I’ll admit that this topic was triggered by an article I read this evening about the 50th anniversary of the Munich Disaster that takes place next week on February 6th. 23 people died, including 8 first team players for Manchester United. The manager was hospitalized, and the assistant manager who wasn’t on the plane had 13 days to rebuild a competitive team before their next game. Disaster planning is also a topic that’s been raised many times throughout my career, and is generally more of an issue within small companies due to the lack of available resources.

Let’s start off with what you should be doing now, and then move into what you should do when that bus comes careening recklessly down the road.

Proactive damage mitigation

As much as people hate to take the time to write things down, the need for them to document processes and client interactions is vital. Using a good project management tool and getting the team to buy in to using it will save you many headaches down the road. In the past I’ve used Basecamp, which seems to be a favorite of other SEOs that I’ve spoken to, but these days I use a product called ClockingIT, which has the added benefit of being free, so there’s no excuse not to use it. There are plenty of other project management tools out there, and as long as you use one of them and not a collection of white boards in the hallway you should be fine.

If the team truly is a team (that is, it’s not a team of one), there should be cross training and regular project and process meetings to ensure that you have a functional backup for each team member. In larger teams, each member most likely has a functional speciality—analytics, SEO, SMO, etc. Having team members be backup for different areas gives them more of the bigger picture view of the team, allowing them to appreciate the impacts that the various functional areas can have on each other. Don’t forget that at the very least you want to be able to let your team members take vacations and sick days when they need to, without severely impacting your schedules. Cross training gives you the support to be able to allow them to do that.

Post-loss—the solo shop

For a company that has an in-house staff of one, two weeks or less will most likely not be enough time to find the right candidate for the position and get them trained. Sure, it may happen—but that depends on the supply of qualified candidates in your area willing to jump in right away. Your best option may be to bring in an agency to bridge the gap while you look for the right person; you could even involve the agency in the interviewing process, as they may be able to identify functional gaps that you may not have known to look for. Assuming there is a two-week notice, the outgoing SEM can train the agency staff member with any domain knowledge that they will need to have to complete the tasks. The documentation that they created proactively will go a long way to helping with this transition, and the one from the agency to the new hire, when you do find the right person.

Post-loss—the in-house team

If you’ve cross trained the team, and the potential capacity is there, then the team should be able to pick up the urgent short term tasks while the hiring process for the new team member moves into top gear. Once the new member is hired, the documentation and the current in-house knowledge should bring them up to speed quickly.

As long as you plan for the certainty that you will lose team members, you will find that you minimize the disruption to your projects and your company. As for what happened in 1958: the assistant manager patched together a team out of reserves and bit players from other teams, along with the few players that eventually recovered from their crash injuries, and that cobbled together Manchester United team went all the way to the cup final.

Simon Heseltine is the Director of Search at Serengeti Communications a McLean, Virginia based digital marketing agency, runs the Virginia Search Marketing Meetup group and writes for Endless Plain. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

What follows are interviews with Melanie Mitchell, the VP of SEO and SEM at AOL, Patrick Schaber, Marketing Manager, George Bounacos, Sr. Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Innovectra, and Edward Serrano, President of Nine Blue.

What’s your favorite search marketing tool?

Melanie: For the publicly available tools I would have to say WordTracker. Before you write me off as “uncool” for not naming the latest trendy gadget, let me explain why. Keyword research is one of the most important parts of SEO. Wordtracker data is easy to use and is displayed in a user-friendly format that shows how often specific keywords/phrases are searched for, as well as the number of sites for which these keywords and phrases compete. This, of course, gives you a better understanding of how people are searching for a particular subject and possibly provide you with ideas for target terms you may not have thought of otherwise.

A useful addition to Wordtracker’s suite of offerings is the related keyword facility. We have 70+ channels and products and we cannot be experts in every subject matter we work with, and facilities like this help us, as well as our programming and editorial folks, uncover many related keywords and phrases that we may never even have considered to be valuable.

Patrick: I’m a big fan of Google AdWords for paid search.

George: My favorite tool is querying the raw server logs. I also love my thesaurus and Excel or Access. Everything else is a nice to have.

Edward: Google Analytics. It’s so broad and deep in its offerings, especially when combined with the e-commerce option—that it makes business fascinating.

I asked the group for their thoughts on the “is SEO rocket science?” debate from a while ago, because it still pops up from time to time, and I wanted to hear what those working in large and small corporations across the US thought on the topic. As you may expect, they all agreed that Search Marketing isn’t rocket science, but I did want to share a couple of the responses.

Anthony: I love this question because it comes around so often in many ways. My off the cuff answer is “of course it’s not rocket science, but I don’t think it’s a fair comparison.” You could argue that search marketing is harder to master than rocket science because if you go to “rocket science school” and get your “rocket science degree,” then you are done and no one questions you—you are a rocket scientist. In our field, you don’t need a degree or even specialized training, but you do need to be committed to continually learning as things change so rapidly. Also, a lot of what is “shared” in our industry is speculation or hypothesis based on someone’s experience, but others are often quicker to debate it rather than embrace it or test it. This just says more about where the (SEM) industry is and how people respect it (or not).

Edward: Search marketing is common sense. I like to think that it gives us the ability to target mind-set and needs instead of demographics. Traditional marketing vehicles such as print advertising lack what search makes clearly available to us—the ability to target people who are in need of a particular set (and even subset) of products/services and deliver what they need at that moment—and just as importantly, not target those who don’t need that product/service.

Last, I asked about the adoption of social media strategies within their companies: what’s the In-House take on social media?

Melanie: I cannot comment on the details. However, I can tell you we are seeing double digit percentage increases in traffic in a number of cases.

Patrick: Our strategy involves blogging which we hope will appeal to our audience and also to search engine crawlers. Along with that, we’re starting to socialize our content on niche social media sites. Our content is starting to get some momentum and so far the results are what we expected.

Edward: I’ve not delved too deeply in social media and thus don’t fully understand it enough to capitalize on opportunities. I also think that the sheer number of online marketing options have forced small/medium sized companies to, in effect, choose children. Having limited resources requires us to seek to develop and improve those areas of our online marketing efforts that will have the best immediate and short-term payback (pay the bills, you know), and attempting to dip into new marketing avenues involves time and research which often takes away from proven producers… the common opportunity cost issue.

Thanks to the group for answering my questions. Now, a question for you, dear reader: Are there any particular topics that you’d like me, or the other Search Engine Land In-House columnists to focus on for future columns? Post your requests over on Sphinn.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for several years before moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. In January 2008 RedBoots will move to a new brand: In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

What follows are interviews with Melanie Mitchell, the VP of SEO and SEM at AOL, Anthony Kirlew, Internet Marketing Consultant & In-House SEM Specialist, Patrick Schaber, Marketing Manager, George Bounacos, Sr. Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Innovectra, and Edward Serrano, President of Nine Blue. . The first question that I asked the group was to identify the biggest challenge(s) to their search marketing success.

Melanie: Getting management to understand the importance of SEO and rallying the organization around it. Much of educating management comes down to education of what it is, what it can do, what’s it going to take to get there, as well as tying all of it to an ROI. If I was going to ask executives to commit to a search marketing strategy, I had to show them how it would pay off.

Influencing the overall organization—and depending on its size—can be a big challenge. There are many different groups with many different personalities that you need to work with, and they have their own goals and objectives that may not align with yours. Many of these folks also have their own opinions on how to do SEO from gathering snippets from various sources. As many of us know, when you first begin to learn about SEO it can be a bit overwhelming—and there are thousands of online blogs out there about search marketing. Some of the information on these blogs is right on, but some of it is outdated as it is a dynamic industry that is always evolving. Some of it is easily misinterpreted, or just plain wrong. Thus, for these and many other reasons, it takes a lot of work to influence people who don’t directly report to you or your group. You have to show “what’s in it for them.”

Anthony: Working with developers or managers who just don’t get SEM, but let their egos take over to where they continue to question your suggestions and recommendations (and not for the sake of learning) because they can’t fathom that you know something that they don’t understand.

A close second would be working with management that really doesn’t understand what the results of SEM should be. This is a reminder to anyone looking at taking an in-house position to make sure you discuss “traffic and ranking” goals and expectations explicitly before you start; this way, your success will be documented and no one can question whether or not you are doing what you were hired for.

Patrick: My biggest challenge as a small business in-house marketer is time. Search marketing is not a one-time setup project. This is something that takes time each day and needs dedicated resources.

George: Biggest challenge is balancing an organization’s strategic needs with the industry’s dynamic nature. You can’t chase every new fad, but knowing which fads will turn out to be good or bad long-run is like reading tea leaves. Ultimately, you have to compartmentalize your knowledge and continue to view the page and site as a new visitor would.

Edward: Access to reliable and credible information. With the advent of AdWords a few years ago, Google had an interest in educating the business world on contextual advertising and the science behind it all, but the same hasn’t happened for other areas such as search engine optimization, et al. I find that in the area of SEO, most of my time is spent wading through loads of misinformation and gathering bits and pieces of credible information to then construct the logic path to success. With regards to CPC, I’d say that the biggest challenge is properly and cost-effectively tapping into the content network. While a ton of web sites carry AdSense like code which allows advertisers to generate relevant leads/prospects, the analytics/tracking for that part of CPC is lacking.

One topic that always seems to be an issue for In-House search marketers is finding the right people, at all levels, but it’s especially an issue when you need to hire someone to lead your In-House effort. To that end I asked the group to illuminate me on the skills and experience they’d look for if they were promoted to the next level in their organization and had to hire their replacement.

Melanie: Besides having to understand the space, you need someone who is personable and is not easily overwhelmed. This person would have to be ok with wearing multiple hats throughout the day and be able to constantly shift gears. Additionally, this person would also have to be able to look beyond the immediate needs and be able to lay out a longer term strategy of where we are, where we need to be, and how do we get there.

Anthony: Skills—a good mix of all things that comprise SEM:

• Organic search marketing (including site coding)

• Link building (and link baiting)
• An understanding of what really matters (e.g., Results vs. Toolbar Page Rank)
• PPC / Paid Search
• Social Media Marketing
• Metrics analysis and tracking
• A good overall business sense. Many execs don’t realize what an integral part of a company the SEM person plays and they miss out on valuable industry insight that comes around in SEM circles or other competitive analysis than a good SEM Consultant can provide.

Experience: If I were hiring my replacement, it would be for a management position, so I’d want to make sure the person had several years of experience directly doing all of the above, not just one component such as paid campaigns. I would also want to see results—the numbers don’t lie. If there were one strength I’d want to see, it would be Social Media Marketing because anyone who does SMM well usually gets good results with traffic.

Patrick: As a small business marketer I handle multiple aspects of marketing, so that is a tough question. But, I would for sure be looking for some kind of search engine marketing experience on the resume. They don’t have to be experts, but need some familiarity with paid search, social media, and writing optimized content for the web.

George: I would look for balance in a replacement. They need people skills up and down and especially externally. They also need good perspective on business and their industry. They have to be a solutions provider, not a specialist looking to fit each client’s need to their skills. Finally, they need to know which information to capture and how to effectively present that to customers and management. They need to learn 43 variations on the spelling of the word “troy.” Maybe not the last.;)

Edward: A solid analytical background. While we all have access to tons of information on the inner workings of our web sites and traffic, it takes a person who can interpret mounds of data and derive a workable path to success based on it. Recaps and summaries don’t solve complex problems or reveal potential opportunities. Analytics web services have relieved us of the heavy lifting, but someone has to make sense of it all.

Tune in to my next column, where the group names their favorite search marketing tools, discusses the role of social media in their organizations, and gives further opinions on the complexities of search marketing from an In-House perspective.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for several years before moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. In January 2008 RedBoots will move to a new brand – Serengeti Communications. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Of course, the reality is that it’s not like that, although it may sometimes feel like as though it is. Both the search marketing team and the IT team are on the same side. Both want the corporate site to succeed, and both want to be a part of that success. As an in-house search marketer, here are some of the issues that you’ll probably encounter, and how to deal with them (writing as a former developer, these are observations from both sides of the fence).

Personality clash

We’re all human. Everyone has a different personality, and while some work well with others, some just don’t. Some of the more frequent personality types that you’ll encounter include:

• The know-it-all

• The closed mind
• The control freak

The know-it-all thinks that they know everything about the web, and as such your requirements are merely “recommendations.” How can you know what needs to be done on the web site when that’s their job? To work with this personality you do need to network with them, and then you want to educate them. This can be done subtly by sending them articles that you “think they’d be interested in reading,” and by inviting them to formal training sessions within the company. It may be wise to invite them to training sessions for management so that they’ll have to take part, rather than disrupt the meeting with interruptions as they “make their point,” or as they sit there playing with their smart phone, not listening. You’ll have to decide based on your experience of interactions with the person which is the best approach.

The closed mind is a dangerous personality type, especially if they’re incompetent. The closed mind just doesn’t want to listen. They have their way of doing things and that’s the way it’s going to be. They’ll make excuses that they don’t have the resources, or that implementing your recommendations would involve a radical change to the system that just isn’t budgeted, etc. When dealing with this personality, you may feel like you’re in a constant battle to get anything accomplished. The only way around the problem is to network with management, as you’ll find that they’ll have more sway with this personality type than you. However, that can also lead to resentment, so it has to be done carefully and without malice, as you want the focus to be on getting the work scheduled and done, not on the personality issues.

The control freak is an interesting personality to work with. They want all changes to go through them. They’ll send back changes that don’t conform to their standards, which may, most likely, make sense in an ideal world, but in this non-ideal world that you’re operating in, may just serve to hinder and slow down your work. The way to deal with them is to work within the guidelines where necessary, and work to change the guidelines that don’t make sense. Use your position on the search marketing team to set your own guidelines, stroking the ego of the IT control freak, by letting them know that you’re doing this based on the success of their work on guidelines. Heck, you can even then turn the monitoring of the guidelines over to them, since they like doing that. Then the next time that changes are made they’ll have the power of approving the changes based on guidelines that you’ve set. If they want to take credit for the success of the guidelines, let them do it. As long as the work’s getting done and implemented, what does it matter?

With any of these personality types, and especially when you’re dealing with a combination, you’re going to want to keep a close eye on the site so that previous recommendations of yours don’t suddenly get changed because IT decided that another way was better—for example, moving the analytics code to an external file because “it all looks the same.” If you don’t notice a change before it goes live, you’re going to notice it the next time you look at your analytics and either see a massive spike or a drop to zero in conversions.

Corporate priorities

In a lot of organizations, especially smaller companies with limited budgets, you’ll find that you’re going to have a battle for resources, especially when the work directly involves the IT team (database modifications, content management systems, integration, etc). The challenges here involve getting buy-in that your recommendations will be more beneficial to the long term success of the site than that new piece of functionality the IT team wants to implement.

This, again, is where educating your organization and networking within your organization will enable you to get your items on “the list.” You’ll also have to accept that there will be times when management will deem other work more important than the work you’re recommending. What you should do then is, after making a point of the opportunity cost, look at the work that has been approved, and see how search marketing can be applied to that work.

You’ll also have the challenge of scope-creep in other projects forcing your project to be pushed out into the next release cycle. Regardless of how much educating and networking you’ve done, you may not be able to get your project back on the schedule. All you can do then is make everyone aware of the opportunity cost of the delay, and get ready to make your case for the prioritization meeting for the next release.

In reality, the in-house search marketing team and the IT team are both on the same side. The issue is that they both see the prize at the end of the road, but they may have mapped out different routes to get there. It’s only by working together, and understanding the issues that each faces, that you can compromise and find the best and fastest route to success.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for a medium sized Virginia company before moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. He also organizes the Virginia SEM meetup group. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

First, let’s look at the places that you can get your education:

Blogs

The big two here are Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch. Why are they the big two? Well, apart from the fact that they both have many columns addressing various aspects of SEM, and they both keep on top of all search news, both of them put out daily lists of links to other blogs and articles that either say something new and original, or contribute a new perspective to an ongoing blogosphere discussion. So if you just read these two blogs, you’re going to get exposure to a variety of viewpoints, and be kept very well informed on most of what’s happening in search.

Forums

Forums allow you to be involved on a day to day basis in a much more dynamic environment, enabling you to ask and answer questions with other forum participants. Different forums have different styles, focus, and ‘rules of engagement’, so you’ll probably want to lurk for a while to get a feel for a forum, just to make sure that it’s the right place for you to spend your time. Examples to check out here include: The Search Engine Watch Forums, the Cre8asite Forums and the Small Business Brief Forum. While it’s not a true forum, I’m also going to include Sphinn in here, as you do have the ability to create discussion threads, and the comment threads tied to a particular article are sometimes more informative than the original articles.

Conferences

Conferences are a great place to get an in depth education on a variety of SEM topics. The standard bearer for years has been Search Engine Strategies (SES), with PubCon being another option. However, this year has seen the entrance of Search Marketing Expo (SMX). To determine which conference you should attend, you should look at the focus of the conference (some of these conferences are becoming more specialized, focusing on topics such as SMX Local & Mobile and SMX Social Media), the sessions being offered (will they add enough value to cover the cost?), and the location (the conference promoters try their best to spread the conferences throughout the US, and throughout the world. If you’re East coast, then maybe you’ll want to wait the 3 months for the next New York conference, rather than heading out to one on the West coast). Conferences are also a great place to network and meet people that can answer questions that you may have either at that time, or at a later date.

Training Courses

These days more and more vendors seem to be offering training courses on SEM topics. Training ranges from more personal training than you’d receive at a conference session, to specialized training in one or more specific areas of SEM, to tool vendors giving you ‘hands-on’ training on their products. With training courses you need to research the type of training that you are looking for, and look for a best fit based on your needs.

Books

Books? For something that I described as a constantly changing field? Yes, books. There are some good ones out there that can give you a good grounding in overall strategy / tool set use, even if in 6-12 months time they may prove to be outdated. Some examples of books that I’d recommend you read are: “The new Rules of Marketing and PR” by David Meerman Scott, and “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” by Avinash Kaushik. Then there are the e-books that you download that are usually regularly updated by their authors. Examples of SEM ebooks include: Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, and Jennifer Laycock’s Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing.

Networking

In a previous in-house column in Search Engine Land, Duane Forrester did an excellent job discussing how an in-house SEM can build both their internal and external networks, so I’m not going to reprise that here.

So, now that you have all of that education, what are you going to do with it? Well, obviously you’re going to apply it to your job. But here’s another thing that you should do. You should now turn around and become an educator yourself. Take the knowledge that you’ve gained, and spread it around your company. Obviously, other members of your team should be trained up, so that they get the benefit of everything that you’ve picked up that’s pertinent to the job. You should also give upper management overviews of what you’ve learned, and how it’s going to benefit the company when applied. You should take the opportunity to pull in team leaders from other departments, and let them know what you’re doing and why. Let the IT group know why you’re going to be pushing for certain architectural changes on the site. Let corporate communications know why you’re going to recommend particular changes to the press release process flow, etc. If you can get the organization on your side up front, then you’ll have a much easier task the next time the budget is being discussed, or even at corporate task prioritization time.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for a medium sized Virginia company before moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. He also organizes the Virginia SEM meetup group. The In House column appears on Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

Let’s first look at why you may need to bring in an outside agency.

Training. Expanding the knowledge of the team is a vital task, either in general terms, in a specific area, or for a specific tool. There are different levels of training provided by different vendors, from online courses to ‘hand holding’ with continual support.

Proof of Concept. If the company is unsure about the benefits to be gained by an in-house search marketing effort, then hiring an outside vendor gives the company the ability to prove the concept prior to committing resources. The same can be said of starting any new project that has an uncertain future.

Scaling. If the demand for search marketing work exceeds the in-house resources available, then an outside agency can be used to pick up the slack. This can give the in-house team some breathing room to hire more resources, with the goal of eventually replacing the agency. Alternatively it can allow the in-house team to concentrate on whatever areas of speciality are deemed to be corporate core competencies, leaving the agency to work on whatever ‘unsexy’ items remain.

Expert Resources. Agencies can be used in an advisory capacity to keep the company informed of recent industry or tool changes. They can advise on long term and short term tactics and strategies. They can also be used to perform search marketing audits, pointing the in-house team in the right direction and telling them what they didn’t know they didn’t know.

Whatever the reason for bringing in an agency, you need to ensure that the one that you bring in to work with your company and your in-house team is the right one. The first step after identifying potential agencies is to talk to them and ask them questions, to ensure that they do indeed have the knowledge or skills that you need. You should get a list of references and talk to them, probing for details of their strong points are, and then determine whether those strong points align with the goals of your project. Ensure that they do things “the right way.” When you do finally select an agency, you need to work with them to make sure that the contract aligns with your goals in terms of length of the contract, price and objectives.

Remember that during this process the agency is also vetting you as a working partner. They want to know what the working relationship is going to be like, they want to be able to have as clear an understanding of the resource requirements as possible. They also want to know the expected level of involvement of your in-house team. They want to know if they make recommendations whether they will be implemented and how long will it take. They want to know up front whether they’re building up a system that will transition to an in-house team, or whether this could be the start of a longer term relationship, so that they can price it accordingly.

This is where you have to be honest about your intentions. If you intend to just use the agency as a stop-gap measure, or as a proof of concept, yet you tell them that you intend to establish a long term relationship, you’re not only being unethical, you’re damaging whatever trust you’ve built with that agency, which will harm you should you need to use them again in the future. In response to an earlier in-house column, Nancy McCord recounted her experience with this:

I have worked in several situations being the outside contractor and have been used by the in-house staff to create programs only to be told later that they had decided to move the program that I helped to forge in-house.

I understand that this can be a smart business decision to cut costs, but based on this experience I no longer discount my prices or offer proprietary information that will be used to build a business and then cut me out of it.

It is only through establishing trust and building on it, over the course of the relationship, that a win-win situation can be created for both the in-house effort and the supporting agency.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for a medium sized Virginia company before moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. He also organizes the Virginia SEM meetup group. The In House column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.

The benefits of an internal blog are easy to see. But first, how do you restrict the readers to just your internal corporate audience? You simply install your blog software of choice on a server behind your corporate firewall. This creates what’s known as a “dark blog,” a blog that’s completely hidden to the outside world. Once installed and secure, your internal teams have the opportunity to share their thoughts, commenting back and forth on whatever topics they need to—product improvements, training, knowledge sharing, cross team communication, etc, without the worry that others can see the conversations. By restricting the task of authoring posts to a core group of individuals, your company can set posting schedules, and more effectively control the message delivered to the internal audience.

Wikis are another powerful tool that can be used as an effective communication tools for internal teams. Simply decide on the features that you want for your project and install a wiki behind your firewall. Once the team starts working with it, you’ll wonder how you managed without it. One of the great uses of a wiki is as an in-house change management system, where every change to any page on the site is saved and logged with a timestamp and user identification (permissions can be set to restrict posting privileges). Whenever there’s a question on a particular project, you can scroll through the different versions of a page until you find the information that you’re looking for. Again, being behind the firewall, whatever your team puts on the wiki is as safe as anything else on your network.

You can even set up a corporate social network, allowing everyone to share thoughts and ideas in their own way. Think of it as an internal mySpace, where various corporate departments have their own presence with their own look and feel, each able to share their message in their own way, using the network to share and collaborate with other departments.

What about podcasts and videocasts? Are they overkill as internal communication tools? Not necessarily, depending on the size of your organization. For large organizations in a multitude of locations, they may be an effective way of transmitting corporate information to all the various organizational nooks and crannies around the world. You also have the option of using these tools as training mechanisms. You may even discover, as Chubb Insurance did in the 1970′s, that your corporate training becomes a core competency, and by having this stock of social media training material you’re easily able to adapt to push out your own Online University to the masses at a later date.

As an added benefit, the next time you want to push an external project using these same tools you’re going to have an internal team that will be used to the concepts, the terminology, and the benefits. It’ll make the job of getting internal buy-in on your social media project a heck of a lot easier.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for a medium sized Virginia company before moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. He also organizes the Virginia SEM meetup group. The In House column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.

There are several determining factors that are going to play into your decision process for your first in-house SEM hire. These include:

• The availability of resources, along with the time line to launch and the currently defined action plan
• The corporate culture—structure and politics, where they are going to fit, and how that role will interact with existing departments
• The availability of experienced search marketers and whether you already have an enthused in-house SME looking for a new challenge
• Competitiveness in your market place, both geographically and vertically
• The planned size and composition of the team

Whichever way you decide to go with your first in-house hire, if you’re planning on having a team of more than one, you’re going to need to make sure that the person selected can, as with any manager in your organization, provide the necessary level of leadership for the team. Organizational and personal goals need to be created in line with the corporate goals, and expectations need to be set with every stakeholder

So what are the pros and cons of each approach?

The experienced search marketer

The experienced search marketer gives you a number of advantages over the internal hire (depending on their actual experience level). First, they immediately know what they’re talking about SEM-wise, and are therefore able to get your project(s) up and running sooner. Hiring the rest of the team should also be easier, as the expert should be aware of the needs for the various aspects that they will have to hire for (SEO, PPC, analytics, etc.) and the individual traits required to be successful with each. They may have a personal network that can assist in the hiring process, or it may just be as simple as them being more aware of niche job boards that they can utilize.

Training should also be easier, as the expert should know what would be most beneficial for the team as a whole, and for the particular niche role of each individual on the team. They should also be able to provide at least a basic level of training to the entire team. The downside is that they may not know enough about the various intricacies of your industry such as history, legalities, competition, etc, so they may need some ramp up time in those areas.

The industry SME

So given all that, why would anyone go for the internal hire? What benefits can you get from that? Well, you may not be able to find an industry expert willing to work for your company, in your location, at the salary level that you are willing to pay. Given the surplus in demand and deficit in supply for experienced search marketers, that’s a real possibility. Also, given your meline, if you give the internal resource enough lead time to get themselves familiar with the basics of SEM, then they may be just as effective at building the team as the experienced search marketer (depending on the level of expertise they are able to find for the various roles on the team).

Given their familiarity with your industry and your business in particular, they may be able to highlight areas of opportunity that an outsider may not, as someone new to your industry may not know the right question to ask to get the answer that they need. Then there’s the organizational familiarity; the person that’s already in-house is a known quantity, you (and the members of the other teams that they’ll interact with) already know their personality, and their work habits, which can ease the integration of the new search function with the other business functions.

Of course, if the resources are available, then there’s nothing wrong with bringing in consultants to help either the industry SME or the experienced search marketer get up to speed faster on the areas that they need help in. This can also help to provide checks and balances, by helping them to know what they didn’t know they didn’t know.

The good news is that you’ve decided to make that first step in doing something about search marketing for your company, and the first step is typically the hardest. Make the right choice for the first hire for your company, and it gets a lot easier from then on in.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for a medium sized Virginia company before recently moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. He also organizes the Virginia SEM meetup group. The In House column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.

“Over half of advertiser respondents said they plan to manage all of their 2007 paid placement spending in-house… Nearly two thirds of advertiser respondents said they plan to manage all of their 2007 organic SEO spending in-house.”

What are the benefits of an in-house effort?

When you have a team dedicated to your search marketing effort, all they care about are the results of the work performed for your site(s). Your team would ideally be subject matter experts, intimately involved with the processes, politics, products and services of your company, easily able to know what to promote, and when to push in a particular direction both internally and externally.

At conferences and on online forums, etc. there would be a person or people representing your company to the search marketing community. This networking can assist your company by keeping your team on the cutting edge of the industry by exchanging information with others who may have encountered situations similar to those that your team will face. There are groups out there such as the SEMPO In-House committee that assist in-house search marketers with the various challenges that will undoubtedly arise as their projects move forward.

From a control perspective, it is much easier to keep tabs on an in-house team, ensuring that the tactics they employ are the best, in the long run, for your campaigns and your company as a whole.

What are the challenges?

From my experience, and from talking to others building up their teams, one of the hardest parts of building an in-house search marketing team is to find the right people. Again, your corporate strategy will determine the direction that you will want to move in. Do you want to pay for already experienced search marketers, or do you want to bring in fresh, eager, sponge-like minds, ready to absorb all that they can about the field? Of course, if you have an aggressive deadline then you may not have a choice, as it takes time to train up a team and for them to gain experience in what works, and what doesn’t.

In a similar manner to the tech boom at the end of the last century, the demand for search marketers currently outstrips the supply, so the chances are that at some point you may lose staff. Even though the work may be challenging, the pay competitive, and the resources abundant, for some people the grass is always greener on the other side. The only way to counter this is to plan for it, ensure that your processes are documented, and that there is always at least one other member of staff cross-trained in a particular discipline.

Getting your staff trained correctly can also be an issue. Depending on the direction of your in-house effort, you may need SEO training, PPC training, analytics training, tools training and so on. You have to determine which training is going to be right for each member of your team, preferably ensuring that the person you send is able to then train those who didn’t attend the training. If yours is a large organization, you can most likely get training done on-site. For smaller companies, you’ll have to send your people out to where the trainers are.

Scalability is also a concern, as an outside vendor may be able to ramp your project up much more easily than you would be able to if, for example, your requirements suddenly change due to a situation such as a gap in the market being identified that you need to take advantage of immediately.

Why outsource?

Given that search marketing service providers tend to be expensive, are potentially not focused on your goals (should you not be one of their larger clients), and may use tactics that you wouldn’t want used, why would you want to hire them? Well, as outlined above, if your schedule dictates a quick turn-around time, then you may not have a choice, at least initially. It could also be that your company decides that while SEO and analytics are core business components, PPC is not, so why not bring someone in to perform that function while the in-house team specializes in areas that you want them to concentrate on?

Even if you decide to go fully in-house and your internal effort seems to be going well, you may still want to pull in an outside vendor to do an audit on your SEM effort to ensure that the team hasn’t missed something that they didn’t know about.

Just remember that when you do pull in an outside vendor, you still need to have staff managing that relationship, facilitating cross-team conversations, and setting expectations on both sides to ensure that the SEM effort works as best as possible. The person that fills that role should also be the internal champion for the SEM effort. So, even if your company goes with a vendor for absolutely everything for the SEM function, you’re still going to have at least one in-house person.

Simon Heseltine worked as an in-house search marketer for a medium sized Virginia company before moving over to work as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. He also organizes the Virginia SEM meetup group. The In House column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.