About a week ago I got a phone call from a college buddy of mine named Paul who runs a soon-to-launch
online business. Here's how the conversation went:
Paul: "We want to hire your company to do the SEO for us. Whatever the price is, we can afford it."
Me: "Tell me a little more about your company and exactly what you expect to achieve from search."
Paul: "We want to rank #1 in Google for EVERYTHING in our industry, and I know you can do it for us."
Me: "I'd be happy to consult with your team to make sure you understand the principles of SEO and
get off on the right foot, but I think you're better off doing the work yourself."
He was perplexed. Why wouldn't we want to take on his SEO work? It has nothing to do with him or his
company. It has everything to do with the misunderstood nature of what it takes to consistently rank
high in natural search. The absolute best companies I've worked with make every decision with SEO in
mind. Everyone in their organization – from management to programmers to marketing – is thinking about
the search impact of their decisions. For that reason it makes sense to hire a consultant or to learn
it yourself, but not to hire an outside firm to outsource your entire SEO campaign to.
Most of the time when companies outsource SEO they do it with the mentality of "here you go, you
handle it, we expect results." They view it as an entirely separate entity and not as a core value
that needs to be instilled in their organization to be successful. That's why outsourced SEO just
doesn't work: your organization still makes decisions the old way.
How will this programming change impact our search results? Can we build link-building into our
marketing campaign? What adjustments can we make so that both are working in harmony to achieve
our objectives as a company and rank as high as we can? There is no incentive to learn about search
if someone else is handling it for you, and consequently you probably won't be asking these important
questions when making a critical business decision.
Paul was still a bit confused with that answer. So let's take a closer look at some of the key
components necessary for SEO success and what needs to take place for them to be accomplished:
Keyword Research – this entails researching how frequently
phrases relevant to your site are searched. I like to use the SEO-Book
tool or the free version of Wordtracker. Keyword research is important
because it will impact your site structure, title tags (widely regarded as the most influential factor in how high you
rank), and will help identify opportunities in your industry (if a term is searched a lot but there aren't a lot of good
results, you may have just identified a great expansion opportunity for your company). This is best done by either a
consultant or the internal head of your SEO campaign, which should be someone in upper-management.
On-Site Optimization and Site Structure – this is what most people
think of when they think of SEO. What changes should be made to your site so that search engine spiders have the
best chance of crawling it, understanding the content, and ranking you accordingly. Most often, this involves
changes to Title/META tags, cleaning up source code so that it's proper HTML, moving CSS and Javascript to external
files, adding sitemaps, modifying internal linking structure and anchor text, and several other standard changes
that eliminate all potential crawling and indexing issues. This is best done by your programmer(s) so that they
understand the importance of the changes and make them part of their routine in the future. These changes can be
suggested by a consultant, but will only really be successful if programmers are on board.
Link building – this is probably the second most common task associated
with SEO. By now you already know that you need one-way incoming links from relevant sites with applicable anchor text
to rank high. Many outsourced SEO firms will either engage in elaborate link exchanges or purchase paid links for you:
both of which are obsolete in terms of having any positive impact in your rankings, and now can potentially penalize
you. The best one-way link building techniques – press releases, content syndication, blogging, product syndication,
viral videos, etc – all require a LOT of input from you to be successful. Most of the time they should be integrated
into your existing marketing plan to have the highest chance to thrive. For example, most companies already issue
press releases when they have newsworthy announcements so it's a natural extension to email the release to online news
sites and blogs, and to use an online distribution service. I think successful link building is best done by your
marketing department as part of your overall marketing strategy. It's fine to have a consultant help put the plan
together, but the actual implementation of the plan should be done by you.
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Analytics – this involves the measurement and tracking of your sites'
SEO and marketing campaign. Previously, this could be tedious for small sites and I might have recommended outsourcing.
But with the new version of Google Analytics, a properly configured
account will tell you everything you need to know about where every single sale on your site came from. Your programmer
or consultant should be able to set it up for you and configure the reports to track only the most important metrics for
your organization. I also like to track incoming links and search engine rankings for a site (two things that Analytics
does not track), but those can easily be tracked with the Marketleap
Link Checker and Digital Point Keyword Tracker .
In the end, whether you decide to hire a consultant or tackle SEO internally with the vast information available online,
you still need to make SEO part of your organizations objectives for it to be a success: something that outsourcing
usually doesn't do.
About The Author
Adam McFarland is the co-founder of Faceup-Sites and the author of the
Faceup Web Marketing Book: The Perfect Combination of SEO, SEM,
and other tactics to maximize results without breaking the bank. Faceup-Sites specializes in helping businesses develop
highly customizable sites that are easy to update, visually pleasing, and search engine friendly at a fraction of the cost
of what most developers charge.
