How to assemble a team, and train it.
Assembling a search marketing team
Your next consideration when contemplating in-house search marketing is: Do I have the staff expertise to perform SEO and SEM effectively?
Everything should point to your business goals. Your search team will be responsible for organic search, paid search, paid inclusion, optimized shopping feeds, click fraud monitoring, brand reputation management, link-building strategies, affiliate marketing, business development and viral marketing.
You will need people with excellent research skills, copywriting skills, technical expertise, and quick learners who are detail-oriented and have a high tolerance for change. People with an affinity for solving complex puzzles, multi tasking and experimenting with different solutions also make good search marketing candidates.
Depending on company size, search VPs may have to deal with millions of documents, hundreds of thousands of products, multiple regional or local influences, security walls, registration walls, paid subscription walls, editorial guidelines and management egos. In-house search marketing requires a leader with consummate ability to manage change.
Search marketing projects require integration and involvement across all units of the company's infrastructure. The best methodology will integrate search into the daily workflow through a series of systemic changes that deliver significant results. In-house search marketing systems require support including a Wiki knowledgebase, a search hub, ongoing training, standardized reports, the best tools, technical and editorial checklists, search engine policies and authoring guides so that everyone participates in unity.
Training your staff
Once your team is assembled, they must be trained. Both quality and output of SEO and SEM performance is affected by the time allocated to perform those tasks. Well-trained, experienced workers are more productive and make fewer mistakes than a poorly trained staff. Therefore, successful, cost-effective in-house search engine marketing production is dependent on a well-trained staff.
There are a number of resources and training options available. Your choice of options will depend on several key factors: company size, existing IT staff, editorial staff, search marketing staff, staff consolidation under one roof, product diversity, level of competition and current search marketing experience.
If company size and product diversity are broad, such as the big brands or a Fortune 1000 company, the best option may be to hire a search marketing training expert for the sole purpose of training your in-house staff on-site.
There is a huge knowledge and experience gap in the search marketing industry when it comes to organic SEO. Currently, there are few, if any, standards, licenses or authentic certifications available in SEO and/or SEM advertising. In addition, the continuity required for proper measurement of organic and paid search is seriously lacking in most professional business environments, despite the fact that search marketing results are measurable and accountable.
There is also a serious shortage of valuable and trusted search marketing professionals with the experience required to fulfill these tasks within a large in-house search environment. Search marketers who may have worked at eBay, Yahoo! or other well-known companies within a "search marketing" capacity will have a very focused and specialized skill-set typically centered on the paid search environment with little or no SEO skills or visa versa.
An alternative is to hire someone who will experiment in creating the fundamental policies described above, a sort of on-the-job training. However, for a company seeking immediate in-house search marketing capabilities, this can cause unnecessary delays, redundancies and expenses.
A third option is to utilize online or off-site search marketing training resources.
Whichever route you choose, the bottom line is that those companies that take search engine marketing training seriously in the years ahead will remain strong and competitive in their market.
Paul Bruemmer is director of search marketing at Red Door Interactive. Read full bio.