One Man Band – Doing Your Own SEO

Remember Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins? The one man band looks pretty cool, and you have to give credit to anyone who can pull it off. When you run your own SEO, sometimes it seems exactly like you are trying to play all the instruments you

rself – simultaneously.

As in an-house SEO, you ahve to juggle all the facets of your company’s search engine marketing. This means producing positive results without specialist support – you literally have to do it all.

Search strategy and tactical execution will probably both be assigned to you; this means that effective management of your time will be critical to your success.

Delegate

Get others to help you when possible; for example, IT personnel can usually be convinced they are the only ones who can do redirects, etc, so slough off some of the busy work in the coding field to them.

Copywriters can be engaged to help with content and generation of tags and descriptions, to save more time. It could take mere hours to train someone to do this task, and save you days of tedium.

Outsource

Sometimes specialty jobs need to be done in support of SEO and you may be able to outsource some of these if you can convince your company it is cheaper and more efficient than, say, paying you overtime.

You can often hire out such one-off tasks as landing page design, custom script development or CMS modifications. may be most expeditiously accomplished by contracting out the work. Paid search is the most obvious candidate for outsourcing, unless that is your primary job.

Automate

Some portions of SEO can be automated by programmatically pushing database fields. For reporting, configure analytic reports to eliminate any need for manual data extraction. This takes up front time, but saves you in the long run.

Manage

Educate your company about your job! There is no better way to get the respect you deserve than to give along presentation that manages to keep their interest and ends with a reporting of how much you have increased profits.

Learn

Don’t let opportunities to learn more about your trade be sacrificed (or delegated to off-work hours) . Insist that you are in a field with rapid changes, and that investing in your ongoing education increases your value to the company.

Do it

Every day, ask yourself the question, “what SEO did I do today?” You should always have a specific answer.

Each day, no matter how swamped you are, find an hour or two to actually do SEO, even if it is as simple or lowly as redirecting a URL adding metatags or posting a blog. That keeps you from feeling that a day of meetings and report summaries was not worthless.

Keep on doing your best buy following these tips, and being a one man band will beceom something you love to do!