The Soft Costs of In-House SEO
There is a misconception in the business world that SEO is equivalent to “free traffic,” as though SEO involves nothing more than waving a magic wand and watching the traffic come pouring in to your business website. The reality is that SEO is quite costly. Whether you outsource your SEO to an internet marketing agency or choose to train your own professionals in-house, you’ll find that SEO is a significant investment. But the reality is that you simply can’t afford not to do SEO, no matter how much it hurts to see that money come out of your budget.
You may feel like you’re saving a bundle if you choose to take care of your SEO in house. But if that’s your choice then you’ll have to hire experienced professionals or pay to train staff that you already have. You’ll need to allocate some funds to an SEO consultant to help to prioritize your SEO opportunities and help your in-house employees hone their skills. You’ll have to invest in software and off-site training, as well as ample opportunities for networking.
The soft costs are more difficult to measure, but they will definitely affect the bottom line:
1. Missed opportunities. If you’re not able to completely optimize everything, then you’re losing sales. You may never know just how many sales you’re costing yourself, but a recent study revealed that 66% of all of the recommendations made to companies by SEO experts weren’t implemented one year later.
2. Time costs. Large companies who choose to allocate internal resources to SEO find that it takes a very long time to get their SEO plans off the ground. And the longer it takes to implement SEO, the more traffic you’re allowing to just pass you by. One SEO expert told of an outdoor equipment retailer who invested over 1000 man-hours of his IT Department’s time to URL rewrites. There was no way they could have known in the beginning that it would take so long.
3. Priorities. If you ask your IT team to work on SEO instead of the tasks they had been doing, you shift their priorities. It’s highly likely that one of the tasks they had been working on will slip through the cracks, and there’s no way to determine how that might affect your business in the long run. SEO is crucial, but there might be other crucial aspects of your business that get overlooked when you switch your employees’ focus.
It’s hard to determine just how much lost revenue results from SEO that’s done poorly or inadequately. In fact, you may never know what you’re missing. This is exactly why so many companies turn to paid search strategies rather than organic. Paid search makes them feel like their doing something, even if they’re not even close to maximizing their website’s potential the way they could by hiring an SEO firm. Paid search is also predictable. But if you stop paying for paid search then you stop getting traffic. The same is true for your SEO investment, but it will take a lot longer to see the drop-off in traffic if you’ve been using natural search.
Once you’ve invested in SEO and finally achieved top rankings, the new challenge becomes maintaining those top rankings. Your competitors are doing everything they can to outrank you, which means that you now have to do everything you can to stay in your spot. So even if the initial SEO work is complete, you have to keep building links and staying abreast of search engine algorithms since they change so frequently.
You may decide that in-house SEO is the way to go, but consider the hidden costs of do-it-yourself. While it may seem cheaper in the short term, consider the long-term costs of taking on the tasks yourself. Is it worth it?
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