Does your in-house SEO team get the best knowledge, training and ongoing support?

In recent years, many medium-sized and large companies have chosen to expand their in-house marketing team's expertise in, among other things, SEO, keyword ads, social media marketing, and email. A few smaller companies have also jumped on the bandwagon - especially those where SEO has a high strategic priority. And I actually think that's a really wise decision. On the one hand, with the increasing importance of these channels, it is very important that there is a solid internal anchoring and on the other hand, there are a number of tasks that are either handled better or cheaper by own employees than external consultants. But what remains, for most, after all, are some challenges. The internal teams must be kept up to date with the latest knowledge, complicated technical and strategic challenges can be difficult to deal with, and there may be practical tasks that they are not equipped for or have the capacity to solve. In this post, I will take a closer look at some of the challenges your company may face if you have also chosen to handle several of the digital marketing challenges internally. 

Digital marketing is complex and evolving rapidly

In general, digital marketing - and perhaps especially SEO is an extremely complex discipline. Even people who have worked with it for several years - and who you may be lucky enough to have on your team - can fall short from time to time. Whether it is special SEO technical or strategic challenges, very few can solve everything themselves. In addition, the many other people in the company - developers, copywriters, SoMe teams, PR people, etc. who have a very direct influence on the overall SEO results also need to know a lot about SEO. Anyone who has been just a few years in the digital marketing industry knows how extremely fast things are evolving. The opportunities you have today were not available last year, and in a few months, new opportunities and challenges will emerge. 

Every year, Google makes many thousands of small adjustments to its search engine. Some have no practical significance for your business. But many have. Some mean that previous strategies or technologies need to be adjusted. If you just let go and continue as yesterday, you will quickly lag behind. Competitors who take advantage of the latest opportunities and adapt to the constantly changing limitations will run from you. Of course, this does not mean that you have to change strategies or adapt to Google every two weeks, or that it is necessary to jump at all new opportunities. But it is important that you constantly assess what it takes to maintain and expand your visibility and impact on Google. 

We learn across industries

Even if you, or your team, feel really well equipped for the tasks today, there is the weakness of an internal team that they usually only learn from the experiences they themselves - within their own company or industry do. In contrast, consultants like us have the great advantage of working with many types of clients across markets and industries. This means that we can spot new trends faster, which may not just appear first in your industry, and we get inspiration from other industries' ways of solving technical and creative challenges. 

Workshops, “style” guides and ongoing support

Through the development of recent years - with more and more good internal digital marketing teams, we have developed our advice so that it better supports them in their work.

Two of the important pillars of that work are workshops and ongoing support. Workshops are used in connection with the training of the individual teams - SEOs, editors, developers, etc. It is a really good way to raise the professional level in these groups. Workshops are often held in connection with the establishment of established internal standards, which are especially important in connection with SEO. Developers need to know exactly what they are doing for SEO - in the same way, that security standard is often written down. Web designers, editors, and copywriters need to know a lot about how to research the behavior of search users and optimize and target content to them. And other teams like SoMe and PR need to know how their work - at best, can have a positive impact on SEO. You probably already have written down standards for safety a style guide. I can strongly recommend having an internal SEO services in Lahore-style guide made. It can help reduce stupid mistakes a lot. In addition to the general boost it can give in a company that the level of knowledge increases and that all teams know how their work affects common goals, there will often be a need for repeated follow-up workshops, as well as more general and ongoing support. Because as I said - the development is fast, and you can not expect even such skilled internal employees to know it all - all the time. Therefore, we often supplement the above with an ongoing support agreement, which means that the company always has a skilled external expert they can call, take a meeting with and save on technical, strategic, and practical challenges. 

Missed Opportunity Charts

Even in large companies, there are limited budgets. Although it can often be obvious to the employees in the digital marketing department how sensible it is to spend more money on e.g. SEO is far from always gaining traction in management. Understandably, it may well be difficult to fully discern the value of increased investment in that kind. Therefore, we often help companies make more objective assessments of what an increased investment in SEO can actually provide. It often takes the form of what we call Missed Opportunity Charts - a method of demonstrating how many customers and revenue you are missing out on by not being as visible on Google as you should be - and as you could be. 

This, together with the expected investments required, can paint a fairly accurate picture of the expected ROI. And it is my experience that an objective analysis like this can to a much greater extent make the management understand the importance of the investment. Because as you probably already know - the customers who do not find your company in Google will not be wasted. They do not disappear into the blue. They just find some others - in Google, and then end up trading with them. Hence the name - Missed Opportunity. 

Team scorecards can create better results

If you are in a larger company, with several teams - maybe even in several countries, all contributing to your website, it is far from certain that they all have an equal understanding of, or focus on SEO services in Karachi. 

In some teams, there will probably be a great passion for SEO, they will follow the guidelines you (hopefully) have set to the letter and create good results. Other teams may not have quite the same attention to SEO and achieve less than good results. To inspire all teams to create as good results as possible, we can recommend that a scorecard system be established. The system must measure both the implementation and effect of the work of the various teams and result in an overall score that can be compared across. We recommend that it is used positively - to inspire those who do it less well, with those who do it.  

It can be difficult to accomplish all the practical tasks

Even with all the above put in place, it can be difficult for an internal marketing team to achieve all the tasks that need to be solved in order to reach the goals of the strategies. There may also be specific tasks that the team does not feel well enough equipped to perform in practice. With most of the larger customers we help, we therefore also perform some of the practical tasks.

On the basis of the strategies and plans that have been laid down, the work is distributed in a way that makes the most sense. Often it is e.g. link building we help with. Depending on the scope, an ongoing budget and completely precise work tasks are agreed upon - including which reporting and documentation are desired. 

Shall we have a talk?

If you are in a medium or large company, with your own internal digital marketing team, I offer to go out completely without obligation and free of charge, and talk to you about how your team can best achieve its ambitions.