I recently moved from an in-house SEO team at Kaplan back to the agency side of things. Here are a few things I learned as an in-house SEO:
1. It’s hard to implement things
Even knowing the difficulties of getting things implemented on an in-house team, they are likely going to be worse. Prepare to dig in.
2. Constantly evaluate your own assumptions
People aren’t thinking the same things as you. They have different processes, different assumptions.
You can save yourself and others a lot of work by investigating these assumptions – identifying them, calling them out, correcting and molding them as needed.
3. Own the increments
Ian Lurie talks about the importance in technical SEO of owning the increments.
In other words, SEO is in the small things. This feels especially important in an in-house environment at an established brand since projects are typically longer term and less agile.
4. The pace is slower but the depth is greater
A well-founded preconception about working in-house instead of agency is that the pace is slower. In my experience, this is real.
In previous agency-side experiences, I often found that I would only be put on projects for a few months before being transitioned to another. It can be hard to fully get to grips with a client’s website and audience in that timeframe.
In-house, you’re typically working on the same websites and within the same audiences the entire time you’re there. This affords you the opportunity to dig deeper into the nuances on the technical side and in the content strategy of a site – again an opportunity to own the increments.
Resources
Here are a couple of newsletters that have been particularly helpful in honing my thinking around in-house SEO work:
Got any others? I’d love to hear about them!
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