Build an in-house team to elevate your game

Luis says: “Elevate the value of SEO by developing internal capabilities. Building an in-house team is becoming more important than ever before, given all the movements that are happening with generative AI and all the new technology that is out there.”

Should an in-house team replace your agency or augment your agency?

“It can do both. For many large and established businesses, bringing the SEO function in-house just makes sense. It’s a difficult decision, given the reliance on agencies and the speed of delivery that they can offer.

However, focusing on providing a good user experience, answering people’s questions through content, and driving them to the right page is a multi-pronged approach that encompasses many stakeholders, data points, platforms, and data sources. For an in-house team, that can be easier to achieve.

With outsourced teams or agencies, you can find a lot of different hurdles in terms of approvals and access to the actual data. An in-house team can own the end-to-end SEO process by using owned data, determining the strategies to create the content or the pages, and analysing the activity promptly. SEO is becoming a much faster and more dynamic environment and it’s important to measure everything at each stage.”

Why do you think that building an in-house team is so important now?

“After several years working with both agencies and in-house teams, I’ve noticed that the speed of delivery and value for the company, especially in the long-term, is elevated when you have an in-house team. Every time your team executes an SEO project, they will develop expertise within the company itself, which will lead to efficiencies.

That’s not always the case with agencies. With agencies, there’s always a question about who’s in the background, who’s handling the project, and how to communicate and execute those projects.

Developing your internal capabilities becomes more relevant right now because there is so much automation going on with generative AI. Now, you don’t even know if your agency is employing people or using scalable solutions. These solutions are valid but, when you’re dealing with regulated businesses or you have an international scope, your team will be better prepared to tackle those challenges.”

How do you ensure that everything is accomplished as well in-house as it would be by an agency?

“Analysis paralysis is one of the biggest risks that you face in SEO when you’re looking at so many data sources. There will be updates and it can become difficult to deliver on what you set out to achieve.

My advice is to stick to your plan and your goals. Even if it’s a forecast or a guess, try to assign the value that you will be bringing to the company by executing certain tasks. That should help you to stay true to your goal, especially when there are updates or you see some tremors in your rankings. It can be very easy to go into panic mode and start changing all of your plans and priorities. What truly matters is that you are confident in your plan and the performance of that plan.

You have internal sources and internal stakeholders, so it’s important that you are working together with the rest of the company. Generally, that doesn’t get affected by algorithm changes or a change in priorities within the SEO team.

Stick to your goals and make sure that your plan considers what the output is going to be and how you are going to measure that output. That output needs to be recognised and familiar to the rest of the company.”

Is there anything agencies do that in-house teams tend to forget about?

“Transparency is really important. An agency can be briefed about your company goals and the topic of your campaign, but external people won’t be as connected to the philosophy of the company as your team will be.

One of the risks, though, is a lack of transparency, and things can easily be missed when you’re relying on external parties. The most common of these things are how your competitors are doing, and actually visiting your own website.”

If you still want to work with an agency in some capacity, what tasks might you recommend giving to them?

“A hybrid model is definitely one of the approaches that I would suggest. It helps to bridge certain parts of the project and provide skill sets that you might be missing.

The areas it would be beneficial for an agency to handle are competitors and monetary. An agency will have multiple clients, so they will have greater visibility into different industries. It’s important that you’re fed that information. It’s almost like having a creative refresher that allows you to see a different perspective on your own conclusions.

The second task I would recommend using an agency for is as your strategic sounding board. You should always be trying to share with other SEOs and other experts in the industry to discuss new ideas and new theories. We are still in the world of figuring out how Google works. You can use your partners to give you an external point of view that has no bias to what the brand is or the actual product. That can be beneficial for making your SEO strategy more comprehensive.”

If you intend to bring your SEO agency’s activities in-house, what conversations do you need to have with your marketing teams?

“The most important conversation would be around the transition period and how you start reacquiring responsibility.

Recently, we started to retake the data and reporting around certain activities, and it definitely caused some tremors. You need to stay in close communication about the internal capabilities of the team and who can help you work around different challenges, particularly in terms of the data. For example, it is important to understand whether you have the storage and the software to analyse and service data points as efficiently as an external partner.

Additionally, having an in-house team requires having more people in your team, which can develop into managerial challenges and people challenges. People want to have a career so you will need to lean on your HR experts and design a career path for the people who are starting out as well as those who are already seasoned SEOs. It is difficult because there are multiple potential pathways. You can become a manager or you can become an expert in a specific area, and both are valid. It’s about understanding what you need from people and then designing a path for that.

Firstly, during the transition period, pay particular attention to data migrations and reacquiring metrics. Secondly, look out for the hurdles that may arise from simply having more people within the team.”

How difficult is it to build an in-house team and what trends are you seeing in terms of recruitment and what new employees are looking for now?

“To start with, the size of the team shouldn’t really matter. I don’t like to pinpoint a specific number of people, as long as certain areas of expertise are covered. For me, a complete in-house team will always have data people who understand and process numbers for the rest of the team. You will also need people to handle the website itself, including everything that you can tweak regarding content, performance, number of pages, and tooling.

At the tip of the sword (which is probably one of the most difficult areas to develop) you need to have dedicated team members who can understand what the next big opportunity is going to be and how to tackle it. The size of the team should reflect the responsibilities that you have and it should reflect what you are trying to achieve.

In terms of what is attracting people to new teams, providing learning opportunities upfront is really important. That’s something that a lot of candidates are keen on. They want to expand their knowledge base. The market is healthy for companies at the moment, though not necessarily for SEOs. There’s really good talent out there, perhaps coming out of the trend where a lot of in-house teams were really beefed up. Now the industry is entering a more normalised period, so there’s definitely good talent available.

To attract the best talent, have a career plan. Everybody can be an expert and arrive at a new job already knowing a bunch of things. What matters is how you can set that person up for success in the next five years and keep them in-house. Also, be aware of the different necessities that people are bringing to the team so it can become an inclusive space. Technology isn’t always inclusive, but we are becoming a more diverse industry so your team culture should reflect that.”

What advice would you give regarding the use of automation and AI?

“Be cautious about automation. It’s definitely very tempting because we want to make our jobs easier, and we want to make our jobs faster. However, we might be missing something in there.

I was reflecting on my own career and how I started in SEO and eventually became an expert. It was mostly through grinding keywords and grinding spreadsheets with data numbers and trying to understand how those things correlate to the SERP and how the changes become more tangible. The danger with automation is that some of the expertise developed through actually executing the work can be lost.

Try to automate the process but don’t automate the task itself. You might rely on generative AI to write all of your emails, but what is going to happen when you present to a leadership team or at a conference? In those environments, you can’t rely on a tool to give you all the answers.

You can use automation for the process itself – to get all of your approvals, gather everything within the same database, make data transformations, etc. – as long as you have the ability to put your effort and expertise into it.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop obsessively looking at your rankings. We’ve all been there, especially when there are updates. It’s almost like an obsession.

The rankings are going to be there. Spend a lot less time observing something that is just there. That way, you’ll have a little bit more time to spend creating your strategy, thinking about the best way to create helpful content, and distributing your product.”

Luis Rodriguez is Head of SEO at ComparetheMarket, and you can find him over at ComparetheMarket.com.