SEO Survivor

Alright, so I have some juice to write this post since I have recently lost one of my great clients because of this.

My client’s company is located in the East Coast. I work out of Southern California, and ran both SEO and PPC campaigns for his company. My point of contact within the company decided to move on to bigger and better things, something that I highly respect and admire. Upon his departure, the company’s executives found out that they don’t know much about internet marketing. In fact, they looked at some of the reports I used to send to my old contact and realized they didn’t know anything about SEO and PPC. They couldn’t read the reports and couldn’t make decisions.

Without communicating with me first, they decided to hire an SEO company located a couple metro stops away from their main office. This company would be able to send one of their SEO consultants to their office due to the close proximity. According to them, this was the only thing this other company had that we didn’t. They were located close to my client’s main office.

After they made this decision, within a day or two after my contact left the cpmpany, my old contact got in touch with me and told me that “the decisions made there were purely to get someone that can walk across the street there and explain SEM/O to their staff and executives.” At the end of the day, with my contact leaving, they had “no one that could manage or even understand the hows and whys of what I was doing.” In the process, he was extremely nice in letting me know that they credit us with having helped their company achieve record breaking numbers during the course of their campaign with us. I was very grateful for that, and we’re actually building a case study about them now.

The question remains: Do you really need an SEO consultant in-house?

I can definitely agree that this has its advantages, but only if it’s the right person. I run across so many websites that have been “optimized” by their in-house webmaster/web designer/SEO expert person, and these sites have crappy SEO. As if these “SEO experts” went to a crappy SEO 101 course, didn’t pay attention to the class, and walked out to apply some basic concepts (like meta tags) and now they think the page is optimized. There’s so much more to SEO.

So, while an in-house person is a good way of having a face-to-face interaction with your consultant, a team that’s working hard from a distance can be 1,000 times better if they actually know what they’re doing and know how to communicate what they’re doing.

My advice, don’t think that just because you can get you local little SEO dude in-house, you’re doing better off than hiring a robust internet marketing company to back your SEO efforts. Phone and email allow for excellent communication, and if needed, internet video conferencing is super easy to be done today as well. Your local SEO person might be the right person, but do talk to different companies and make sure you don’t hire the local person just because they’re local and it may seem easier. It could cost your business thousands upon thousands of dollars in the end, not to mention the potential untapped business.