When you hear the phrase "in-house SEO expert" or "in-house SEO," certain things immediately flash to mind. There’s the glamour bits built around the perceptions fostered from hearing of six-figure salaries, or direct involvement in big projects and depth of contact many in-house search marketers seem to have within the executive workings of their companies.
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8 Comments
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Hi Duane, We met at SES NY, great to see your post! You’re so right on this. I work for a media company and everyday I meet with editors, content producers, marketers, and others and as the in house SEO’er of our company I face the same challenge. Two years ago I spent my days trying to explain that SEO was not snake oil breakdown the myths, and reassure them that there is no “SEO easy button”…sorry but I am all you got. Through a year of that I got them all on board with the concept and the value of optimization, got a Wiki started and re-wrote workflows to include SEO tasks. But you are right when I go into my meetings now I don’t talk about rankings, or first page placement it is about expectation setting. I talk about the audience and usability of the site. What your audience needs the site to provide them to get their job done, what paths do they need to take on your site to get the information they need. Focus on the audience and make sure the path you take them down is one the search engine crawlers can follow too. So I completely agree a new title is in order let me know what you come up with!
Having made the transition from a very well known search marketing agency to an in-house firm, I have to say that Duane hits the nail on the head with this post. Stumbled, and bookmarked :)
Duane, great article. I run the SEO department at a large automotive research website and couldn’t agree with you more. Having SEO in your title can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. Fortunately we have had oustanding results so we are well respected within the company. Having the support of upper management goes a long way but everyone wants to see positive results. Once you have proven your recommendations work, it is funny how people begin to proactively seek your advice. After all, everyone loves their incentive bonus for hitting traffic and revenue goals.
Great post and so true about being "usability experts"!
It’s a bit of a ’thing’ with me, but I see SEO as ’marketing’ - or at least an element of marketing communications - ’meeting the needs of the customer’ and all that. Sadly, go into your aforementioned meetings with a ’marketing’ badge on and your reception will be even more frosty. Search guru Mike Grehan tends to think along the same lines, he used to favour the term ’merket-led SEO, but I notice he is now associated with an organization that uses the term ‘keyword–driven marketing’ - which I like a lot.Forgot to say - good article.
Good article, Duane. I suppose it can be difficult to get the point across -- that if they want to communicate to the people they’re looking to communicate to, they’ve got to look at it from that vantage. They may be experts, but they’ll need to add something more to their expertise in order to get that done.
Great, thoughtful piece.However, I have no intention of being pidgeon-holed into useability. I’m a marketer, and sometimes marketing has to go against useability. Like laying out the supermarket so that most people *have* to pass other aisles and offers.In website terms, this can mean building a site that promises to answer questions, but seems to make it just a little tricky to actually get the lot. And each question it does answer raises more questions, which then also ned finding. But there’s a big, fat link to buy the download that puts the whole lot into a neat report with added summary. Marketing.Useability is opening the door for customers to enter *and* leave. Marketing is encouraging them to stay that bit longer and hear what you have to say. Somewhere in the cross-over is a largely unexplored area whose name we’re not as familiar with. But it is not pure useability. Its more along the lines of Persuasive Design and Persuasion Architecture. It touches on Captology.Useability is the opposite extreme to ’captive audience’ and ’hard sell’ intrusive marketing. Its the middle-ground we all need to be exploring more, isn’t it?
I’m with you on this one, Ammon. The content of any discipline is measured by how it works out in practice. Usability often has a somewhat thin view, but at most it deals with the user experience. Clearly users must be satisfied with their interaction with the website. However, the company must achieve its selling goals through the website. None of the disciplines can be forgotten in how that is achieved.