Mediaboss Marketing

This is the second installment of our series on in-house SEO in which we dig into the operational challenges and opportunities that managing search engine optimization in-house presents.

As a consultant who specializes in in-house SEO, Im often asked how large the SEO team should be. Most people think it has to do with revenue numbers. While that comes into the equation, its not a leading indicator of what size SEO team a company needs.

Lets explore some of the factors I consider when making recommendations for SEO team size. Theyre typically surprising to most SEO teams! The reason is I look at the operations, not just the revenue. Revenue can help justify (or limit) the team size, but its not an indicator of the SEO hours needed in a week.

If your site is simple, you typically need a smaller SEO team. The reason is that your SEOs are likely chasing fewer fires.

More complex websites have a higher risk of introducing SEO problems with even small changes. Most SEO teams spend a good chunk of their week chasing projects, putting out fires, and trying to minimize SEO problems rather than increasing SEO revenue.

All this means, if youre doing SEO for a site without a lot of complex functionality, its one factor that would make me consider a smaller SEO team.

Hands down, this is one of the leading factors for determining SEO team size at a larger corporation. Some companies I have worked with have 150+ developers working on the search engine-facing aspects of the site. In these situations, you need more than one technical SEO person to guide each of these releases to ensure they will be SEO friendly.

Product managers are one of the most influential roles on a website, and they are constantly spinning up projects. SEO teams need to be tied at the hip of product managers and have an intimate understanding of what product managers are proposing to change on the site.

If you have one or only a handful of product managers, you need fewer SEO hours allocated to work with them. But, if you have 12 product managers, then interaction with product managers will take a lot of SEO time.

Merchandisers in each company take on different roles, and at many companies, they have the authority to create new pages, write new content, and change links within the site and navigation.

If you have a couple of merchandisers its easier to stay on top of what theyre doing, but if you have 8 merchandisers its going to take a lot more SEO resources to guide them on keywords for their new pages, the type of content needed to rank, and ensuring theyre not making changes to existing pages that will hurt SEO.

The number of UX designers focusing on search engine facing pages greatly influences the number of new page designs that are being cranked through the development machine. I typically find the more designers, the more SEO requirements youll need to define for development.

Once writers understand how to optimize content for SEO (and have bought into it, or incentivized to do it) they can really start impacting the website from a content perspective.

Unfortunately, most companies dont have a lot of writers for the website, and creating this content falls on the shoulders of roles that are not experienced writers. For these non-professional writers, its often more of a challenge for them to account for all the business needs, conversion needs and SEO needs in content and still make it sound elegant and on-brand. This means the SEO team will spend more time reviewing content, and the SEO team may have to write all the title tags and meta descriptions.

Some companies are so metrics heavy that SEO teams can easily have one person dedicated to cranking out reports and estimates for revenue lift/drop based on proposed changes.

For perspective, I spent a week with a client on-site and watched her spend an unexpected three solid days preparing metrics for a company quarterly business review and two days analyzing a proposed A/B test that, if launched, would shrink the site navigation by 30%. This doesnt even account for regular reporting that executives and other teams wanted to see. At this company, there are a lot of SEO hours spent on analysis and reporting.

Another client knew their product managers need a significant amount of SEO data broken down by category of their e-commerce site as regular monthly SEO reporting. They realized it would take two to four SEO data analysts to support the reporting requests. Of course, they were making almost a billion dollars in SEO revenue a year so they could justify the expense of such a team.

The last factor I wanted to talk about is where each role is in terms of SEO knowledge. Do they know a lot or practically nothing?

Ive seen many non-SEO teams with enthusiasm to work on SEO (Factor #8), but they knew so little that their enthusiasm couldnt compensate for expertise enough to make SEO time investments efficient.

If your non-SEO teams dont have enough SEO knowledge (nor enough enthusiasm for SEO), the solution is effective SEO training and toolkits, because:

Now youre set to have a really good understanding of what size of SEO team you should have for your company. And more importantly, how to discuss growing the SEO team with executives.

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How many people should be on your SEO team? The factors to consider - Search Engine Land