I’m now less than a week from starting my new job as the SEO Director of a search marketing agency, and it got me thinking about what I’ve learnt from my time as part of an (initially very small) in-house SEO team. There have been a lot of pros & cons to my time here, and in true blog style, I thought I’d try to summarise these in a snappy little list.
Bad Things
- Not having complete control: When you work inside a large company, you are at the mercy of the actions of other people. Months of hard work can go down the pan just because someone else doesn’t understand what you’re doing or trying to do. Sometimes, they can be based in a different department or even a different country.
- Corporate/IT bureaucracy: Getting something done in a large company (say perhaps, the world’s largest B2B publisher) can be painful at times. We’ve been trying to get an internal blog set up since September of last year – to date, no luck. Similar issues have affected attempts at everything from domain management to URL rewriting.
- Education, education, education: This is a follow up to #1 really, but when you have a company of over 1,000 people, and a search marketing team of 3, you often spend the whole time explaining why SEO matters, or even what SEO is. And, as often as not, you may get laughed out of the room.
- Lack of resources: Trying to optimise 13 sites, with a team of 3, as well as educating the rest of the company on the importance of what you do, can leave you a bit pushed for time. Throw in some traditional online marketing, monthly & weekly reporting and the odd bit of PPC, and it can seem like there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
- It’s not very cool: It’s just not, is it?!
Good things
- Recognition: Being part of a small team, who come to be seen as being centrally important to the future of the business, is a pretty exciting place to be. When that team essentially starts changing the way that company does business, it’s really exciting.
- Education, education, education: Ok, so some of them may laugh. But finding a person, or group of people who get it and are keen to learn, can be very rewarding. Seeing them create content that then ranks really well against competitive phrases, is a pure buzz.
- Variation: Although there is a lot of stuff that stays the same, there is also an incredible amount of variety when you have responsibility for sites whose topics range from science to social care, farming to hotels & restaurants. And the range of people you get to meet matches this variety.
- The people: I know that I just mentioned this in passing, but what I’m referring to are the people in an in-house SEO team. If the team I worked in was anything to go by, then they tend to be pretty dedicated – otherwise they wouldn’t be in-house right?!
- Getting head-hunted: This is a joke – although it was quite nice!
Overall, I’d have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed my time in-house and the good definitely outweighed the bad.
I certainly had no great yearning to leave, and was very happy in my position. I learnt a huge amount and, for me personally, with my love of journalism, being involved with a major publishing company working out how to adapt to the Web 2.0 world was incredibly interesting.
I hope to be able to keep track of the ups & downs of working for an agency in the same way, but in the meantime, does anyone else have any experiences, positive or negative, of working in-house?
