Synergies of SEO, PPC, CRO, DEV, … and consulting.
I recently had a conversation with another business consultant which highlighted to me some things I should really write about on my blog, so here goes.
Businesses, in particular online-businesses (e.g ecommerce), face tough choices in how to grow as fast as possible. Having all the required skills in-house is often not possible in a small/medium sized business as revenue hasn’t grown to a level where bringing on extra internal staff to specialise in SEO, PPC, software/web development is feasible.
Not to mention having internal skills on more esoteric topics like LPO (landing page optimisation), CRO (conversion rate optimisation), etc. are even more unlikely to be sustainably fundable until a certain size of turnover/profit is reached.
Bringing in one or more “generalist“ junior staff, covering basic skills in the areas mentioned above, to tackle what might be ambitious growth goals or advanced technical challenges is risky.
That essentially leads to outsourcing.
Finding someone external who is great at social media and won’t cost an arm and a leg is reasonably easy. However, finding someone can measure and prove that social media is providing a good, or any, ROI is already trickier.
“Finding someone who is great at social media is easy. Finding someone who can measure and prove social media ROI is harder.”
But when it comes to things that could have a massive positive impact on growth, requiring a lot more specialised/advanced skills and experience, is already a lot harder. First of all it tends to be the case that the best people work for themselves/their own companies or larger businesses already, and are in all cases very likely very busy.
One must not forget that businesses often are, for one reason or another, actually in a niche, or even a ”corner”, when it comes to constraints their online operation places on them. For example if you hired someone to build your original online shop and the platform chosen was Shopify, you need someone who has expertise with Shopify to do more advanced things. And, as your company grows, all the things you do become more advanced over time.
Outsourcing to agencies.
There are some upsides and some downsides to this, most popular, approach. The obvious up-side is that agencies are easy to find – they tend to promote themselves effectively enough. The main downside is what you get for your money. No matter how good an agency is you often cannot justify the cost versus the value you get from them, especially if your ambitions in the short-term are high and you seek aggressive growth.
Why? Let’s say you are spending £2000 per month for your SEO agency. £1000 of that will pretty much be swallowed up by the agencies organisational nature and need for overhead cost to be covered. The remaining £1k split by 4 weeks results in £250 per week being available to the agency to spend on staff-time/effort/work for you. If that agency staff is reasonably good you have to expect the agency to have around a total expense of £50+ per hour on that staff member. Which very simply leads to an understanding that you will get around 5h/week (just over 1/2 a workday) of SEO effort spent on your site. That is nowhere near enough to sustain strong growth. Sometimes that also won’t be enough to effectively tackle problems that have an estimated scope of several days of effort.
Outsourcing to individuals.
Unless you come to an agreement with the agency that allows for dramatic expansion in short-term efforts, which will come with a proportionally dramatic increase of cost, you will progress and grow very slowly, certainly much slower than you would like.
This is where finding someone like me, an individual with deep skills and experience in several areas required, is like a treasure-find for many companies. You suddenly have someone who covers your needs for growth at a more reasonable cost, with low to no overhead cost, and likely flexible availability that can accommodate big bursts of work.
Using the example of £2k a month from before, you will find that I’d likely be working around 2 days a week on your project, totalling 8 days a month rather than merely 2. The type of project that can be completed in 1 month is suddenly much more ambitious and the gains/growth are dramatically accelerated.
Synergies.
Also, having skills in several related areas leads to synergies that would otherwise likely be lost or result in a lot of time being consumed by communication (and friction) between several 3rd parties and yourself – providing the agency or internal staff can even cover such requirements.
These are skills/services I offer and some examples of how they symbiotically enhance each other:
SEO, basic & advanced search engine optimisation.
For example keyword insights gained here can inform better decisions in PPC advertising. Any web developments needed to implement SEO changes on-site can be done by myself right away. Setting up analytics and measurement of the impact of changes are “integrated” well.PPC, basic & advanced Google Ads/pay-per-click (there are others, but Google Ads is the primary focus).
Paid ads helps finding new optimisation targets for organic traffic which can, if needed, easily be translated into content expansion and search optimisation. Conversion rate tracking and remarketing/retargeting for conversion optimisation are more easily done.CRO, conversion rate optimisation.
Knowing the site from several aspects, like organic and paid traffic, or site layout/content/structure changes, leads to a better ability to identify, implement and measure optimisations.Web development.
Websites need constant tweaks and these changes should also play well with related SEO and paid ads efforts. Implementing landing page optimisations (LPO) is tightly integrated with other work.Software development.
Innovative approaches can be introduced that weren’t available before, like the utilisation of APIs (application programming interfaces) to automate existing and new aspects of the company’s operations. Extension of systems like Shopify/Squarespace in ways that are without bespoke software not possible.Analytics/measurement.
This is, in my experience, always a challenge. Different requirements for data insights, requirements for accuracy in such insights, implementation of new measurement tools, … always bring challenges and doubts that I can resolve providing ease of mind.Social media automation.
Social media can be very time intensive and the results can vary dramatically. This often leads to challenges when it comes to deciding how much time/effort/money to spend on production value when at best only a few people might see what was created. Automation dramatically changes this equation in favour of higher production value and better results from a commercial standpoint. Having the insights available from the other areas of focus mentioned above again makes this as integrated activity more feasible and valuable.Business consulting.
My experience as a business consultant brings additional knowledge and know-how gained in many other projects and organisations to your company and likely will help you improve and grow in other digital business aspects than your online presence alone.
My skill set provides synergies between SEO, PPC, DEV, CRO, automation, and more. Let’s have a chat and see how I might be of benefit to you.
