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The Case Against Outsourced SEO
By Adam McFarland, Faceup-Sites (http://www.faceup-sites.com/) (c) 2007

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 (http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/)
or the free version of Wordtracker
(http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/). 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.

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
(http://www.google.com/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 (http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm) and
Digital Point Keyword Tracker (http://www.digitalpoint.com/
tools/keywords/).

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.
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Adam McFarland is the co-founder of Faceup-Sites
(http://www.faceup-sites.com/) and the author of the Faceup Web
Marketing Book(http://www.faceup-sites.com/marketing-ebook/) :
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.
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