SEO Choices, In House, Agency or SEO Company?
Charlotte SEO Company - Had an interesting discussion today with Jason Ramsey of CGR Creative web design in Charlotte today over lunch. We were discussing a long list of experienced Charlotte SEO ’s he had come into contact with a a few varying philosophies of how SEO for your website gets done. My name is Todd Kron and I am the Online Marketing Director for CGR Creative in Charlotte with a decade of experience in SEO, affiliate marketing and Adwords PPC management.
An In House SEO Position refers to a company hiring a skilled internet marketer to work from their office with the single goal of working on their behalf. This type of SEO position is considered by many to be the “holy grail” of SEO jobs from the search marketer’s position. This type is very appealing to experienced independent SEO like me. My experience being from many affiliate programs and generating traffic for income or referral income means a lot of changing markets. This is a great way to learn every niche and all things that work but the comfort of a single focus and single project is appealing to many SEO’s. The in house jobs are often the best pay and benefits as well since the company covets your skills as the only person tasked with a lot of jobs related to the website.
When I say Agency SEO I mean an SEO who is also you web designer. This sounds like a bad idea to those who know SEO, but there are more coming.
Any SEO’s worth their weight know that a person who does web design then sells you SEO as a way to get residual income and an afterthought may not be the best choice, but that’s not the person I refer to here. In agency I mean the design agency that has an in house SEO staff. This is what I would see as an ideal situation for both the SEO who is job seeking and ideal for the clients and web designers as well. Here you get the smaller number of clients which the SEO likes; you also get the chance for more complete SEO.
An in house SEO has the advantage of working directly with designers with makes it possible to be part of the site structure and construction process. A large part of the battle later on will be the way you decide to map out a site, the folder structure and the URL structure. An in house with the agency SEO works alongside the designers. This situation makes on site changes, pre design brainstorming and creative updates or changes much easier to implement.
The last type of SEO is what I have heard referred to as “the grinder”. The pure SEO agency is often the lowest paying and highest volume workplace or the SEO looking for work. This situation generally have about 6-8 project managers perhaps, based off the Charlotte SEO grinder agency I am thinking of. Each of these account managers may have 8-10 accounts they are responsible for and doing SEO is all they do. This will encompass PPC, social and both on and off page work. Now, let’s look at the problems with working with a pure SEO agency as opposed to a design firm that has its own SEO department like CGR Creative.