know is that all new sites need to be optimized effectively for search, in order to be successful long term.

You’ve made major revisions to your site’s structure

Once again, if you’re making revisions to your site, be sure to conduct a rigorous quality control check upon completion. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen money thrown out the door due to changes being made to a site and all the previous optimization efforts thrown out the window. Doh! Don’t forget to connect the dots! Broken code and server errors can and will doom your site.

You add or delete a significant portion of content from your website

Perhaps you need to change a page’s location or you need to remove information that has already been indexed and ranked by the search engines. You now risk losing search rankings and more if you don’t inform the search engines of your new forwarding address. Remember to follow the rules related to 301 permanent redirects.

Considering B2B PPC programs

Here are some scenarios when PPC makes the most sense:

Time is more important than money

If you feel you don’t have the time to wait for significant organic improvements, then PPC can give you the instant gratification you desire. The beauty of PPC: within several minutes, you can immediately begin generating traffic to your site. Still though, you must follow the 3 simple steps above or you’re likely to bankrupt yourself through a PPC campaign that generates traffic, but no leads!

The perfect testing ground

Most B2B marketers simply see PPC as a way to generate traffic and leads. True! But what’s more compelling about PPC is the real-time gathering of data about your site visitors and being able to test in real-time different messages and calls to action.

Utilizing ad copy and landing page testing, you can pay for traffic, measure, track, tweak, and test again in a much more timely fashion than with SEO. It’s a continual process that you should always be undergoing. What you learn from PPC, you then implement into your organic SEO efforts.

When to implement B2B social media programs

Finally, examples of when to use social media:

To manage your online reputation

Social Media is here to stay, or at least it appears so! The people have spoken. Large brands like Comcast, Zappos, Dell, Cisco and more are embracing Social Media as a way to quickly respond to their customers’ complaints and develop, new, long-lasting relationships. Social Media is a way for organizations to put a name, face, and a personality to their organizations. You don’t have to embrace it, but I promise you your competitors will!

To develop brand awareness

Create a fun, engaging blog. Tweet your blog posts. Share with your friends and fans on Facebook. Be creative and develop a video related to your post. Share on YouTube and the multitude of other video podcasting sites.

But remember…if all you’re doing is trying to sell something right out of the gate…you’ll fail!

To enhance your SEO efforts

That’s right! Need more incoming links to your site? Of course you do! Utilizing the power of Social Media…Brand Awareness…Online Reputation, you can stand out in the crowd and watch your incoming back link profile skyrocket as you get new followers, friends and fans.

Implementing multi-channel marketing

When to combine SEO, PPC, SMO, and more…

The best search marketing campaigns are a happy marriage between SEO, PPC, SMO, Conversion, and Analytics. As you can see above, there is a definite time to use one or the other…and at times, both.

A comprehensive Search Marketing strategy will give you the best of all worlds and multiplies your chances of having a successful search campaign 10 fold. Success is truly all about balance. If budgets allow, it makes the most sense to execute a comprehensive strategy where each component is tied to the next.

Want to dominate your business niche? Implement a long-term comprehensive search marketing strategy that combines optimization, paid search advertising and social media.

• Hire an in-house SEO employee
• Work with an individual SEO consultant
• Outsource to a search engine marketing (SEM) agency

Typically this decision is not conducted using a proper cost/benefit analysis comparing costs to the total value you’re receiving. If you think in terms of price only, from lowest to highest, the SEO consultant is typically your cheapest option and the agency the most expensive. But, should you base your decision on price alone?

Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons associated with each option.

Hire an in-house SEO employee

Pros:

• All B2B marketers should have someone on board who fully understands SEO and internet marketing in general.
• An in-house SEO usually has direct access to internal resources for quick turnaround of necessary changes to a website.
• This person usually understands the vertical they operate in better than someone from the outside.
• They are much more concerned with their company’s success and bottom-line results knowing their job depends on the direct success of their efforts.
• The in-house person will more than likely guard the company against using tactics that could get the company site banned from the search engines.
• An intermediate level SEO will at minimum cost around $75,000/yr. > $60,000 salary + $15,000 in benefits or $6,250/mo. Expect to pay $100k+ for advanced level SEOs.

Cons:

• In-house SEOs are rarely only working on website optimization. More often than not, the SEO employee is wearing several hats.
• In-house SEOs are extremely susceptible to “going elsewhere” once they’ve honed their skills. SEO experts are in demand! Commonly they will be approached by the competition, an agency, or seek the opportunity to start their own business.
• Rarely does an in-house SEO have all the necessary skill requirements such as marketing strategy development, analytics experience, conversion improvement skills, copywriting experience—and the list goes on.

Work with an individual SEO consultant

Pros:

• Assuming we’re talking about a qualified, experienced consultant, this person is solely focused on SEO, knowing what’s happening in the industry, ensuring that the techniques they’re using will bring the greatest benefit to their client.
• The SEO consultant understands that they have to be more than just a traffic generator. An increase in visibility must convert to qualified visitors and finally leads/sales.
• The smart SEO will belong to a large network of search marketers and will have relationships with different networks allowing them to easily negotiate links purchases and find the best places to help promote their client.
• There are no out-of-pocket expenses to the client to keep the consultant trained or certified in their discipline.
• A qualified SEO consultant will at minimum charge between $100 – $200/hr. Monthly contracts range from $3000 – $7500/mo.

Cons:

• Individual consultants are usually serving many firms, so the time dedicated to your company may only be 10-33% of their total time.
• Most SEO consultants are very good at their discipline of SEO but lack additional skills required to generate the maximum ROI for a B2B client in a specific vertical.
• If traffic is the only thing you’re concerned with, the SEO consultant can certainly add value. But, it is usually outside of the SEO consultants’ expertise to increase overall website ROI.

Outsource to a search marketing agency

Pros:

• A solid, experienced agency, especially one who specializes in B2B search marketing, will usually have a much broader perspective and greater experience because of the many different types of clients they work with.
• Agencies usually have more “tips and tricks” at their disposal to generate results in ways not known to beginner and intermediate optimizers.
• Agencies work across multiple disciplines such as SEO, PPC, web design, web conversion improvement, analytics, copywriting, email marketing, etc. and therefore have the expertise and resources at their disposal to help their clients achieve the greatest success.
• Agency personnel usually will have a much broader set of industry resources and contacts to reach out to in order to provide solutions to sometimes complicated issues.
• More often than not, you can hire a SEM Agency, a team of internet marketing professionals, for the annual cost of one in-house specialist.
• Typical agency fees for SEO range between $5,000 – $20,000/mo or more depending on the scope of the project.
• It’s much easier to cancel your contract with an agency than it is to let go of an employee who may be involved in multiple areas of the company.

Cons:

• Oftentimes, agencies do not have required access to internal IT resources for a quick turnaround in SEO implementation tasks.
• Compliance and legal issues may hinder the agency’s ability to execute the most optimal search marketing plan on a timely basis.
• Agencies must rely on an internal person for proper communication and to be the liaison with IT.

Frankly, I believe the best option, if you can afford it, is to have both an intermediate SEO manager in-house and hire an expert search marketing agency for all the reasons stated above. The bottom line is that your optimal choice will depend on your business, your goals and your budget.