Effective Link Building Service: In House: The Coming Decade & In-House Search Marketing's Coming of Age

**The Coming Decade & In-House Search Marketing's Coming of Age**

**by Aaron Bradley**

In October of 2000 a start-up company launched a self-service ad
program with 350 customers. The company was Google and the program
was, of course, AdWords. While practitioners of SEM were then
relatively rare, those employed full-time by companies to optimize
websites for search engines were almost unheard-of. Some ten years and
billions of dollars in AdWords spending later, the profession of
in-house SEM is an established one, and poised on the brink of
maturity.

What lies ahead for the in-house search marketer in the decade ahead?
In a word: more. The proliferation of technology platforms and social
networks continue to spawn new search opportunities, at the same time
that search providers innovate furiously in order to capture or
consolidate market share. The challenge for the in-house SEM will be
to stay on top of these changes while continuing to profitably
optimize for "traditional" search—and still find time for more
mundane activities, like eating and sleeping.

More convergence with marketing units

Savvy in-house search marketers have long understood that the
marketing silos typical of bigger firms have resulted in missed search
optimization opportunities, and have remedied this by taking a more
holistic approach to in-house marketing activities. Indeed, the
ability to integrate aspects of public relations, advertising and
affiliate marketing into search marketing strategies is one of the
benefits of possessing an in-house search marketing program.

This will be an increasingly important principle to pursue as, among
other things, the search engines make efforts to improve the
prominence and relevance of real-time search results. Many
organization's Facebook updates and tweets, for example, are already
becoming fodder for search results, demanding that social media
marketing units—where they exist—coordinate strategy with SEM.

More convergence with technology units

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a well-structured site for search
had valid HTML, a heading coded as H1, and well-formed title and meta
tags. No longer. As more and more websites compete for a growing but
still finite amount of search traffic, organizations that are able to
integrate search-friendly technologies quickly and cleverly are going
to have an important edge.

On one hand, the in-house SEM will continue to see his or her time
coordinating the deployment of new and changing technical search
requirements with coders and developers. The rate of innovation by the
search engines will make this a substantial challenge. XML sitemaps,
now in the "best-practice" column on most SEMs' checklists,
demonstrate what a challenge it can be keeping up with search engine
changes. Introduced in 2005, their use is widespread but still not
ubiquitous. The same is true even of Google News sitemaps (2006),
which are arguably more important for Google News-indexed sites, while
few sites to date have availed themselves of Google Video sitemaps
(2007) despite the obvious potential benefits.

On the other hand, it will be ever more important to interact at a
strategic level with developers and designers to build sites that are
optimized for things like real-time and mobile search. As search
evolves, so must search-friendly information architecture. There is,
perhaps, no greater sign that in-house SEM has come of age than the
job title "SEO Developer" starting to appear in company
directories.

More types of search ads

Aside from the competition born of tacking several zeros to those
original 350 AdWords customers, today's paid search marketer now has
to contend with a dizzying array of advertising formats and models.
Video ads, mobile search ads, Facebook ads, CPA ads, and product
ads—including the whole Bing Cashback model—have all made life
more complicated for search engine marketers. Not only do new search
types typically involve learning a new interface, but require
different optimization strategies and the development of different key
performance indicators to measure return on investment. A web-based
text ad and an ad focused on local search for mobile devices
definitely require different approaches.

The array of advertising options related to search, social networks
and semantic technologies will continue to grow in number as
technology changes and different sectors, like social media, mature.
In the time since I started this article Google released Pay-Per-Call,
and had been observed testing AdWords lead generation capture forms.
Paid search marketers in the decade ahead will be challenged to learn
and integrate new advertising types while controlling their ad spends,
and keeping their advertising efforts profitable.

More types of search

As an example of how fast things are moving, just since I started
this article Google has launched Near Me Now, which displays nearby
restaurants, coffee shops and bars based on a mobile user's geographic
location. Even for those who were actively optimizing for Google's
Local Search for Mobile (introduced September 2009) this represents a
change that for which new strategies must be devised. An SEO in 2000
had to optimize for misspellings; with the advent of mobile-based
voice search SEO tactics now have to target misspeakings as well.

As devices develop optimization techniques must evolve to address
these developments. While that has always been true, the rate of
innovation in search has increased dramatically. The types of
verticals in "universal search" (now old hat, introduced by Google
in May 2007) will also morph and expand, as recently demonstrated by
the inclusion of tweets by Google and Bing.

More in-house search stars?

The best-known figures in the search marketing community—names like
Greg Boser, Dave Naylor, Jill Whalen, Barry Schwartz and Danny
Sullivan—have typically come from the agency and consultancy side of
the business. While the industry has not been without prominent
in-house leaders, such as Marshall Simmonds of New York Times and
About.com fame, in-house search marketers are still minority members
of the "SEO rock star" pantheon. As more big brands seriously
commit to search marketing expect to see senior in-house SEOs, such as
Brent D. Payne (Tribune Company) and Dan Perry (Turner Broadcasting),
gain greater industry visibility.

More work

Pity the in-house search marketer working without a team, except in
the smallest and most singularly focused of companies. In-house search
marketing departments are unlikely to see increases in budgets
commensurate with the rate of change in the industry. This will force
many in-house search marketers to be more selective in their
optimization efforts, and increasingly outsource specialty
optimization and paid search tasks. There are exciting, challenging
and demanding times ahead: remember to sleep.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.

Aaron Bradley <http://searchengineland.com/author/aaron-bradley/>
Aaron Bradley is SEO Director for the online magazine and writers'
network Suite101.com <http://www.suite101.com>
, and writes on search issues at his blog SEO Skeptic
<http://www.seoskeptic.com/>
. He has been an in-house SEO since 2005, following ten years as a
website designer.

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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

In House: The Coming Decade & In-House Search Marketing's Coming of Age

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