I recently moved into an in-house SEO role for a large company in the UK to initiate their SEO programme and strategy. I’ve been in the role for a little over 5 months, and I wanted to share with you some of the challenges I have faced as well as how I overcame them.

I’m going to begin mentioning some general tips and then go into some areas of SEO.

For those who do not know, there are some differences between working Agency side and In-house:

Agency SEO 

• Work on many clients.
• Attend client meetings.
• Depending on agency, Work on one aspect (eg. on-page SEO) of numerous clients or work on all aspects of fewer client (10-15).
• Your time is split between different clients.
• Gain experience across many industries.

In-House SEO

• Work on one client (the company you work for).
• Fewer sites.
• Your boss/manager is your client.
• Work on all aspects of SEO (on-page, link building, etc.)
• Generally work within one industry

@RichardBaxter has written an excellent post On Becoming an In-House SEO for those who would like to read more on the differences.

I am going to tackle numerous points in this post:

SEO Experience

One of the downfalls of being in-house is the potential lack of access to other experts; working in an Agency, you will be surrounded by many experts in SEO (programming, strategy etc), whereas In-house, you will be alone unless you go in-house at a large company.

My advice – don’t switch to a general in-house SEO role if you don’t have experience in all aspects of SEO includING (but not limited to):

• On-page SEO
• Link Building
• Building a Strategy
• Blogging / Copywriting
• Keyword Research
• Excel/Data Analysis
• Analytics and Reporting
• Presentation Skills
• Basic HTML/CSS

I was very fortunately to land my first SEO role working under some great SEOs, such as Neil Walker, Paul Spreadbury and Gary Douglas to name a few.

In my opinion, it’s very important to invest time in making, and then keeping, contacts in the industry, as they will become an invaluable resource whom you can turn to when you need some advice or have questions or you just need to talk about the crazy and cool things happening in our little world! However, and I must emphasise, that this needs to be a two-way relationship – if someone needs helps and you have the knowledge, experience and time to help, then do so. This will do wonders for you in the long run. Trust me.

Keeping up to date with changes in the industry is vital: spend time daily to read articles written by other industry experts, attend conferences (more on this later), and make sure you know what is going on, because knowing the ‘what, why, where, when, who, and how’, shows others that you can do this.

I have a private Skype group set up where some of my previous colleagues and I chat on a daily basis, and discuss various news relating to SEO (we also ponder and plot our next gatherings, because it’s good to keep things varied ☺).

Organisation/Management

This is of utmost importance. If you’re initiating the SEO programme at a company or have been employed to further growth the SEO department, then you must be organised, both personally and professionally – your work must be spot on at all levels.

You will be required to plan and organised some or all of the following:

• Short-term strategy
• Long-term strategy
• Link Building
• On-page SEO
• Rankings
• Weekly/Monthly Reports and what goes in them
• Outsourcing
• Content Marketing
• Your daily work
• SEO procedures
• etc.

Pro tip: Don’t rush the initial strategy. Once in motion it will be difficult to go back. Spend time and get it right the first time.

(Tool) Dropbox / Google Drive

Initially I used Dropbox to manage all the files related to the SEO department however shortly afterwards moved onto using Google Drive due to its better collaboration features.

(Tool) Microsoft Outlook

I love the shared calendars in Outlook. I use Outlook to plan each month assigning daily tasks to myself and the team. The calendar is then automatically synced with those who have access to it, making sure everything that needs doing is in there, and everyone involved can see it.

Time Management

I can’t emphasise how important managing time is. In general in-house roles, you are more flexible in terms of what you want to work on each day of the week. If you don’t continuously manage your time well, you can expect lots of problems and pressure.

Neil Walker initially introduced me to (tool) HarvestApp which is fantastic to track your time throughout the day and automatically produce reports at the end of the week/month. I used this for over a year and continued to improve how I manage my time. I have recently stopped using HarvestApp and now use (tool) Toggl, which allows me to work faster - I’d welcome people’s feedback and thoughts on either, and any other, similar tools.

I personally think every person should track their time and continuously improve how they spend their time which leads to becoming more productive and getting more things done each day.

Wil Reynolds (whom I had the pleasure of listening to at LinkLove London earlier this year) has written an excellent post on this topic which you should read – 10,462 entries over 4.5 years – what I have learned tracking my time, and what you can too.

Presentations

Giving presentations is an important aspect of the in-house SEO life. You will be be dealing with many departments and important people within the company and many a time, presentations are preferred methods of updating people. I actually presented in my interview and once joining the company, I presented every week in my first month on different aspects of SEO and now limit presentations to once a month (unless more are required).

Practice makes perfect. You won’t become a superstar presenter overnight; it takes years or practice. I find watching others present useful too. Some resources:

Presentation Skills for SEO – SEOmoz
@trinefalbe is an experienced presenter and has written an excellent post on this topic.

Strategy

The strategy is the most important aspect of an in-house role. Get it wrong and the chance of failure is high.

Depending on the type of agency, an SEO may strategise part or the whole campaign for the client. If you’re moving to an in-house role, be sure to have lots of experience strategising all aspects of an SEO campaign as this will be a main part of your role, and you will have two parts to your strategy, one for the website and one for the job.

I concentrated on the following areas:

• Keyword Research
• On-Page
• Link Building
• Social
• Procedures and Checklists
• Training

I’ll go into each in a little more detail however before I do this, you need to ask yourself what the main objective of the business is:

• To increase traffic?
• More Sales?
• Generate Brand Awareness?
• Promote the content on the site?
• Prepare for the launch of a new product/tool?
• etc.

Keyword Research

Thousands of posts have been written on keyword research so I’m not going to delve into this. However I will mention a few tips through what I did from an in-house angle. We have two sites here – Toner Giant and Cartridge Monkey. Both sites offer similar product however one is catered for consumers and the other businesses. So initially I did the keyword research for the industry as a whole using various methods and tools (primarily):

• (Tool) Google AdWords Keywords Tool
• (Tool) SEM Rush
  • Great for seeing what you and your competitors are already ranking high for.
  • Free tool is limited. Sign up to their Pro version.
• (Tool) Open Site Explorer
  • Analysing the anchor text of competitor’s backlink profile will reveal plenty of info.
• (Tool) Microsoft Excel – Smashing it all up together!

Pro Tip: Don’t rely on one tool (that goes for the Google one too). Always use a variety of tools.

So, to convince your in-house Boss/Marketing Manager, You need to use all the methods above and also include information from competitors.

Some SEO agencies stick to a handful of keywords for each client. You can’t do this in-house - you will have to plan for a much bigger number of keywords, and often have to keep adding to these over time.

Once I gathered all the popular, high traffic keywords in the industry I had split them as follows:

• Which website to optimise for which keyword. It’s not wise to optimised both sites for the same keywords (There are ways round this). This task was difficult and each keyword has to be looked at individually. I had to consider factors such as:
  • If a user searched for a keyword, do we want them to land on Cartridge Monkey or Toner Giant?
  • How will optimising one keyword affect other keywords I choose for the site.
  • etc.
• What are the primary (high traffic/competitive) keywords
• The low hanging fruits i.e. keywords we are ranking relative high for already and require little work to push onto page one. (See Barry Adam’s quote below to see why this is important)
• Homepage Keywords
• Category and Product Keywords
• High Traffic long-tail keywords

I did this in Excel.

Neil Walker has written a fantastic article on predicting what return you can expect from an SEO campaign - have a read, as this will assist in promoting your strategy.

It’s very important to work with the whole team at every aspect of the strategy and discuss many aspects of SEO with them, as this will create trust and help you in the long run.

Pro tip: It’s not always the best practice to choose high traffic keywords for the reason that the lower traffic keyword are often more likely to lead to purchases that have a much higher profit margin (and they generally easier to optimise for!)

Analytics / Reporting

This is an important aspect of any SEO campaign. Reporting in-house is slightly different to reporting for clients within an agency.

I break my reporting as follows:

• Rankings – Weekly (Primary keywords) / Monthly (All optimised keywords).
  • I’m still searching for the best tool to track rankings. For the time being, I use SEOMoz.
• Organic Traffic (Brand/Non-Branded) – Monthly
  • % change from the previous month
  • Overall traffic over the last 6-12 months
• Revenue – Monthly
  • Organic Revenue, Paid Revenue, Total Revenue, Organic Revenue Share, Paid Revenue Share on 1 Excel chart with multiple axis.
• Assisted Conversions – Monthly
  • Google First Click Organic (Total/Branded/Non-Branded)
  • 6 Month History of First Click Organic Conversions
• SEO Strategy (Link Building/On-page) – Monthly
• Guest Blogging Plan – Monthly

I report on all of the above using Excel. Know Excel and pivot tables well. Below are some resources I like:

• Excel for SEO – by Distilled
• (Tool) SEO Tools for Excel (What would I do without this?) – by @nielsbosma

@RichardBaxter has written a great article explaining some uses of this tool

• Eight Useful Excel Functions for SEO – by @dohertyjf of Distilled
• (tool) Gecko Board is a personal favourite. Once setup, it allows you to see a snapshot of your daily statistics and activities in real-time.

On-Page

As with other aspects of SEO, you will delve into the on-page aspect deeper than you would at most agencies. Unless you’re moving in-house on one aspect of SEO, having an understanding of HTML/CSS knowledge is a must! I won’t go into detail explaining on-page SEO however some tips and tools:

• Try to automate the Title and Meta description to be unique and relevant (the site will probably have 1000’s of pages and manually updating each one won’t be feasible.
• I manually had the important pages on the sites updated such as the category pages and the high-traffic keyword landing pages.
• (tool) Screaming Frog Spider – A great desktop tool to spider your site and return data such as errors, links, URI issues, etc.
• (tool) Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit – Many SEOs are unaware of this great tool from Microsoft. It’s free and has a ton of features. Here are two articles on this:
  • What Every SEO Should Know About IIS – SEOmoz
  • IIS SEO Toolkit Secrets You Might Not Know – SEO Gadget

Link Building

If you’re managing the link building in-house, be sure to have a strategy and organise it very well! For obvious reasons, it’s important to vary the types of links you build. As above, I’m not going to go into this in detail as you can find 1000’s of posts written on this topic. I will, however mention some of the tools I use:

• (tool) Excel to manage links built in-house.
• (tool) SEOmoz Pro and Open Site Explorer for research.
• (tool) MyBlogGuest for finding blogs that accept guest articles.
• (tool) Majestic SEO – Their daily updates and Backlink History features are ace.
• (tool) Rapportive and Boomerang for Gmail – Great for outreach.

I’ve been using (tool) Link Prospector from Citation labs recently and seems to be quite useful. There are many other great tools out there however I don’t use them as regularly.

Pro Tip: Create amazing content and create a strategy to build a community. Boring industries can do it too. Take a look at http://www.fiskateers.com/.

Procedures and Checklists

It’s important to create guides and checklists for every department that deals with some aspect of the website such as:

• Uploading new products
• Writing blog posts
• Updated the user help pages
• Writing website copy and product descriptions
• etc.

So for the first point, it would be good to have a checklist when adding new products to the website so non-SEO co-workers can follow it and ensure the page is well optimised.

Pro tip: Most inductions will involve introductions from each department in the company and so take this opportunity to learn as much as possible on how each department functions and how they use/update the website.

Training

Many a time, many of the employees in an organisation do not have the slightest idea of SEO and so it’s important to educate and train them – some of these people will be important as they will have control over certain aspects of the company’s sites. Give your best and do great training sessions – This will help you in the long run.

Pro tip: Keep it simple.

Conferences/Peers

One of the perks of being in-house is the greater possibility of attending many conferences and listening to SEO experts share their experiences. Conferences have the additional benefit of being somewhere you can meet, interact and make contacts with others in the SEO industry – something which may be more difficult when you are in-house as you may be the only SEO in the company). You can share experiences and ask each other for assistance in the future. I was at Distilled LinkLove earlier this year where I met @Attacat_Joel – Really cool guy, you should follow him.

Resource: Keyphraseology have a detailed list of all the popular SEO conferences in the country and world.

Advice from Experts

Finally I end this article with some advice from industry experts. I asked each expert to provide their advice for someone who is considering making the switch from an SEO agency side role to an in-house SEO role.

Barry Adams (Pierce Communications Ltd)
I have a lot of respect for Barry. He was one of the first SEOs I followed on Twitter. He writes great articles on SEO across a variety of sites such as State of Search and speaks regularly at many conferences. He is currently the Digital Services Director at Pierce Communications Ltd.

You can and follow Barry on Twitter @badams and visit his site at barryadams.co.uk.

Jessica Lee
Jessica is the Content and Media Manager at Bruce Clay Inc, A global internet marketing company. She is a contributor to the book – SEO All-in-one For Dummies – and has written some fantastic posts over at the Bruce Clay Blog.

You can follow Jessica on Twitter @BzzContent

David Main
David is the Head of Search at Dominion Marine Media and has over 14 years of experience in marketing. He shares some very valuable info below.

You can follow David on Twitter @DavidJMain

Rishi Lakhani
I’m sure many of you will know who Rishi is. Occasionally, he gives 10 minutes to answer any questions his followers on Twitter may have. I took this opportunity to ask him for his advice on on making the switch from agency to in-house. Read his tweets below for some priceless info.

You can follow Rishi on Twitter @rishil and visit his site at explicitly.me.

And that brings us to the end of this article. I myself have been in-house for almost 6 months so there is still lots for me to learn! I would appreciate your experiences and tips in the comments.

Tips and Tool to Help You Make The Switch to Working In-house is a post by Ahmed Bhula on SEOAhmed.

Below are 4 Chrome extensions I use that you should too, to achieve the same.

Boomerang

http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Boomerang allows you to schedule your emails to send at a later time and date. This can be customised further to return important conversations back to the inbox if you don’t receive a response after a number of days or take messages out of your inbox until you need them.

Rapportive

http://rapportive.com/

This is an awesome app. Even better for outreach. Rapportive gives you rich profiles of the people you’re emailing besides the compose box. Very useful if you’re contacting someone for the first time for building links (sending a more personalised message or contacting the person via Twitter first can go a long way).

For example, the following is displayed when emailing Neil Walker:

Taskforce

http://www.taskforceapp.com/

This is my favourite. A simple, yet powerful extension that allows you to convert your emails to tasks at the click of a button. If you use Gmail, Install this today and instantly become more productive.

KeyRocket

http://www.veodin.com/keyrocket/

Now this tool doesn’t give you new features within Gmail. It recommends keyboard shortcuts while you browse the site, thus improving your use of Gmail shortcuts over time and ultimately making you more productive.

I’m always on the lookout for new extensions to save me time and improve my productivity. Any suggestions in the comments will be appreciated!

4 Chrome Extensions I Use For Gmail That You Should Too is a post by Ahmed Bhula on SEOAhmed.

They want to rank their:

• Facebook page and profile on Facebook search
• App in the Apple/Android/Windows App Store
• Video in YouTube
• Name!

And so on.

I’m going shed some light on optimising your app for the Apple App Store.

Why?

In June 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his WWDC keynote revealed Apple had paid developers $1 billion since the launch of the app store. The other day, I came across an article in the Metro – Order & Chaos iPhone game makes £600,000 in 20 days. This game is making ~£30,000/day.

Apple have surpassed half-a-million apps (source). Your app ranking in the top 5 on the App Store will provide exposure and boost downloads (lower positions are below the fold on the iPhone/iPod).

App Store Optimisation

Keywords (100 chars)

• Use standard SEO research tools (such as Google Keyword tool) and the App Store’s auto-suggest feature.
• Don’t include app/company name. App/company searches will return your app.
• Order – most important first
• Localise keywords if your app is multi-lingual.
• Once entered, they cannot be changes until you update the app.

App name

• Keyword in name – Apple gives more relevance to this
• Prefix with number if possible.

Keywords in Developer name

App Description

• Keywords in the description do not benefit rank
• Mention popular related apps – this will result in your app popping up for searches made for those apps.

Reviews/Ratings

• Encourage users to write reviews (e.g. within the app)
• use Truevoo to encourage users to review your app

High average download rate

• Use Admob
• Price drops – assists moving up the charts and there are many sites and directories that track price drops (such as 148 apps). PopCap Games Inc. have had lots of success using this technique.
• You can even buy downloads. In 2009, Adwhirl conducted some research and concluded you need ~2500 downloads a day to hit the top 100 and would cost at least $1850 per day (which is beyond the reach of most developers). This would, of course be more now.

Upload 5 screenshots for your App

Release a lite version of the app if it costs

• A free lite version of your app will not only allow users to try your app before they buy but also gives you another slot in the app store and increases your credibility.

Study the popular apps

• This one is important
• Tens of thousands of pounds have been put into promoting and marketing successful

Follow the above and you’re halfway to your app becoming a success!

Optimising for the Apple App Store is a post by Ahmed Bhula on SEOAhmed.

The big question – Is your link building efforts paying off?

Outcome of this analysis

You’ll have a visual representation of the

• Number of links lost in the last month (or a number of months if you have the data collected)
• Number of new links gained
• Lost and Gained link comparison
• Month Comparison between you and your competitor

The links will be grouped by Page authority, Domain authority and Anchor text. a little further work will also allow you to group more metrics such as Geo Location etc.

How are we going to achieve this?

• Excel and Pivot tables
• Open Site Explorer
  Why? Because we know when an update takes place unlike other services.

Note: Open Site Explorer update their index approximately every 30 days so unless you have last month’s link data for you site, you’ll have to wait for the next update for real data.

Step One – The Data

Download a chosen website’s backlinks (in CSV format) from Open Site Explorer using the following options:

Note: an SEOMoz Pro Account is required to download up to 10’000 links.

If you already have your backlink data from last month or earlier, you can move onto step 2; otherwise you need to wait until the next Linkscape Update.

Once the update takes place, download another CSV using the same settings above so you will now have 2 sets of backlink data for your site – one being from the month before.

Step Two – Organise

Open both spreadsheets in Excel and delete the first 6 lines in both:

Scroll to the bottom of last months CSV and add some hash’s (or #):

Copy all the link data from this month’s spreadsheet and paste it into last month’s sheet below the hashed line:

Next:

• Create a new column (called “Month”) on the right of “Target URL”
• Fill the “Month” column with the month you took your data for. e.g. before the hash’s, “January” and after the hash’s “February”
• Delete the “Title” Column.
• Format all the data as a Table

Step 3

Highlight all the cells below the “URL” heading

Click “Conditional Formatting” > “Highlight Cells Rules” > “Duplicate Values”

Thereafter select “Unique” with a light red fill

Now the interesting bit. Click on the small arrow besides “URL” and filter by the colour above:

This list is the pearl amongst the stones. Let me explain.

All the links listed above our hashed line are those links which you had last month but have lost this month (according to Open SIte Explorer) and those below the hashed line are the new links you have gained which you didn’t have last month.

Next, we’re going to compare each link from last month to this month using various metrics such as Page Authority.

Step 4 – Pivot

Before moving on, Delete the hashed line in your table.

To graphically compare the links, we’re going to use a Pivot table in Excel. To do this:

Highlight your table and click “Insert” > “Pivot Table” > “Pivot Chart” > “Click OK”:

Now set you Pivot with the following options (“Values” must be set to “Count” and not “Sum”):

Next change you chart type to either a “Line” or “Area” type. I’m going to choose a “Stacked area”:

And there you have it!

From the above, we can see the links we have gained in the new month are overall more weightier and better than those we have lost over the last month.

The beauty about Pivot Charts are that we can easily switch metrics so if I wanted to compare using  “Domain Authority”, I only need to switch it:

Note: You can also compare using “Anchor text”, “Linking root domains”” etc. and can add more metrics to the list (if you can get your hands on them such as the geo location of each link).

Note: The data is only as accurate as Open Site Explorer is.

Note: I used made up data for the above

How can this data be used

• Measure your efforts
• Spy on competitors and discover the source of their new links
• Compare your links with that of a competitor using the same Pivot chart (I might post something on this as a follow-up to this article)

Track backlinks historically to compare each link lost and gained (Excel) is a post by Ahmed Bhula on SEOAhmed.

A short intro…

I used to manage a general SEO blog prior to this however wanted to blog with a more personal approach to SEO so… Welcome to SEOAhmed!

I’m an Internet Marketing professional and currently work for Just Search, one of the largest Internet Marketing firms in the UK.

I also have experience in Design and Development. See the About page for more info.

SEOAhmed Launch! is a post by Ahmed Bhula on SEOAhmed.