Every company that needs promotion on the internet, including search engine optimization, sooner or later faces a choice: to form its team for this purpose or to resort to the services of third-party companies. If you are closer to the first option, read this article, and you will get valuable insights regarding in-house SEO strategy and its management.
SEO Team: In-House or Outsourcing?
An in-house team and external contractors differ in tools and ways to achieve goals. As for outsourcing, you have two main options: freelancers and agencies. Agencies are often more focused on semantics, technical audit, and traffic. To go further, to delve into the business, they either lack the competence, or the company does not let them into their internal processes and does not transfer the needed data. At the same time, hiring independent freelancers might also not be an easy task because it is complicated to find someone reliable and with good expertise.
On the other hand, in-house teams have every opportunity to enter the company’s processes and work specifically to increase sales. For them, making a profit can be a KPI since, unlike an agency, they can set tasks for all the company’s internal structures. The problem is that in-house employees are not always motivated to work that way.
Even if you have your in-house team, it doesn’t mean that you can’t outsource some of the services. In several cases, cooperation between the in-house team and the agency is effective, especially at the stages of searching for growth points and active development. For example, instead of hiring a whole set of outreachers and copywriters, you can simply use the guest posting service https://adsy.com/.
Workplace for SEO Department
Before selecting specialists, you must make a vital decision: will your team be remote, or will you have to allocate space in the office for them? If you’re creating a remote team, it’s worth making a list of the specialist’s equipment requirements, such as computer and software specifications needed for the job.
If your SEO team will work offline, provide a comfortable and functional workplace, for example, separate offices or a spacious room for all specialists. At the same time, purchasing the necessary furniture and computers falls on your shoulders. Be sure to include these items in your team-building budget.
Composition of the Ideal SEO Team
Every employee plays a critical role, and missing one link can lead to SEO failure. However, remember that the positions listed below are pretty universal and general. In fact, each agency may assign individual employees different titles. Still, you can take the following SEO team structure as a basis, where you can add and combine different roles. However, remember that without a team lead, employees will not be able to work effectively and coordinate their actions, so you need to think about appointing a person to this position first.
SEO Manager
The SEO manager is the head of the SEO department who reviews the team’s work, manages the project, and prepares the actionable strategy. In some organizations, the head of SEO and the SEO manager are two different positions. This situation is prevalent in large agencies, where there are many employees with diverse responsibilities, so their work is controlled by experienced management. The SEO manager and head of SEO usually make vital decisions that can affect positioning performance and the overall strategy.
SEO Specialist
An SEO specialist is a generic term for a search engine optimization expert. Very often, this employee takes care of optimization, auditing, reporting, and obtaining external links. Approximately half of SEO professionals have basic technical programming skills due to their knowledge of JavaScript or PHP. These professionals also often need to implement HTML and CSS effectively.
Copywriter
The task of this team member is to make attractive and engaging texts enriched with the required keywords and assembled in the necessary structure. Usually, this specialist takes care only of the creative part, not the technical search for keys. You can hire a professional writer or journalist for this role. In other words, you need a person able to make perfect texts.
Link Manager
Link-building is one of the main directions of the off-site SEO. If you can afford it, find an individual exclusively for this job. Still, in most small companies, local or global link building usually falls on the shoulders of technical SEO specialists or third-party companies.
Technical SEO Specialists
The list of technical specialists’ responsibilities can vary depending on the approach and your vision. Some SEO professionals define this area as working with directives, robots.txt, and crawl paths. In other words, these team members work only on the programming part.
The other approach is much broader, and it includes internal optimization. It means technical specialist also checks titles, tags, and other on-page SEO details. Therefore, before hiring a person for this role, you should define the exact list of duties to avoid misunderstanding. In many ways, the team’s structure depends on the tasks you need for your company. Browse this page for an example of a comprehensive promotion strategy with key focus areas.
Conclusion
If you decide to form an in-house SEO team, prepare for a huge amount of work. You must develop procedures, determine the department structure, and equip the functional workplace. Yet, this effort will pay off with increased efficiency and reduced costs of your online promotion. In-house SEO staff with smart management will strike your imagination with their results.
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