Posted by Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Manager, HP.com

Search Marketing – should you bring it in house or should you outsource it? If you do bring it in house, what’s the best way to go about it? Do you train or hire experienced search marketers? The latter certainly aren’t easy to come by and even if you do there’s no guarantee they’ll stick around given the industry is short in these resources right now.

This is always a topic of discussion at the search conferences and within blogs and articles across the web.

Marketing Sherpa just recently released their annual Search Marketing Benchmark Guide which highlights the challenges of bringing search marketing in house. Stefan Tornquist, Research Director of Marketing Sherpa Inc. summarized some of these challenges in a post on Search Engine Land. You can also purchase the full Search Marketing Benchmark Guide directly from Marketing Sherpa if you want to dig into the details for yourself.

When I participated on the Big SEO Panel at Search Engine Strategies in New York, this was one of the questions we got was whether it made sense for large organizations to bring search in house or outsource it.

I would argue that the question isn’t whether or not to bring search marketing in house but rather how much of the search marketing efforts should be brought in house.

To some extent every company that uses an agency for search marketing should have a search-savvy employee on staff to manage the search marketing strategy and direct all search marketing efforts regardless of the extent to which the execution of the campaigns is outsourced. The reasons are many but I’ll highlight a few that come to mind – these are just as applicable to small businesses as enterprises like HP.

• The search agency doesn’t know your business like you do. Simply looking at the web site and determining the best strategy for a search marketing campaign (paid or natural) is not going to be nearly as effective if the agency doesn’t get some guidance from those who know the overall business strategy.
• The Search agency doesn’t know your web site like you do. Every web site has its unique quirks, user-experience, navigation and development process and understanding these before embarking on campaigns (especially SEO) will save you time in the long run. Without someone inside the company to guide them through this, agencies may take an approach that isn’t feasible for your web site.
• You have an alternative perspective. A more diverse set of eyes on a project can yield in better results. Looking at your campaigns regularly and questioning tactics and results will result in more proactive campaign management from the agency and will help them think about your specific campaigns from a perspective that is more aligned with your business and strategy. It will also help you to better guide them as the internal strategy and company priorities shift.
• You have the ability to network internally. Everyone knows you can launch a search campaign and drive traffic to a page without anyone else’s support or involvement but that doesn’t yield in the most effective search campaign and can actually result in a negative ROI. Having direct links to the content and site owners that can take results from your campaigns to better optimize the site for conversion results in far better search marketing ROI than stand-alone campaigns. And without an internal resource to champion and network it will be impossible to get the required changes made to optimize for natural search.

Again, these are just a few high-level reasons that outsourcing your search marketing entirely may not be the most advantageous but that doesn’t mean you have to hire a search expert in house to manage these campaigns full time. I’ve found that agencies often learn from working with other clients and it improves their ability to efficiently manage your campaigns. And since search marketing is their business, they often stay abreast of changes in the industry that might affect your search campaigns or strategy.

One agency recently wrote an article that stressed the absolute need for outsourcing search marketing. The title will likely come across as offensive to many in-house search marketers “6 Reasons Why In-House Search Marketing (SEM) is Ineffective” but the points they are trying to make can make sense if your in-house team is not experienced in search marketing. But that’s not to say that no company can employ highly-qualified search marketers in house. Perhaps a better title would have been “6 Reasons You Might Want to Employ a Search Marketing Agency” since that’s really want they want you to do anyway.

Many companies have bought search marketing entirely in-house - and very effectively I might add.

A previous colleague (and still close friend) of mine works for a large e-commerce company that manages their entire search effort in house – and they do this from a relatively small town where resources are scarce. For them, finding highly qualified search experts is extremely difficult but they have a model that works very well for their business and they’ve shown that a fully-in-house model is the most effective and efficient way to execute their search marketing strategies and campaigns.

Again, the question I don’t believe is whether or not to bring search in house, it’s how much of the search marketing effort should be in house versus outsourced. That’s a business decision that requires internal resources to determine as more and more marketers employ search strategies and make it more challenging to obtain a positive ROI from these campaigns. Gone are the days that you simply enlist any search agency to launch a campaign to drive traffic to your web site for a few cents a click and leave those campaigns to run unchecked. With the ever growing competition for keywords – even the long tail – it is going to require a much more strategic approach and that requires your internal guidance.