In House Search Marketing covers the daily tasks and challenges that face in-house SEO’s and search marketers who manage internal programs as they deal with everything from budgetary issues to office politics. In house search marketing isn’t just for big business and household brands anymore – small businesses, start-ups and developing brands often utilize In-House search marketers to manage all aspects of search/social and PPC as a way to fully control their search efforts and expenditures. Columnists share successes and failures they’ve had as in-house SEO & SEM practitioners, getting executive buy-in and bigger budgets, offer advice on employing search agencies and vendors, as well as recruiting additional in-house expertise.

Sign Up To Receive This Column Via Email:

3 Guidelines To Scale Your SEM Team

May 16, 2012 at 10:03am ET by Richard Carey

There is a phenomenon within organizations that causes productivity to decline as teams grow larger. This phenomenon is described in economics as a diseconomy of scale and is caused by at least three factors including increased communication costs, duplication of effort, and top-heavy management. These three components can cripple an SEM team that grows larger than four or five members. On my current team, there are 31 people globally across SEO, Paid, and Site Search so we have to be careful to not fall victim to the diseconomy of scale. To combat decreased efficiency, I recommend thr [...]

Related Topics: In House Search Marketing

The Most Destructive Lie In Search Marketing

Apr 18, 2012 at 9:51am ET by Richard Carey

The biggest lie in search marketing is that paid and organic search are separate channels. From the customer's perspective, paid and natural search are nearly identical. In fact, according to this study done by Performics last year, around a third of all searchers don't even know the difference between a paid and a natural search listing. This lie wouldn't be a big deal except that it causes advertisers to under-optimize their search marketing programs. There have been several studies done to show that having a paid and organic listing on the same SERP can either cannibalize or have [...]

Related Topics: In House Search Marketing

Do It Yourself A/B Testing

Apr 4, 2012 at 12:53pm ET by Conrad Saam

I always start marketing interviews with a phone screen of some variant of the following question: “Let’s say this is your first day at Urbanspoon and I show you the following data. We’ve just launched an A/B test of that I’d like you to evaluate. [The example can be almost anything you want to test different results for – from almost any search element, PPC campaigns, email subject lines etc. In this case, I’m using a PPC example.] Imagine you are running two different ads on a campaign with 50 kewords. We’ve been running Ad A for a while and have 17,235 impressions and 272 cli [...]

Top 3 Paid Search Marketing Features Underused By In-House SEM’s

Mar 28, 2012 at 1:51pm ET by Kelly Gillease

Are in-house search engine marketers taking full advantage of all the features and tools at their fingertips? Being more organized, efficient, or better informed may not require additional special tools or staff, but just better utilization of the fantastic features already provided for free by search engines. In-house marketers are always under pressure to do more and taking full advantage of these features and tools is a step in the right direction. My Client Center That agencies and consultants are the only users of AdWords’ My Client Center is a common misconception. While the multi [...]

Related Topics: In House Search Marketing

The Hidden Lever In Paid Search Optimization

Mar 21, 2012 at 9:19am ET by Richard Carey

There have been many articles written about paid search optimization, but there is one piece of the optimization puzzle that continually gets left out. The hidden lever in paid search optimization is prioritization. Prioritizing optimization opportunities is equally as important as doing the optimization itself. I have seen double digit increases in performance and significant time savings in every program that has implemented a prioritization process, even if they were previously using a fixed schedule for optimization. There is so much work to do on a paid search account that someone cou [...]

Related Topics: In House Search Marketing

Become a PRO member and see all articles in our In House Search Marketing archives!

PRO Members get unrestricted access to all archives - and more!

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Free Daily Search News Recap!

SearchCap is a once-per-day newsletter update - sign up below and get the news delivered to you!

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX Advanced - June 5-6, 2012
SMX East - Oct. 2-4, 2012
SMX Social Media Marketing - Dec. 5-6, 2012
SMX Toronto - April 2013

EMEA

SMX Paris - June 7-8 2012
SMX Stockholm - Oct. 15-16, 2012
SMX Munich - Apr. 9-10, 2013
SMX London - May 2013

APAC

SMX Melbourne - Sept. 5-6, 2012
SMX Sydney - May 2013

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.