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Life as an in-house search marketer is very different compared to someone at an agency. Things certainly work differently for an in-house marketer. For SEO’s the first few months as an in-house can be a big culture shock. In this post i will try to highlight some of my learnings as an in-house search marketer and what you can expect in the first few months in your new role.

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What is the current state of search?

This should be your first investigative task. At this stage find out who handles search marketing in your company. Which department has search responsibility(if at all)? If there are multiple departments leveraging search then find out who handles it and what is the size of their current program. You can also type in some simple queries in Google and you will find out how much SEO and PPC is being done.

How much search is currently being leveraged?

With this you want to understand the size of your program. There would be some areas that spends millions of dollars on paid search whereas some other that spends heavily on SEO consultants. Size too would vary a lot depending on the structure of that division. I am sure you would find out that most divisions are heavy in Paid Search and light on SEO (easy to spend and measure!!).

Ask for the right introductions

Your first few months you want to get introduced with all the right people in the company. If you are lucky, as i was, your hiring manager would get you connected with all the stakeholders in the company. Think of it more as a SEO roadshow. To equip yourself, get a detailed organization chart and check mark names as you meet them. Also, prepare some notes after each introduction. Trust me, this little time investment would go a long way especially after meeting so many new people.

During this stage, try and maximize this golden opportunity and meet as many groups as you can. Early introductions in your in-house career can go a long way. These early introductions would also lead to introductions with other members of the core group.

I always find these early introductions as a great icebreaker and also a idea bait. This is a good time to also establish yourself as a thought leader. Throw some search related idea to each group you meet. This idea need not be specific to their business but something related to their industry. For example if you meet folks from HR/Recruitment, talk to them how search can help them to recruit candidates faster employing SEO and Social Media.

Who in your company currently “gets” search

After your initial introductions you will be able to judge that who in your company understands search marketing. Do not expect them to understand the technicalities of SEO but more at a functional level. By functional i mean like someone who can differentiate between paid and organic, talk about page titles, among other things. This would be the people who would eventually be your in-house support and also your bridge to getting SEO done for their business units.

It is very easy to overestimate everyone’s knowledge about search. You would be surprised to learn that how little search knowledge there is out there in Corporate America. I remember the laugh i had got when a division head thought search marketing to be the same recruiting search. Yeah it happens!!

The above were some of my experiences and look out for the next post related to in-house.

It would also be interesting if you had similar experiences…..i would encourage you to share!

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I had the opportunity to speak on a session at SES Chicago on the Usability & SEO: Two Wins For The Price of One panel. I thought this would be a nice venue to do a recap of that session. In this presentation, i tried to look at the web development process and how different stakeholders are involved including the customer experience and search marketing teams.

In my opinion there is always the classic debate that rages on, especially between the “user experience” experts and us marketers as to what is more important or which one takes more precedence? For me, they both go hand in hand and without the one you cannot have the other.

The first task for anyone performing Website Usability is to determine how easy it is for website visitors to perform or complete a task on your site. On the other hand Search Engine Usability is an Search Engine Optimization task that determines how easy it would be for search engine crawlers to index your site.

In most companies that i have known, it is a very common practice to see that both the “user/customer experience” and the search marketing teams are separate with different reporting structures.  This can get very nasty as both the parties involved looks at site development very differently. Most of the times, customer experience is associated with interactive engagement on site like heavy use of Flash and AJAX to name a few. To SEO’s that is a deathtrap. The same way, SEO’s cannot expect to build a site that is only filled with text content. SEO’s need to understand that there has to be a balance and that all stakeholders involved get their equal share of voice.

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Email Marketing has traditionally been the best marketing channel for all marketers.

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Often the debate rages on. Paid Search (PPC) or Organic search marketing (SEO) which one is better? Granted there are millions of pages on the web dedicated to this topic but the debate still rages on. Executives, CMO’s, and everyone else keep on speculating on the results hoping the next quarter’s report will help them decide which one performed better. Paid Search is definitely the easy route (especially for big corporations) as anyone can set up a Google Adwords account and be up-and-running in about 5 minutes.

For Search Marketers like us this is not a choice but an option that marketing on the internet provides to us.

Well there is no real choice for us marketers as end of the day we have to use all available mediums to generate more sales revenues.

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