Search engine optimization (SEO) involves hundreds of moving parts. If you’re managing a site with several dozen pages, or one that expects to compete with national-level major businesses, there are too many considerations and responsibilities for one person to conceivably handle. Instead, you’ll need to hire a team of people to work alongside you, divvying up responsibilities and hopefully building expertise in different niche areas.
Hiring is one of the biggest SEO-related decisions you can make, and your ultimate choices will have a dramatic impact on the future of your campaigns.
SEO Teambuilding Tips
When expanding your SEO team, keep the following tips in mind:
- 1. Understand your main goals before hiring. Before you start hiring, make a list of what you want to accomplish. If you’re overworked and overstressed, that’s a good reason to consider hiring—but you shouldn’t make any decisions until you know exactly what positions you want to hire and why you want to hire them. For example, do you hope to build more links per month? Are you struggling to produce high-quality content in the volume you desire?
- 2. Prepare the legal and paperwork. If you’re going to hire full-time staff members, keep the legal requirements in mind. According to Heller, Maas, Moro, and Magill, every business needs to have worker’s comp insurance, and depending on your state, there may be other requirements as well. Do your research and prepare the proper paperwork before you start hiring, so you aren’t surprised with extra responsibilities later.
- 3. Consider freelancers. Full-time hires can be ridiculously expensive—especially once you factor in the insurance and benefits you’ll be paying. As an alternative, consider working with freelancers. Freelancers won’t be by your side throughout every work day, and you may not be their only client, but they’ll generally have lower rates than full-timers, and you can use them as much or as little as you need to. They’re a perfect way to balance out your team, especially if you have some niche requirements that your core full-timers can’t fill.
- 4. Choose full-time hires based on trainability, not experience. When you hire full-time workers, consider hiring based on their trainability, rather than their past experience. SEO is a field that’s frequently changing, so you’ll need someone who can keep up with those changes. Also, hiring based on experience may seem like the better choice—but it’s also more expensive. Instead, hiring newbies and teaching them from scratch may be more efficient.
- 5. Seek complementary skillsets. If you can, try to hire people with complementary skillsets—or skillsets that fill gaps in your own abilities. It’s better to have three specialists on your team, all with different areas of expertise, than it is to have three people with decent abilities in a wide range of different areas.
- 6. Establish a hierarchy for communication. After bringing people on board (or perhaps during the interview process), make sure you establish a clear hierarchy for communication. For example, who is reporting to whom? Who needs to know when a piece of content is completed, and is there anyone who gives the final signoff? These are common points of confusion when working with a new team, but you can clear them up before they become issues by simply announcing your expectations.
- 7. Leave room to adapt. Even if you have a firm plan in place, and you find the perfect candidates to fill your needs, it’s a good idea to leave some room to adapt. Your vision for your SEO campaign may evolve once you have more people on your team, and you might find your team members’ strengths and weaknesses to be very different in practice than they were in theory. If your plan is too restrictive, and unable to adapt, you could paint yourself into a corner, so be prepared to change over time.
Treating Hires as an Investment
When hiring new people for your SEO efforts, think of each new hire as a future-focused investment. Like with any investment, you want to earn a profitable return, so keep tabs of how much you’re paying each employee, and what they’re bringing to your organization. After the first few months, you should see an increase in your SEO ROI proportional to the increased costs of your SEO team; if not, you may need to readjust. Measurement is everything in SEO, and your teambuilding efforts are no exemption to that rule.