Outsourcing SEO/SEM Vs. In-house SEO/SEM.

Well, it would seem that the great debate over SEO/SEM in-house vs SEO/SEM outsourcing won’t go away. I would like to hammer the nail into the coffin of this debate. Its just amazing that a company will think their SEM team will out perform a professional firm. But, we will humor those who still choose to do the former.

The crux of the debate is really about dollar amount, no ifs-ands-or-buts about it. Some companies will only put 1-5% of their advertising budget into an online marketing campaign, which, is acceptable in some cases of a small business. Given that business doesn’t feel that online marketing can yield results due to past experiences with in-house SEM management or inadequate outsourcing of the job to inferior SEM companies. With such a small amount actually being spent toward online advertising, large international companies & others feel that its an acceptable loss. That logic to me is insane, if you feel that way, hire a bum on the street to ware a sign & pay him/her the 1%. After, all the 1% is an acceptable loss.

Well, your company has signed up with a SEM Company, its been about six months & you see results, however, minimal. Although, this isn’t acceptable by any means & the ad networks being deployed are proving effective enough to generate clicks to the web site. Is the real problem a lack of creativity? Are the ads themselves annoying to the buying crowed. I’m sorry to say, but, having ads that trick the person into clicking on the site doesn’t equate to a good campaign. They seem annoying & who’s to say that they where more interested in ‘closing’ the ad, then actually finding out about the product(s) being sold. Having a game as a banner ad in itself isn’t terribly effective either for the same reason. The suffer could just be more interested in playing rather, than buying. It will get your paged viewed & you may even see a small ROI from it, but, creativity on the landing page & the banner itself will generate more fruitful clicks that are not throwing good money at bad ideas.

It only goes to further the point at the in-house debate are they looking for clicks or are they analyzing those results with some human ingenuity to lower the clicks & increasing buyers. Looking over logs can be a daunting task, looking at where those clicks are coming from can yield better results. Are they generated from one particular ad network, are they coming from one particular geographical area are their seasonal factors to equate for, can you generate a better targeted customer? A program that you pay $10,000 for your in house team can be useless if they solely rely on program to do the thinking for them. Then, again if you are paying them an hourly wage you probably are loosing money off the bat.

Is the in-house team only performing SEM work, what I’m trying to get at with a firm they goal of SEM/SEO work comes down to getting you to the top for keywords that are generating the sales, rather, than having to pay for every single click if its to supply you with a buyer or just a curious seeker. Once, you have reached the top in most major search engines for a well performing keyword better results can be expected, partially due to the fact the initial cost has already paid for itself after a few sales. Not, that one should get laxed once this has been achieved.

When, it is seen which keywords are obviously outperforming the others in terms of sales optimizing for the keywords will probably take a little bit of work. Of course this could also be relatively easy. While, some will call the SEO work: generating links, managing the image through what is posted on other sites does take work of excellent SEO professionals. This is one major point on which I have to disagree with others in the industries who would trivialize this process. One, of the main points with excellent link building, not only will it help you in the SERPs, but, you should see a few clicks coming from those sites if they are worth their salt, not just building a massive amount of incoming links. This is what a company should expect from outsourcing the SEO/SEM work.

If anything I hope I at least convinced one company’s CEO or CEM that outsourcing SEM/SEO work is imperative to a good campaign. Building from a perviously executed SEM/SEO plan that wasn’t thought out well enough, can be a challenging experience. Going with an in-house team only because or falling pray to a quick talking SEO company shouldn’t discourage a company from finding an ethical, reliable SEO/SEM firm.