SEO Consultant Ireland

How to handle the SEO jobs?

Irish companies are still not 100% sure if to have the SEO outsourced to the specialist SEO Company, or to hire SEO staff directly, and have them work onsite. The constant barrage from the SPAM email offers from mostly Far East SEO companies and their low pricing and the high contract rates of the local Irish SEO companies and professionals mate things even worse! To outsource to an unknown company on the other side of the world, or to hire a local provider – who will in most cases charge you twice more?

The reason it is so hard to hire a SEO staff or engage a SEO company is that there is relatively little understanding on what SEO really is. It is not uncommon to hear the completely opposite opinions and definitions on what the SEO is. Some people bring in the pay per click (PPC) in it, some talk about on site and off site SEO, some talk about link building (now, how do you build a link?). The social media, made things even more complex lately.

So how do you hire someone not knowing nothing neither on what the task on hand is, nor the results that are to be achieved? You are quite likely to fail. If you stick to it, you are quite likely to fail a few times as well.

The same is true if you hire internally or a external SEO vendor.

Do it yourself SEO jobs are the natural result of this situation. You either try to do it yourself if you are a small company, or you ask the existing staff you have to learn and do the SEO tasks for you. That is even more often a recipe for the disaster. You are asking of your staff to do a SEO job that they have not been trained for and have no experience in it. Jet somehow you expect them to succeed?

Hiring for SEO jobs is tough.

The best peace of the advice is to get a the best SEO professional you can get – to help you and do the job interviews for you. Regardless if you are hiring an external SEO company, or a onsite SEO vendor, or the person to do SEO inhouse on your payroll. You are far likely to get the right one to do your SEO jobs than trying to asses the candidates yourself (presuming you are not a SEO specialist yourself!).

Any Business Plan has to include a Marketing Plan of some sort. For the Internet based businesses our Marketing Plan will most likely be one of the main sections. When it comes to writing the Online Marketing Budget, the whole list of problems start. Why is that?

Pay Per Click Budget

Online Marketing people will like budgeting for the PPC. Why? Simply because the cost of the PPC is predictable. And the whole PPC business is accountable (if you build in the Click Fraud in your formula somewhere). There is a cost per click, and volumes, and targets and markets… lots of figures you can work with – something an accountant will love.

SEO Budget

Where is where serious question marks are raised under the accountants head! What is the budget required for the search engine optimisation? What is the units, deliverables, and values of each? With SEO it’s all far less specified and defined than with the PPC. And SEO also consists of so many areas that it might be defined very differently by various vendors. The needs for the SEO are very different by every client.

I want to be #1 in Google!

In most cases marketing people with little online experience will have serious issues when defining the Budget for the SEO in their Marketing Plan. They will ask the SEO Experts, and base their SEO Budget on the quotes from the SEO Vendors. Most likely their definition of their SEO Marketing Goals will be – We want to be #1 in Google for …! In other words, they will tell the SEO Companies nothing really relevant that is needed to create a plan of actions and analyze the market and keywords in question to be able to establish the real amount of the work required – hence the cost of it. Ballpark figures and even figures completely imagined are therefore quite common in SEO. People ordering SEO Service do not understand what part of their Marketing Plan do they HAVE to disclose for the SEO Company to give back the realistic estimate.

What’s the cost of SEO?

Marketing people with no online marketing experience usually call the SEO Companies and simply ask – What’s the cost of SEO? The tendency is to disclose as little as possible of their real needs. With a bit of shopping around – hey choose the Best SEO Offer. Not asking themselves much why do the SEO offers differ so much and why does one vendor charge sometimes 100 times more than the other. Not 100% more, 100 times more!

The reason is that the one ordering the SEO service needs to understand the exact deliverables of the SEO web site optimisation. Understanding the tasks involved in the web site optimization work also greatly helps. Understanding the whole process and timelines – well that defines the Perfect Client for SEO!

Unfortunately that is almost never the case.

Those who understand SEO tend to find time to do it all themselves.

The world of internet marketing is changing. Where are those banners from the ’90-ies? Google made a revolution with its AdWords pay per click programme that dominates the internet advertising market. No other competitor actually ever came close to the Google’s AdWords. The predictions for the future are further growth, in this booming industry.

One thing caught my eye, and that is the comparison of the search volume of the two abbreviations the pay per click – PPC and the search engine optimization – SEO. PPC was dominant but SEO was catching up in the last couple of years. In the last couple of months it is actually hard to separate the two keywords. It just shows the growing importance and awareness of the search engine optimization in the internet marketing world.

Search Engine Marketing in Ireland is in fact almost exclusively Google Search Marketing, simply because Irish usage of the search engines is dominated by the Google.ie. Yahoo in particular and MSN have a far biggest clients share in US than in Ireland. This makes Irish search marketing market much simpler, since the web users are using almost exclusively one search engine Google.ie.

Google has the Advertising program called Google AdWords. It is extremely easy to use and instantly starts delivering results – and therefore spending your advertising budget. Google enables you to publish your adverting on the right sidebar and above the search results on the relevant Google search results pages.

Google also have the program for the web publishers canned Google AdSense that enables them to resell advertising space on the number of other sites that are the part of the Google AdSense program. Google shares the generated revenue with the web site publishers that publish your ads.

Since with the Google AdWords program the advertiser is charged only when someone actually click on the ads, and a brought directly to the advertised web site, the program and the model is called Pay Per Click or simply PPC. Again since this is the only widely used service often is the Search Engine Marketing in Ireland reoffered to as just PPC.

SEO: To Outsource or Not to Outsource?

A raising number of the businesses are linked one way or another to the Internet, and with it in some way with the search engine optimisation (SEO). Interment marketing plays the more and more important role every day, simply since people use internet more and more in their everyday life. Even if you see something in your local shop, you are quite likely to go online and just check the prices in the other shops, and the user reviews, the manufacturers web site…

Companies know nowadays they need to invest heavily in the Internet Marketing. Pay Per Click (PPC) is where almost everyone starts, just being seduced by the simplicity and the transparency of it. Of and not to forget – the low cost entry to the market. Some take a few days, but the majority of the PPC advertisers require more than a year to realise the real costs of the PPC, and get to the ‘Panic Mode’ looking for anything else but PPC after realising how little they got for their money invested.

A strategically important decision is usually made then, to stop the PPC and get down the organic listing route and optimise the company web site for the search engines. SEO usually then becomes a ‘Hot Potato’ in the company. If there is a separate Marketing Department and the IT Department, they will try to pass it on to each other. IN reality, the likelihood that any of the internal resources knows enough about SEO is fairly slim, since SEO is not what the company has been doing so far. So a new type of task is now within the company, and a new skill is required. The management usually fails to understand the fact that the SEO skills do not exist within the staff of the company. Therefore the majority of the initial SEO efforts are performed ‘in house’. When no results are achieved, or the results have no impact at the bottom line, the question gets raised:

To outsource or not to outsource the SEO, the question is now….?

Management will be guided by the costs of the both options to determine what route to go. Seeing the quotes from the SEO companies, as opposed to the ‘zero’ cost of performing the SEO internally puts them in front of the simple position to decide to keep the SEO in house!

This is the list of questions that should help determining if to outsource or keep the SEO in house:
1. Do we have a resources available to allocate to the SEO?
2. Do we have anyone who knows how to do SEO tasks?
3. Do we know what tasks are actually required to be done at all?
4. Do we know how much will the training cost to get our staff in the position to do SEO tasks?
5. Do we know how much time will be required to get the staff trained, and when will the training be available?
6. Do we know what is our SEO goal (why do we do it actually) in the exact numbers?
7. Can we measure our SEO successes (and failures)?
8. What is the budget for the SEO software and online tools required to perform the SEO tasks?

The above are really just the basic questions. If you cannot answer just one of those, the likelihood of any effect of your internal SEO efforts on your business are very slim.