Jessica Bowman, Director Of SEO, Business.com

Jessica Bowman, Director Of SEO, Business.com

Jessica Bowman is the director of SEO for Business.com and does independent consulting. She rel- ishes the human side of SEO, the art of SEO-getting people to do what you need to be done.

Bowman has managed search engine optimization for up to seven different divisions across the North America and Europe, in five different languages. Her diverse experience in project manage- ment, web-site usability, and process analysis has given her unique insight into working with IT to get things accomplished-one of the biggest challenges for in-house search marketers.

Business.com is the leading business-to-business search engine, directory, and pay-per-click adver- tising network. Business.com helps business decision makers quickly find what they need in order to manage and grow their businesses, and enables advertisers to reach them across the business. Internet through premier partners, including the Wall Street Journal Online, Forbes, Business Week, Hoovers, and more.

Jerri: How does having your search marketing in-house differ from hiring someone to help you with your search marketing strategies?

Bowman: The overarching tactics that need to be executed are the same for both search marketing in-house and outsourced.

The key differences are:

■The innovativeness of your strategy due to differences in experience/knowledge of doing your search marketing. Many in-house search marketers fell into their role and/or are fairly new to the world of search marketing. Their challenge is to compete in the SERPs with competitors who have hired a more experienced search marketing person or agency.

■When bringing search marketing in-house with dedicated resources, you now have some- one there 40 hours a week, in the halls and at meetings, who is able to represent and cham- pion search marketing, keep it top-of-mind and high in the priority list. In contrast, when you hire an agency, then the selling of search marketing changes is left to someone who has other things on their plate.

Jerri: Is there anything about search marketing that’s more difficult when you’re doing it in-house?

Bowman: Yes, you’re busy in meetings! When you’re in-house, there is a lot of networking and schmoozing that has to happen to get and keep search marketing efforts a high priority and not removed from projects. Just because you know what needs to be done to boost your organic rank- ings does not mean it’s easy to implement – there are priorities, politics, and red tape that must be overcome, and some people are just resistant to the changes needed for search marketing. It is a challenge to be the person in meetings, networking and schmoozing, and also the person who has to execute the search marketing tactics. It can be done, it is just challenging.

The second thing is that some companies (or even particular individuals/departments within a com- pany) seem to give more trust in what a consultant says versus what an employee says. Any in-house search marketer could give you examples of how they pitched changes again and again and received opposition; however, once a consultant recommended that same change, it suddenly became a won- derful idea that is technically feasible. This is one of the reasons that I recommend in-house search marketers have an SEO consultant available for outside counsel.

Lastly, when your rankings drop, or traffic decreases, you don’t typically have other sites that you can compare with to see if they saw something similar. Whereas when you work with an agency they work with many clients and can compare you with a number of sites to see if there was a big change in the formula that affected many companies, or it is something that specifically affected you.

Jerri: Do you ever work with outsourcers on parts of your search marketing?

Bowman: Yes. I love to outsource portions of a project. I have a short list of preferred vendors for keyword research, directory submissions, troubleshooting, copywriting, site audits, question and answer, code reviews, and there is even one someone I use to keep me up to speed on industry news when I get extra busy.

Jerri: What suggestions would you make for organizations that are considering bringing their search marketing in-house?

Bowman: Know what you’re getting into. There are many ways to bring search marketing in-house and structure the team, tactics, etc. Search marketing in-house will not likely reach its fullest potential if your in-house search marketer is also allocated on other things. You typically spend about 80 percent of your time selling SEO and 20 percent actually doing SEO work. Also, bear in mind that, while the agency you hired only worked 20 hours per week, outside of your billable hours the consultants kept up with trends and news out- side of that 20 hours. Also they live and breathe search marketing all day, making them far more productive than a typically isolated in-house search marketer. Also, your outside consultant wasn’t responsible for getting the changes through the IT department.

■Budget for outside counsel, a more experienced consultant to reach out to when questions.

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■Make it a priority to attend search marketing conferences, at least two conferences per year. When you’re in-house you tend to lose perspective and put on your “corporate-tinted glasses.” Conferences bring you back to the search marketing reality and keep you grounded.

Jerri: Is there anything particular that an organization should avoid if it’s managing its search marketing in-house?

Bowman: Don’t work in isolation. It’s very easy to get so caught up in busy work that you lose touch with changes in the industry. At one time cloaking was accepted, now it can get you banned. Just last year buying links worked, now Google penalizes when they know a site is buying links (and they have asked people to report it).

Don’t get so busy that you don’t have time to stay abreast of the industry happenings and continu- ously expand your knowledge. I now have the expectation that I will spend two hours a day read- ing about the industry-while no one else on my in-house team spends this much time, your most senior search marketer should.

Jerri: What changes do you see coming that will affect the way organizations use search marketing in the future?

Bowman:

1. Brand Protection and Management. Search engines are where people go for information about a company, product, service, or an answer to their question. They use search engines like a question-and-answer machine. Search engines display a wide variety of sources of information for users, some of it favorable, and some of it unfavorable. In coming years companies (e.g., PR departments) will finally catch on that there are things you can do to influence the search results just as there are things you can do to influence the media in the offline world. You just go about it in a completely different manner, but the goal and results are similar.

2. Videos. Google now displays highly relevant videos in their regular search results. This means that companies have the opportunity to have a video in front of Google users, dis- played as an image-a rare and highly valuable commodity in the Google SERPs. It’s an eye grabber and will give your company far more visibility than any other company on the search results page-even if you aren’t listed in position one. We are already starting to see search marketers dabble in videos more than ever before. In the next few years companies will get more involved, offering useful interviews, how-tos, and entertaining videos for their target audiences. The risk for the late adopters is that by the time they join the online video market, online videos will be quite mature and there will be little room for error without receiving public criticism. The benefit of being an early adopter is that everyone is still try- ing to figure out what is successful; therefore errors are more acceptable.

Jerri: What kind of changes will these trends require for in-house search marketing?

Bowman: They need to adopt and get involved in new media-social media and online videos for sites like YouTube.com.

It’s funny, back in the early days of SEO large companies weren’t on the bandwagon and small busi- nesses could easily overtake larger businesses in the search results. Now larger companies have caught on, and it’s now more difficult for the smaller businesses to outrank larger businesses for many search terms. Social media today is like SEO in the early days-large companies aren’t on the bandwagon. There are far more risks and challenges that prevent big companies from going in this direction. For large companies, doing nothing seems like less of a risk than diving in and risking a backfire or no 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.

The in-house lifecycle as defined by Jessica Bowman.

In-house SEO Life Cycle

Courtship

Honeymoon

Reality

Synergy

Source: SEMinhouse.com