ROI. What they don’t realize is now is the time to backfire. It’s going to be more acceptable to mess
up now than it will be in five years when they’re ready to start getting involved.Jerri: Is there anything else you think might be important for organizations to understand
about in-house search marketing?Bowman: My biggest advice is for the same for any company. Search marketing is not a project. It is
like marketing and public relations, it never ends. Once you get high rankings, you need
to maintain your high rankings. And in order to continue growing your search marketing
traffic, you need to go after new opportunities (new niche phrases, video optimization,
local search, brand protection, etc).
Know the in-house life cycle.
Understand that just because you build the team, it does not mean high rankings and
traffic increases will come. Your in-house search marketer needs to work with many
people and several departments to get search marketing changes out the door, and they
are competing with many other high profile projects for resources and priority. If the
changes don’t launch, you are not going to meet your goals. I find that management is
on-board with SEO; it is the lower level managers and technical leads that have opposi-
tion and cause delays in launching changes.
Just because you bring search marketing in-house, it does NOT mean your outsourcing
days are over. Search marketing in-house is like an on-staff corporate attorney — there
are times when you will need to reach to outside counsel for sound advice.
FIGURE B-1
The in-house lifecycle as defined by Jessica Bowman.294
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