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Noah
Noah
Jan 19, 2025, 10:44 AM
Forwarded from another channel:
Forwarded thread from another channel:
Camille Collins
Camille Collins
Nov 26, 2024, 8:24 AM
Hey fellow in-housers! I'm curious, how big are your orgs/sites and how many SEOs do you have working in-house? (total, so local and global)
Kal Dimitrov
Kal Dimitrov
Nov 26, 2024, 8:36 AM
Hey, for a perspective:
• 17 persons in total in the company (2 SEOs, 4 content writers, 2 freelancers, all remote)
• Website doing over 1.4M monthly organic
• 2023 had us at $10M ARR
We found that up until the first million traffic, we could do away with just two SEOs. We hired the second one after we scaled to 300k. We don't have plans to hire a 3rd SEO for the moment.
Shawn Huber
Shawn Huber
Nov 26, 2024, 9:06 AM
While not in-house in my current role, I work agency side with my former company and team which is around 11 strong for SEO. They are broken up between technical and content, with a a couple members on different lines of business.
Boris Kuslitskiy
Boris Kuslitskiy
Nov 26, 2024, 10:02 AM
Large, and many. Probably around 20 company wide.
Camille Collins
Camille Collins
Nov 26, 2024, 1:54 PM
Thanks for the responses so far! I'm trying to build a business case for more SEOs to help me out. For reference, we're at about 100M ARR, 1000 employees, and I'm the only full-time SEO. I feel like this ratio is pretty off, right? ????
The other marketers who help with SEO are from the local teams and only do it part-time alongside their other marketing activities. And I work with an agency who helps me make optimizations and basic strategy recs.
If anyone has any tips on how to build a business case/ask for more SEO help, I'd love to hear them!
Boris Kuslitskiy
Boris Kuslitskiy
Nov 26, 2024, 2:01 PM
That ratio is definitely off. What kind of SEO work are you doing? How much are you do vs teaching other teams to service themselves? If you're still stuck doing weekly audits and talking to all the various teams yourself, that's doomed. I can see it being faintly possible if you're an advisor who sets out strategy and then teaches dev, qa, content, etc teams how to implement SEO in their own workflows so that you don't have to be involved outside of exceptions, but any level of recurring tasks beyond that is unsustainable.
Boris Kuslitskiy
Boris Kuslitskiy
Nov 26, 2024, 2:03 PM
Maybe the leadership considers the agency as part of the workforce, so in their eyes it's not one person, but one person + agency + semi-SEO embedded in different teams. Which is still not great with 100M ARR, but more understandable from their perspective.
Boris Kuslitskiy
Boris Kuslitskiy
Nov 26, 2024, 2:04 PM
What happens if you're out sick? Or go on parental leave? Or there's an priority overriding project/fire that forces you to ignore everything else? Definitely not great.
Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
Nov 26, 2024, 8:53 PM
@Camille Collins You should definitely try to have a conversation with @Dana Tan - she's had lots of experience making progress on this issue and similar situation in her role at UnderArmour.
Bradley Porter
Bradley Porter
Nov 27, 2024, 10:41 AM
If this is a worst case scenario, selling organic headcount to folks with PPC appetites, IMO make it about “showing the money and solving for it”: Start with the estimated organic opportunity space with estimated value and expected timeline. Estimate hours to oversee each organic growth area, maintain, meet, etc. If already bidding on ads, get that cost, or show cost to buy ongoing ad space to cover it (for 1-10 years, whatever hurts the right amount). Show current time spent per year on current organic growth and maintenance activities, meetings and research [the I’m too busy (sexy) for my plan (shirt) slide]. Estimate the cost of an agency, or better yet use an RFP to see what it’ll cost for full/ongoing agency support to cover those growth areas. Compare to the estimated cost to employ a FTE at the required competence level.
Craig Harkins
Craig Harkins
Dec 1, 2024, 10:26 AM
Is SEO in the marketing or product org? The approach to making your case could vary based on where SEO sits.
Overall, it sounds like SEO is understaffed. You will need to build out the case of how much more you could move results your org cares about with more investment.
In the past I’ve built out a long list of what we have on the roadmap, how those benefit the business, and what is not going to get done due to current resource investments.
If you can also tie that to a comparison on how your main competitor is investing that helps the case too.
Camille Collins
Camille Collins
Dec 3, 2024, 3:27 AM
Thanks for all the responses everyone! Luckily, management is really onboard in terms of improving SEO, I think we're just trying to figure out what that looks like for our org. It's definitely a learning curve! I did a lot of additional research and put together a proposal already to send up the chain. ????
@Paul Thompson Thanks for the recommendation!
Stephen Spiewak
Stephen Spiewak
Dec 13, 2024, 2:28 PM
@Craig Harkins curious how you would position the case for more resources based on whether SEO sat in marketing or product?
Dawood Ahmad
Dawood Ahmad
Jan 1, 2025, 10:06 PM
Ecommerce stores in the UK, Spain, and Italy, annual around €3 million annual in total. 3 SEOs, one writer, 5 designers, and 4 PPCs
Eoin Clancy
Eoin Clancy
Jan 3, 2025, 3:31 AM
Would highly recommend Product Led SEO, Eli Schwartz's book, for advice on this exact topic. Shares many of the same sentiments and ways to position that folks have shared above!
Julie
Julie
Jan 14, 2025, 9:59 AM
@Camille Collins I used to be the only SEO person in a company with more than 14000 employees and now there are no more SEO employees, I think they still have an agency helping them that I hired while I was still there. I had 2 people in India helping me tho on a lot of tasks, and I was able to hire one person in the US for a few months. I had a big plan on growing the team but it didn't work out (funny that Dana is mentioned in the conversation, we talked about the process of growing a team a few years ago where she shared her experience with me ???? )

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