SEO Heading In-House For Corporations?

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A friend of mine announced he was getting a new job at a pretty sizable and well-known corporation. No surprise there. But when he told me the job description was “SEO” I was a bit taken aback, I had to admit. I knew that SEO was going more mainstream every day, but he’s really the first person I knew to get hired on for the job at a company that isn’t that know for having an online presence. I guess they plan on changing that.

In-house SEO makes a lot of sense for many companies

It makes sense that companies would consider taking this particular job function in-house. The ones who are paying a great deal can undoubtedly save money. And for other companies, it might be as simple as giving them a level of control that they crave. When all of the work you do for internet marketing is outsourced to third parties, it could come back to bite you in the ass in a variety of ways.

The main disadvantage to this type of effort would be that the employee couldn’t keep up with the changes in the industry. But if she were to stay educated, this wouldn’t be much of an issue. That’s why I also see a continuing trend for SEO education and conferences, both of which are larger fields already this year than in the past. I’m sure we’ll see more and more colleges also offer this type of training. If not, they’ll lose out to niche providers who fill the void.

Change is the only permanent thing when it comes to SEO

The longer people hang around the search engine optimization game, the more changes they’ll see. Imagine an SEO from two years ago even being concerned about Ruby on Rails websites? How about companies that built their entire business model from “page views” who are now forced to re-think their strategy as everyone heads toward fluid AJAX web applications? If people were thinking that their Perl or CGI websites would stay in vogue forever, they’ve already been forced to wake up to the fact that the push towards better technology is relentless.

The only thing any of us can count is in many more changes, and them coming faster than ever. That’s why it may make sense to hire an employee, or staff a department, so that professionals in your employ can actually stay with the company and help grow the web presence in a sensible matter. This could make a lot of sense for anyone.

In the next week or so I’ll take a look at the advantages of Hiring SEOs versus Doing it yourself in-house.

What do you think of the trends in SEO? Can you predict what will happen in the next six months?

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