Understand Your Market Opportunity

Most SEO consultants probably cannot say with certainty what ranking in the top search positions for their keywords is (or would be) worth to them in terms of traffic and revenue. However, you should never set out to develop a new product or launch a new service without first understanding the business case/market opportunity, and organic search should be no different. Understanding the market opportunity prior to editing even the first <h1> tag is important, because it will help you to:

• Understand what SEO is potentially worth to your organization. It will give you an idea of what organic search visibility is worth to your business and answer questions like “How much organic traffic could we potentially procure from higher organic positioning?” Answers to these questions will guide the SEO process, including budget and infrastructure investments, and will help you make the SEO business case to the rest of the organization.

• Track progress as you go. Building a market opportunity benchmark prior to embarking on SEO will enable you to measure progress as you go and demonstrate the ROI of SEO in real, quantifiable metrics that will resonate with the company stakeholders.

A market opportunity assessment in organic search shows the current visitors captured for your keywords, versus the potential opportunity were you to rank in a top position. There are various tools available on the Internet that can help simplify the process.

To conduct a market opportunity assessment:

1. Isolate your top group of nonbranded keywords. Determine your target keywords based on their perceived conversion potential. The number of keywords may vary based on factors such as your SEO maturity or vertical market space, and can range from around 50 for those just starting out up to several thousand keywords for those further along in organic search.

2. Gather search volumes and rankings for your keywords. Find out what your current search volumes and rankings are for your targeted keywords.

3. Use a click-through rate (CTR) curve to identify the potential for new visitors. A CTR curve shows the expected percentage of clicks based on the search position of the keyword. Plugging your current search volume and rank into a CTR curve can give you a general idea of the number of new visitors you can expect to get by moving up in the search rankings.

4. Scale that across your total traffic. The first three steps of the analysis give you a sense of the traffic gain you can get for your top keywords, but it is likely that you have many other keywords driving traffic to your site. If you have an opportunity to double the traffic on your top keywords, you likely also have the opportunity to double your overall nonbranded organic search traffic volume.

5. Check the CPC values for your keywords. Using a tool like SEMrush or Searchmetrics, or the Google Keyword Planner from within your own Google AdWords account, run some numbers on the current market value of your keyword targets.

Get Buy-In Across the Organization

Now that you’ve done an opportunity assessment and know what you will be working toward in organic search, it’s time to internally publicize the opportunity and obtain buy-in across the organization. For SEO efforts to be successful in any organization, active participation from many parts of the business—from C-level executives approving budget, to the engineering department implementing web and infrastructure changes, to content writers using SEO best practices—is an absolute necessity. Organizational buy-in is as critical to successful SEO as information architecture and <h1> tags.

To obtain organizational buy-in:

1. Get people excited about SEO—then scare the heck out of them. Show people the opportunity in organic search that has come out of your opportunity assessment. Make them aware of what the business is missing out on by not performing well in organic search. Then, make them aware of where your company stands relative to the competition, and identify competitors who are currently cashing in on the opportunities you are missing out on.

2. Keep the SEO opportunity foremost in people’s minds. Make posters outlining the market opportunity and hang them on the walls. Speak about it often, and generally socialize it in the organization. The more you can keep the opportunity front and center in people’s minds and keep them excited about it, the better.

3. Create a service-level agreement (SLA) with stakeholders. To formalize the working relationship with organizational departments and increase their buy-in to SEO, sign an SLA with them that defines how quickly they will respond to requests and the metrics that will be used to measure success.

Lay the Groundwork

Once you’ve obtained buy-in from the organization, it’s time to position yourself to succeed. We’ve heard of many instances of chief marketing officers (CMOs) who have dipped a toe in the water with SEO but labeled it “black magic” or ineffective because the company’s website failed to skyrocket to the top of the search rankings for the high-volume, highly competitive keywords they’ve targeted in 90 days or less. To avoid problems like this and to lay the groundwork for SEO success in your organization, it is important to do two things:

• Set the appropriate expectations. SEO is a long-term strategy where you are likely to see incremental improvements that may start slowly at first. Focus expectations on gains in nonbranded search traffic and conversions from that traffic, not on rankings. Many marketers’ only exposure to search marketing is the world of pay per click, so it is important to educate them about SEO with its unique characteristics and differentiators.

• Show early wins. You may be tempted to go after high-volume, highly visible keywords right out of the gate, but ranking for competitive keywords can—and does—take time. It is better to initially target less competitive keywords that can result in quick wins (what we call “low-hanging fruit”), while simultaneously developing a long-term strategy for more competitive keywords. This will help keep people engaged and believing in the opportunity in organic search.

To help set reasonable expectations and report on your organic search progress in the most effective way possible:

• Make a distinction between milestones and success metrics. The fruits of your labor can take some time to materialize in organic search results. To maintain organizational buy-in and gauge your progress before traditional success metrics such as conversions kick in, report on key milestones such as number of indexed backlinks, changes made to the website, and recommendations made.

• Report on SEO metrics as business metrics. Report on SEO like you would any sales effort, by continuously reporting on your search pipeline and the competitive landscape. Create a mission around SEO: you might strike a gong when certain milestones are hit, or install TVs where you can show regularly updated traffic and conversion stats.

• Be a businessperson. Understanding when to use technical SEO tactics is important, but speaking the language of business the C-suite understands is critical to the ongoing success of SEO in most organizations. Expand your horizons beyond Excel and analytics and learn to speak the language of dollars and cents—this is what executives will notice and understand.

Motivate Resources That Don’t Share Your Goals to Help You

As we’ve mentioned, succeeding in SEO requires support and buy-in across your organization. Many SEO efforts are dependent on non-SEO team members in the company to get things done, often relying on resources across numerous departments who may not be trained on, or oriented toward, thinking about SEO. Finding ways to work with others to get things done is key to SEO success.

To most effectively work with resources organization-wide on SEO tasks:

• Show how it will benefit them. Trying to get content creators to use targeted keywords in content can be a losing proposition. If you demonstrate conclusively, however, how it will benefit them—that they will reach a wider audience with their content—they are much more likely to buy in, implement changes to their content development process, and commit to the effort over time.

• Recognize contributions to organic search visibility. Recognize when team members do something that contributes to organic search success, such as optimizing a press release or tweaking an XML sitemap. At one Fortune 100 company, the director of SEO handed out an award every quarter to the individual who had contributed most significantly to organic search visibility.

• Become an SEO evangelist. Evangelism is just one more on the long list of job requirements for the SEO pro. One of the more important tasks is walking the halls, spreading the gospel of SEO. Buy the IT person breakfast, the PR director lunch, and the content writer dinner. Get people excited about organic search and then be sure to keep them that way!

Progress Through the Stages of SEO Maturity

Now that you have organizational buy-in and appropriate resources to execute, how do you go about scaling your keywords and continuing to drive organic search traffic to your website?

Our observations over the years have shown that organizations often move through five distinct stages when it comes to SEO. Each stage is characterized by investments in budget, strategy, and metrics appropriate to the stage’s maturity level. Organizations should continuously be striving to move into the next maturity stage until they are at the “Compete” level and are actively vying to outperform the top firms in the search rankings. The stages are:

1. Foundational. In the first stage of SEO maturity, the organization dips its toe in the water and focuses on low-hanging fruit, optimizing for a small set of initial keywords. In the Foundational phase, the majority of the budget is spent on personnel, with a portion allocated to engineering/production. Efforts begin to move their top target keywords on deeper pages of the SERPs (page 7 and below) into striking-distance (page 4 or below), so they are primed to move into top-visibility positions in later phases. One employee and/or independent consultant is often assigned to SEO part-time.

2. Investment. In this stage, organizations begin to expand their coverage, moving into more competitive keywords with higher search volumes. Average ranks begin to improve as keywords optimized in the previous stage begin to move into page 2, 3, or 4 of the search rankings. Organizations now begin to invest in some link-building activities and content creation and start to expand their investment in SEO technology. One or two employees are assigned full-time to SEO.

3. Measurement. In this stage, to maintain investment in SEO, it becomes critical for organizations to begin showing ROI and tying SEO metrics such as rankings and traffic to business metrics such as conversions and revenue. In the “Measure” stage, rankings continue to increase as the organization becomes increasingly SEO-savvy, beginning to invest in continuing education. Several full-time employees are assigned to SEO, along with specialized outside agencies and/or consultants.

4. Scaling. In this stage the organization organizes and prioritizes, beginning to look at organic search from a holistic perspective. An organic search pipeline develops as SEO starts to be treated as a sales campaign organizationally. Many more keywords move into top-visibility positions as investments in link building and content creation are increased. Several employees remain assigned full-time to SEO along with outside agencies and consulting specialists.

Building an SEO team

At this point in the SEO maturity cycle, you are ready to catapult yourself into organic search success by moving from relying on internal “generalist” SEO professionals with outside consultant specialists to building internal teams of specialized professionals. From content writers who write search engine–friendly content, to link developers who focus on leveraging that content to acquire strategically important links, to keyword jockeys adept at discovering hidden opportunities through spreadsheet analysis, to the project manager who pulls it all together, your organization is now ready to become a lean, mean SEO machine and drive to compete with the best the SERPs have to offer. This is the final stage:

5. Compete. In this stage the organization makes additional gains in organic search visibility such that it begins to look at its share of search relative to the competition. Budgets stabilize, while mature SEO technology is in use company-wide. In the “Compete” phase you are building internal teams of SEO professionals.

The Value of In-House SEO

One of the significant advantages of in-house SEO is the ability to access search expertise whenever you need it. Some additional advantages are:

• A greater likelihood that SEO best practices will be integrated into the company culture.

• Greater accountability.

• Faster ramp-up time (familiarity with the core business).

• Faster implementation time (greater leverage in the development process).

• The ability to ensure that SEO requirements remain in scope (and raise the flag when they are descoped).

• The SEO expert can be tapped anytime and her work reprioritized immediately for quick deliverable turnarounds.

• The ability to provide cross-departmental communications around complex SEO issues, and support project management of ongoing SEO implementation.

The Value of Outsourced SEO Support

Although it may seem that in-house SEO is the ideal solution, there are also plenty of reasons to use an outsourced team instead of, or in conjunction with, an in-house team. Here is a summary of some of the best reasons to leverage outsourced talent:

• Finding expert-level (15+ years of experience) SEO talent to hire is difficult, so it may be smarter to contract with such talent.

• It allows you to focus on your core business and outsource your noncore activities.

• Experts generally have a broader reach in the marketplace via industry contacts, and as a result of working with many clients.

• SEO is multidisciplinary, so using external people makes it easier to pull in components when needed.

• Outsourced teams don’t have the myopic focus that sometimes occurs in long-time in-house personnel.

• Outsourcing brings a fresh perspective and new ideas, and outsourced talent can often identify what in-house staff may have missed.

Many SEO consulting firms, such as those of the authors, are willing to take on contracts that include training in-house personnel. This approach can give you the best of both worlds: the ability to immediately inject a high level of expertise into your organization (albeit on a temporary basis), and a long-term plan to bring the capability in-house, or at least build up the expertise with ongoing or occasional augmentation via outside consulting.

How to Best Leverage Outside Help

As we’ve just discussed, there are several scenarios in which you might bring in an outside SEO expert. In all of these scenarios, you will benefit most by working with someone who is good with people, can effectively and diplomatically negotiate, and can teach. Bringing in someone you can trust is also a must.

To leverage these skills, you need to put your SEO expert in a situation where he can succeed. A good candidate will tell you what will be needed from you to be successful. Take this input seriously. If you can’t provide the things you are being asked for, your ability to succeed will be limited. It is vital that management paves the way for successful SEO plan implementation. Although many managers may believe they are giving SEO projects what they need, this is not always the case, and as a result, SEO suffers. The key is for management to understand how to give the right type of SEO support.

For example, the SEO expert may need time from your development team to implement the suggestions he makes. If the development time is not available, his suggestions will be useless to you. Prearrange time with developers to talk to the SEO consultant, and work with project management to schedule time to work on the recommendations.

On the content side of things, the SEO expert may define a content plan to support ongoing content development and marketing efforts. Before you commit to a new hire, make sure you have a rough idea of the scope of the content development and marketing efforts the expert thinks might be needed to support this.

How to Implement Your Expert’s Recommendations

Take your expert’s input seriously, because he’s telling you what he thinks he needs to be successful. If he doesn’t get that support and ends up thinking he can’t win, what are the chances he will succeed? The thing to remember about SEO is that implementation is crucial; you cannot implement a partial strategy and expect to see results. Unfortunately, most companies implement only a fraction of what is needed and wonder why their traffic isn’t increasing, which is truly a shame—and why buy-in is so crucial. Remember, SEO is extremely competitive. There’s a reason Google makes so much money with AdWords: because not everyone, and not every business, has what it takes to make high volumes of organic traffic happen. To be competitive in SEO isn’t the same as finishing a 5K race; it’s more like running a marathon and finishing in the top 0.001%. Do you think any of the top marathoners implement only 50% of their training, diet, and sleep regimens? Not a chance.

Ultimately, the cost of hiring an outside SEO expert goes beyond the direct cost for the expert’s services. The SEO expert will need a certain amount of support to have a chance for success. Before you decide to hire an SEO professional, ensure that you have the internal support (and are willing to provide it) to make the recommended changes. You don’t want to be one of those companies that pays for SEO advice that sits on the shelf and collects dust—we have seen this more times than we care to count!

You also need to have a plan to manage your outsourced SEO help, as high-quality SEO firms will also be placing demands on your organization. Quality SEO cannot happen in a vacuum. This includes content marketing, which requires high-quality content that represents your brand.

The types of internal resources you need to be able to provide include:

• Engineering and web development resources to implement the SEO firm’s recommended changes to the website, on both a near-term and long-term basis

• Marketing resources to review plans and any content created to support those campaigns

• Content development resources to create any required content, whether it be adding copy to the website or creating content to support content acquisition strategies and link earning

• One or more project managers to oversee the entire process

How to Integrate SEO Knowledge in the Organization

Although it makes sense to involve an experienced SEO professional (employee or consultant) in your optimization efforts, it is important to remember that for SEO to be successful in the long term, you need to integrate SEO expertise into every aspect of your online business.

A basic level of SEO knowledge within the software and website development departments can speed up the production process, as a well-educated development team already knows a lot about how SEO affects what they do every day and can modify their efforts accordingly, on an ongoing basis. They will also be more likely to make the right decisions when the person in charge of SEO is not immediately available. Ultimately, this can save a large organization hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars—because it won’t be necessary to do a large amount of extra work to make the site search engine–friendly.

SEO is no longer merely about <title> tags and meta descriptions. Although this wasn’t the case a few years ago, user engagement signals and website usability play increasingly large roles in search engine visibility today. It is vital that website designers think about the experience of the user who comes to the site from a search engine results page. Likewise, social media strategies need to incorporate keyword themes and links that search engines are looking for as signals in their ranking formulas, as well as the overall element of social engagement that leads to natural link development and increased brand awareness.

Similarly, basic SEO knowledge is an incredibly powerful tool in both online and offline marketing. Many companies have failed to integrate their offline marketing efforts (such as television or radio commercials promoting a new product) with their online efforts, and SEO planning in this area can often make (or break) a product or website launch.

SEO knowledge at the management level is essential for similar reasons. Decisions made by management, which can affect the entire business, can often have disastrous effects on SEO efforts if they are done in a vacuum—one common example of this is contractual agreements with partners for content syndication. It is a common problem that even after the development teams, designers, and copywriters are trained on SEO, managers end up becoming the obstacle because they haven’t been briefed on, or haven’t entirely bought into, the aspects of SEO that executives need to know about.

When all of the members of an organization have and act on basic SEO knowledge, the likelihood of success is exponentially greater. The SEO specialist or team can focus most of their energy on new initiatives and continuing to develop the process, while the rest of your team makes good business decisions and taps them for on-demand answers to questions.

Developing the In-House SEO Specialist

Building SEO knowledge in-house can be challenging in a small organization where most of the employees are already performing multiple tasks. It is often good to have an SEO consultant on call to answer questions and validate solutions.

If you need to assign SEO to existing talent because you don’t have the budget to hire an agency, consultant, or contractor, you should consider engaging an SEO professional to evaluate the aptitude of the person(s) you have in mind for the role. The cost of this assessment from an independent consultant can run anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on a variety of factors. Countless companies have underestimated the specialized skills and investment required for successful SEO. It’s a role unlike any your organization has seen before—this person needs the technical skills, marketing panache, and political savvy to work her way into your website development processes, and the innovative, outside-the-box thinking that will generate creative solutions to search engine crawler needs. Choosing the wrong person can be a costly mistake in terms of time wasted and missed opportunities.

As with larger organizations, it is important to develop a basic level of SEO knowledge throughout the organization. SEO still touches on management, marketing, and development, and it is important that all of these departments have a basic understanding of the issues.

We will outline some of the ways to effectively and rapidly learn about SEO and build up in-house knowledge next.

Making the Most of Limited Resources or Budgets

Learning SEO and doing it on your own can be a challenging task, for two major reasons:

• The demanding, ever-changing landscape of search algorithm behavior is often unpredictable and nonintuitive.

• There are literally thousands of details and tactics to learn, some of which may have little impact on their own but, when used in various combinations with other components, can have a powerful influence on rankings. Herein lies the “art” aspect of mastering SEO.

Fortunately, many SEO training tools and materials are available via paid subscription at Moz, SEO Book, Instant E-Training, Market Motive, ClickZ Academy, and others. If you don’t have the budget for a subscription, you can try public blogs and resources such as Moz.com and SearchEngineLand.com. Also consider the many resources for learning that we discussed in Chapter 11.

You can do numerous things at a fairly low cost to improve your site’s overall optimization, including the following:

Use the free search engine tools

Use the free tools provided by the three major search engines. Create accounts in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and verify yourself as a site owner on both. This will provide you with access to diagnostic tools, such as robots.txt validators, as well as reports on backlinks, spidering activity, server errors, top search queries, anchor text, and more.

Find the best keywords to target

Use the Google Keyword Planner to find keywords with high search volumes. Then use the Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis Tool to get an estimate of how hard it would be to rank for the terms you have identified.

Check out your competitors

Assess your site and those of your competitors for SEO success factors such as keyword-rich URLs, <title> tags and <h1> tags, keyword prominence, and so on. To survey your and your competitors’ <title> tags across a large number of pages, use the search engines’ site: operators and set (in the preferences) the number of results returned per page to 100.

Optimize your <title> tags

You want each <title> tag across your site to be unique and focused on a relevant keyword theme. Make each <title> tag count, because of all the elements on the page, it’s what the search engines give the most weight; it also heavily influences the searcher’s click decision from among the search results.

Optimize other critical elements

Analyze the text, HTML, inbound links, internal links, anchor text, and so on to determine your ideal configuration for success. Include a dose of your own critical thinking.

Measure, test, measure, and refine

Test your assumptions and the assertions of others—particularly SEO bloggers (not every piece of advice you find will be accurate or applicable). Measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and treat SEO like a series of experiments. Make iterative improvements to your URLs, title tags, <h1> tags, internal linking structure, anchor text, page copy, link acquisition efforts, and so on.

What sorts of KPIs should you measure and aim to improve? At a minimum, consider checking rankings, traffic, and conversion metrics. However, you can also check other metrics, such as the number of different search terms used to find your site (for this, use Google Search Console, SearchMetrics, or SEMrush), the number of different landing pages where search visitors arrive, the growth of inbound links and the addition of any notable inbound links, and so forth.

NOTE

We recommend these books to help you understand using analytics: Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik (Sybex) and Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton (Sybex).

Test different ideas

Get one great idea for a tool, service, resource, or page, and bounce it off some folks in social media, participants in SEO forums, or privately through email to an SEO expert whom you trust. Hire a developer who can help you build it; consider leveraging your online relationships via LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to mine recommended developer talent.

Many in-house SEOs have had success finding copywriters via sites like Craigslist or Textbroker to write articles for nominal fees ranging from $10 to $50 per article (few companies and in-house resources can compete with these rates), though remember the old adage that you get what you pay for, and this applies online as well. Again, consider leveraging your online contacts to find highly regarded talent within your budget.

Leverage low-cost tools

Consider using one of the following tools:

WordPress or Drupal

These tools are popular with dynamic and static website/application developers, respectively. Most of the time they are used to build web pages, but they also offer a range of reporting tools.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

This is a simple link-based crawler. Web developers use Xenu to check for broken links on a regular basis, but for SEO purposes the best value comes in the form of simple internal link analysis. By ordering the Xenu Sitemap based on “links in” and “page level,” you can easily detect possible internal linking abnormalities that may interrupt PageRank flow or decrease anchor text value; and of course, you can save all this information as a report. Xenu gathers loads of information, and it is a very useful tool, even for in-depth SEO purposes.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

This is a small desktop program you can install on your PC or Mac that spiders websites’ links, images, CSS, scripts, and apps from an SEO perspective. It fetches key on-site page elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type, and allows you to filter for common SEO issues (or slice and dice the data how you see fit by exporting it into Excel). You can view, analyze, and filter the crawl data as it’s gathered and updated continuously in the program’s user interface.

Microsoft Word

Although it may seem to be an unconventional tool for a web developer/SEO practitioner, Microsoft Word is undeniably one of the best copywriting and publishing tools, and practically all users are familiar with it. It has several built-in features that help you to produce high-quality content, analyze existing content, fix and locate essential grammar errata, and above all, easily automate and synchronize all features and changes with other users and publishing tools. For more tech-savvy folks, there is always the scripting option for fine-tuning.

As with most SEO tools, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you use the preceding tools properly, they can be very helpful, but if you lack experience or try to use them for the wrong kind of task, they can cause pain and misery.

Making proper on-page optimization decisions usually takes days. Even for a relatively small site, it is possible to cut that down to fewer than two hours by using the tools and methods we just described. Of course, there is a difference in the quality of work and the documentation you’ll get with these tools compared to what you’d get with more conventionally priced SEO services, but they do have their place.

SEO webinars

There are numerous free SEO webinars available that will expand your knowledge. Great sources include Instant E-Training, Moz, Digital Marketing Depot, and SEMPO.

Limited cash options

If you’re on a tight budget, create a blog with great content and promote it via social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Google+). Execute the SEO action items identified in this book, and leverage the free tools and guides we’ve mentioned. Attend free webinars. Do what you can for SEO. Then, invest in an hour or two with a consultant to do an ad hoc site review. You can also check with SEO firms to see which ones are offering special introductory packages, as some firms offer special pricing just to get started with a client.

These are just examples of things you can do, and countless other options are also available. Whatever you do, don’t short-circuit the process of developing in-house expertise, even if you hire outside help. That in-house knowledge will be invaluable over time, and if you have hired a quality outsourcing partner, she will be delighted because it will make her job easier. She may even help train you or your team.

Contracting for Specialist Knowledge and Experience

Even if you have a solid in-house SEO team, sometimes it makes sense to get help from the outside. Why would you want to bring in external expertise when you have a strong team already?

The answer lies in the complexity of SEO itself. SEO has dozens of subdisciplines, including video optimization, local search, image optimization, competition for search traffic in other countries, link development, usability, and strategies for social media properties. If you need help in one or more of these areas, don’t hesitate to seek assistance from outside your organization. It’s also possible that your SEO team has mid-level, but not expert-level, knowledge of SEO—and contracting out for expert-level guidance of your team is often a wise investment.

Another reason to bring in an SEO consultant is to conduct an audit of your site. This should help identify the things you’ve missed, confirm the things you’ve done right, and highlight new opportunities. Here are the ideal times to engage a consultant to perform an SEO audit:

• When you need to understand the amount of work that will be involved in optimizing your site

• When you have done what you know about SEO and need advice on what to do next (or as part of an annual training, to help develop better expertise in-house)

• When others in your organization need justification of your SEO recommendations

• Before a site redesign (or at any time you make major changes to a site), so that you can learn what needs to change and what you can do to make the next website more search engine–friendly

Applying SEO Recommendations Intelligently

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is the gap between strategy and implementation. The SEO artist knows how to explain his recommendations in simple terms and in the language of his audience. However, simple expression of a concept does not always mean seamless implementation.

When you look at a site from an SEO perspective, you must always keep the bigger picture in mind: to do what is best for the business by balancing both short- and long-term goals while managing available resources effectively. Changes that minimize implementation cost and hassle but have a big impact have the best ROI. Before you recommend throwing out that old CMS and reinvesting millions of dollars in a brand-new website, ensure that the ROI to the organization will justify the expense, and back it up with data.

This does not mean you should never recommend drastic changes, but rather that you should do so at the right time and place, and break out the implementation of the overall SEO strategy into prioritized SEO “projects.” Be mindful of the potential benefit for each SEO recommendation. Sometimes this is difficult to quantify, and you may need to build a table similar to Table 14-1.

This type of analysis is incredibly valuable in keeping an organization moving forward with an SEO program and increasing search traffic at the most rapid rate possible. Of course, sometimes the executives in your company may want to see dollar numbers instead of High, Medium, and Low ratings for the Value, so you may need to be prepared to give an estimated range of dollar impact. Just make sure to be clear that you are providing a very rough estimate, as this is usually difficult to predict precisely.

Selecting the Right SEO Person

Although experience costs more, under normal circumstances it will bring faster results. On the other hand, a less experienced person is a lot like a rookie in baseball: if you hire a future star, you can potentially accomplish a great deal at a much lower cost.

When sifting through résumés, examine candidates’ specific skill sets. If you are looking for someone to develop social media campaigns, you should probably be a bit more focused on that than on whether the candidate is an expert at keyword research. No matter what his skill level is, he should “get” the Internet. Does he blog? Tweet? Have a professional and well-connected LinkedIn profile? If he doesn’t, and there isn’t a specific personal or professional reason why (privacy, confidentiality, etc.), he’s possibly under-experienced for the position you are looking to fill.

Also, when evaluating a person’s skills, don’t forget to assess her political finesse. What makes a successful SEO practitioner at an agency or in a freelance position is different from what makes a successful candidate in-house. Often, companies focus strictly on results and types of projects; however, if your company is plagued with red tape and political minefields, you need someone who can remain diplomatic, sell SEO to the entire organization, and integrate it into the organization in the right places so that it is implemented successfully. There is an 80/20 rule for in-house SEO: 80% of the time you spend selling and 20% of the time you spend doing SEO.

Pitching the Person

As we’ve noted, finding good SEO talent can be challenging, as top SEO experts are in high demand and are likely to have more than one job option to pursue; for these SEO pros, a high six-figure salary is the norm.

Many companies overlook this. The “jobs offered” sections of forums are often full of offers, but few employers have made any real effort to market their openings. It really is a basic marketing problem that many of those vacancies show. Many don’t even put a location in the title. Far worse is that almost all of the posts are company-centric: all about what the company wants from applicants, and no thought for what the prospective applicant will want from an employer. SEO is not like other job functions. A good SEO guru is in high demand; you have to make her think, “I want to work there!”

Fail to pitch the prospect, and you will get to choose from a diminishing pool of folks who can’t make it alone, aren’t able or willing to make a good living from affiliate programs, and don’t prefer to be with a more forward-thinking and proactive company that looks to develop its staff, rather than merely recruit them. Many SEO pros are looking for companies that have more support and resources; they are frequently stuck as isolated one-person departments, with few tools and “toys” to help them advance.

Making the Offer

Move quickly! Once you know the candidate is the right fit, make an offer. Good SEO professionals are always in demand, and waiting two or three weeks to make an offer could cost you the superstar hire. It is not uncommon for top-notch pros to land a new job in 3 to 4 weeks, nor is it uncommon for a company to search for a candidate for 6 to 12 months. In the SEO recruiting space, if you snooze, you lose. Prioritize time for the interviews, and act fast. If the process just seems too daunting, consider paying for a few hours of a top SEO pro’s time to help you in the hiring process.

Getting the Process Started

Just as a bad hire can be a very expensive proposition, so can engaging the wrong consultant or firm, either through a haphazard selection process, or no selection process at all. Here is an outline of the steps you should take for a more methodical, disciplined search for outsourced SEO expertise:

1. Start with your goals. Connect with your team and make sure you have a good idea of what you want to accomplish by working with an SEO expert. Sometimes it’s as simple as an audit to make sure you’re following best practices; other times it’s training for your marketers and content builders to get them up to speed on how to actively promote the site. If you have a solid list of things you want completed at the end of an engagement, you’ll be better able to find the consultant or firm that best suits your needs—and you’ll be better able to judge the eventual results.

   If you don’t really know what you want, that’s OK, but it does make the SEO practitioner’s task a little less structured, and it means you need an exceptional level of trust in that person. Sometimes an SEO expert can help you define your goals—to get the best of both worlds, you can ask her what she thinks your goals should be and combine those with your own list. It is still fairly common to hear companies tell us, “We don’t know what we need to do for SEO, but we need to do something; can you tell us?”

2. Connect with your social network. The people who can best assist you in finding a good match are often those who know you well. Talk to friends, fellow business owners, SEO bloggers, and people you know and trust.

   When you communicate with your network, make sure you share a little bit about your site, your business, and your goals with regard to SEO (to the extent that you know them). The more information you can share, the better folks are able to assist. At a minimum, if you have geographic considerations or want the culture of a large, multi-offering agency versus that of a smaller, SEO-focused consultant/consultancy, this is good to include in the request.

3. Get advice from SEO-savvy people you trust. Familiarize yourself with the Twitter handles and Facebook pages for the people you trust, and engage. Tap your Google+ circles and LinkedIn connections to request advice and guidance. As a rule, SEO experts are incredibly friendly about referring business to good companies and good people, and if your network has already given you a few names, running these by the professionals can get you valuable insight on potential winners versus lemons. Even the authors of this book are willing to provide recommendations, so feel free to reach out to us.

4. Make sure the person is available. This is a fairly obvious step, but many people do not put this at the beginning of the communication process. Ask the person whether he is available at the start, and then continue the conversation if applicable (there is no need to waste energy on folks who can’t help, though you should always ask for a referral). Your time (and theirs) is precious, so don’t waste it.

5. Define what type of expertise you need. If you have an enterprise-level, highly complex website with legacy systems and a complex development life cycle, you need an SEO consultant who knows how to work within these constraints. If local SEO is your priority, you need someone well versed in local SEO. Few companies do extremely well in all facets of SEO, so you must identify which aspect of SEO you need most and find a company that excels in that area.

Preparing a Request for Proposal

A well-written request for proposal (RFP) can significantly improve the overall process. If your RFP is not written well, it hinders the SEO firm’s ability to understand and define your needs and to scope and price your project. This in turn leads to a disconnect in expectations for both parties. A lousy RFP can discourage a busy SEO firm from even responding—which is a very unfortunate outcome, as it takes the best firms out of the running. That being said, there are some SEO companies and consultants who do not participate in the formal RFP process, and with good reason: some businesses use the bait of an RFP to gain valuable SEO strategy tips, and even specific tactics, for free and at the expense of the SEO vendor. So while it can seem like a good idea to ask for a lot of great information in the RFP, this can place an undue burden on the RFP respondents and may result in some of the best agencies and consultants not responding, simply because they have other opportunities they can pursue without having to participate in a lengthy RFP process.

Many companies intuitively “know” what they want but find it difficult to ask for it in a way that is clear, succinct, informative, and constructive. If written properly, an RFP can facilitate the sales process and ensure that everyone involved on both sides understands the purpose, requirements, scope, and structure of the intended engagement. Following a few key steps in the beginning of the RFP process will enable you to rest easy, knowing that you are more likely to get what your company wants and needs.

Step 2: Define “needs” and “wants” using a decision matrix

RFP recipients will understand that you aren’t the SEO expert, and therefore you aren’t going to be able to adequately define the scope of your desired SEO engagement. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Just try to be reasonable when formulating your needs and wants, and recognize that the RFP recipient may have a better idea of what you need than you do.

In addition to disclosing to the SEO firm the basics, such as your objectives, your site’s conversion types (e.g., online purchases, newsletter subscriptions, white paper downloads, etc.), target audience, constraints, and so forth, in all fairness you will also need to clearly spell out the criteria by which you will evaluate the SEO firm’s suitability. This means you will need to define these criteria in advance.

SEO firms know the selection process is usually governed by gut feel, so any RFP recipient who does not have a preexisting relationship with you is automatically inclined not to respond because he knows the deck is likely stacked against him. This is further exacerbated when you send the RFP to multiple SEO firms. You can allay this concern by candidly sharing with the firms your biases and the clearly defined criteria by which you will be evaluating them.

You should map this out in a decision matrix, which is simply a chart listing the attributes you are looking for in the SEO firm, a weighting factor for each attribute, a score from 0 to 10 for each, and the weighted score (e.g., the score multiplied by the weighting factor). The weighted scores are added to arrive at a total score. A highly simplified example of a decision matrix is shown in Figure 14-1.

Figure 14-1. Decision matrix for evaluating competing SEO firms

Judging criteria that are both quantitative and qualitative brings objectivity into a subjective process, which will aid you in managing expectations internally. And by sharing your list of criteria and the weighting factors with the RFP recipients, you increase the likelihood—as well as caliber—of responses.

We recommend that you place a high premium on trust in hiring an SEO firm. Unfortunately, there are lots of firms that claim a high level of expertise that either don’t really have it or don’t put in the effort to drive results (this is much the same in many consulting disciplines). This is one factor on which we recommend you place a lot of weight.

Communicating with Candidate SEO Firms

You should also plan to talk to candidate SEO firms. This is your opportunity to dig a little bit deeper and move beyond the RFP. If you are a smaller company and have bypassed doing an RFP, you will still need to be in direct contact with your prospective SEO firm. Here are some things for you to consider during this stage of the process:

Ask for a list of past success stories (not just clients)

Let the company tell you where it has helped someone be successful. You can ask for a client list, but be aware that a failed client engagement does not necessarily mean the SEO firm failed. In addition, many SEO service contracts prohibit the SEO firm from disclosing their clients. Many times clients don’t implement the SEO practitioner’s recommendations, or they try to, but do it badly.

You can use this to your benefit. Ask the firm for a case study of a client failure, and then ask them why they think it failed. This can provide some great insight into what they require from their clients, because the failure they disclose to you will inevitably be due to the client not providing them with what they needed.

Talk on the phone or (if possible) meet in person

Email is a great initial communication medium, but a phone call or in-person meeting gives you a real sense of the team you’ll work with. Make sure you’re not talking to a salesperson (if you go with a big company), but rather to the person who will be interacting with you throughout the contract execution process. There’s nothing worse than getting sold by a charismatic, knowledgeable SEO leader and then being passed on to a junior team for management.

In the phone call/meeting, be sure to establish rapport. If you don’t feel comfortable on a personal level, don’t dismiss it—brilliant SEOs are great, but if you can’t work well together, the project is unlikely to succeed. Everyone works better with people they like and get along with. There’s also the incentive of not letting down someone you’ve developed a working relationship with, which extends subconsciously and consciously into every part of the work you do together.

Present a few initial issues over email

Some SEO consultants won’t engage in any work before a contract is signed, but you should at least get them to talk about how a problem can be approached, whether it’s an issue, and what strategies they might recommend to fix it (even from a broad perspective). If you are an SEO practitioner, put a few examples of issues you’ve already identified on the table. Seeing how the consultant responds builds trust in her knowledge, and gives you insight into how she solves problems and what your work relationship and the advice you receive will be like down the road.

Ask for references

Asking for references is a good idea, but make sure you qualify the reference as part of the process. You want to protect yourself from people who might get some friend of theirs, instead of a real client, to act as a reference. It is helpful if the reference the candidate provides works within a well-known business. Make sure the relationship between the SEO firm and the reference provider is clear.

Once you get the reference on the phone, you should try to learn what the SEO consultant was asked to do, and what he did. Get specific details on this. If you want someone to provide link development strategy for you but he did not do link development for the other client, the value of that reference is decreased. Then see whether the reference will give you some input on the benefits they received from the work of the SEO consultant (e.g., increases in traffic, conversions, or other metrics of value). Then verify what the reference says about the SEO firm by checking their site metrics with Compete or Quantcast.

Also, think about doing your own research. Find out what site the consultant worked on for the reference. Then use the Wayback Machine to see prior versions of the site if they’re available.

Contact other past clients

Look at the SEO firm’s site and see if it provides client lists. Call ex-clients the candidate firm didn’t give as references. In addition, ask about good and bad experiences with the company in forums that cover SEO.

Making the Decision

Regardless of whether you have done an RFP or used a more informal process, make sure you understand the process you will use to make a decision. Here are some tips:

Get a written response from two or three vendors

Don’t get an RFP response or quote from just one vendor, even if you’re sure you’re going to use them. Multiple quotes aren’t just a best practice, they’re a good way to learn about pricing and scope discrepancies. The quote from the vendor you don’t like might include some pieces that your preferred vendor overlooked. Pricing is harder because it fluctuates so wildly in the search marketing world.

However, don’t choose an SEO expert on price alone (or even make price the biggest part of your decision), unless your budget is a real problem. SEO is usually an incredibly high-ROI activity. Companies that spend larger amounts on SEO services tend to make it back in a matter of weeks or months from traffic and conversion increases (remember that more targeted traffic means higher conversion rates too).

Thus, going with an SEO expert who costs a lot less might seem like a good idea, but if you don’t work as well together and you think she might not do as good a job, you’re hurting yourself in the long term. Of course, don’t get fleeced by an exorbitantly overpriced firm (watch out; some of the biggest SEO companies have some of the most ruthless pricing models because they know that Fortune 1,000 companies will work only with consultants who’ve done work for other Fortune 1,000 companies), but be aware that the prospect of saving a few thousand dollars is not the best reason to choose a different provider.

Have smart, sensible people review the contract

Lawyers are great, but sometimes legal folks get overly concerned with liability and risk management details and overlook big-picture business items. Make sure your savvy business/ROI-focused personnel get a good look too. If there are legal issues that cause a rift, it can even be wise to get your C-level executives involved. Sometimes the folks from legal won’t budge on an issue that’s going to be a deal breaker, but if the CEO says do it anyway, you can get around the more problematic demands. Also be aware that different things are important to different firms. For example, some SEO companies will walk away from a deal if the client insists on a no-publicity clause, if you insist on them assuming millions of dollars in liability for a small engagement, or if it’s got a “work for hire” clause, which the company has if they want to share but not lose ownership.

Go with your gut

When you finally make your choice, go with the team you feel will bring results. Making a matrix of price versus service versus reputation versus estimated productivity is fine if you’re into that, but consider going with your initial gut feeling. If you don’t feel like there is a “right” company, go back to the table, get more information, and even try to get another bid or two. When you do find the best choice, things just “feel” right. How do you know?

• The way they talk about search engines makes sense and the advice they’ve given lines up with the best practices you’ve seen expressed on SEO sites you trust.

• They are familiar with recent trends at the engines and the links they send or news they cite is timely, relevant, and logical.

• They use the engines like pros, rapidly combing through site queries, link information, and analytics data to unveil the underlying factors that are hurting your rankings or helping the competition to succeed.

• Their interactions with your team “fit.” The team members like the consultants and are eager to implement their advice.

Choose someone you are comfortable dropping your guard around. This is your expert and ideally your confidant, someone you can reach out to and talk to about challenges and knowledge gaps in a way that you cannot with in-house colleagues.

Remember, an SEO business relationship is a relationship, and if the two parties involved simply speak different languages (professionally and/or culturally) within their organizations, no amount of SEO expertise—and no amount of SEO budget—will make the relationship work. It is much smarter to work with people you like than to pay begrudgingly for a working relationship that simply doesn’t work. Cultural fit is essential, so be sure you can identify your own business culture and then look for a compatible, resonant culture within the SEO company/consultancy you hire.