In almost 10 years of working in advertising and marketing there is only one aspect that has caused the most arguments in the industry and that is the trade off between In-House and Agency for SEM and SEO. Every company has their own thoughts on the subject and all of them can hold forth with a reasonable argument for their choice. However no matter how effective their reasoning is all of them boil down to four simple points: Time, Cost, Results and Control.

Most companies feel that these four key points will determine the direction that they go when it comes to how they manage SEM and SEO and it is quite obvious why. Combined they will decide how effective the campaigns are and what the bottom line return will be at the end of the day.

More often than not a business that decides to manage their SEM or SEO themselves will have a simple reason for doing so and it will use a combination of all of the above points or the ones that are most important to them. But if you look into them a little deeper it simply does not make financial or rational sense to attempt to self manage an effective SEM campaign In-House if the business has a large number of keywords active in their campaigns.

Aside from the obvious fact that all Agency fees are a tax deduction as a Marketing Expense we need to look at the hidden costs of doing SEM and SEO In-House. Firstly you need to find an expert who is willing to manage it on your behalf and these do not come cheap, if you decide to manage the campaigns without a specialist in SEM or SEO then the person assigned to manage the campaign will have no time to do anything but monitor the campaigns therefore there is a loss of productivity from 1 staff member who is in effect learning on the job. Following on from this is the fact that an active campaign needs to be constantly checked, modified and updated to ensure that there is no wastage and that you are achieving the best possible results. Lastly if you are running a campaign with any number of Keywords over a thousand you need to maintain your quality score through effective Landing Page Management and multiple Creative’s for each keyword as consumers want to be hooked to click on the link rather than just see the same generic Creative for every search term.

When you add all of the above aspects together then it seems obvious that of the four key points highlighted at the start there is only one that stands up as to why a company would manage their SEM and SEO In-House, and that is Control. There is a demonstrated loss of staff time as they try to manage campaigns while doing their core role, results suffer as the Quality Score for the campaign will not be at an optimal level and the costs (both of the campaign and the staff costs) spiral as there is not going to be an effective system of management on what keywords are working and how to alter the Creatives to enhance Click Through Rates.

A good SEM and SEO Agency will manage all of the above on your behalf and consult with the client to ensure that they maintain complete control and understanding of what is going on, once a company has found the best Agency for them then the upfront cost of setting up the campaign and the ongoing Agency fees are actually going to save them money in the long term as a result of better campaign management, higher traffic levels, greater conversion rates and a better understanding of what is working for them now and will work for them in the future.

In short if you are running campaigns with more than a couple of thousand keywords then you are costing yourself money by attempting to manage your SEM and SEO campaigns In-House.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 7:14 am and is filed under Paid Search, SEM Stuff, SEO, Search Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.