We strongly recommend SEO as an integrated service if the total budget for Digital marketing is less than Rs 10 lakhs per month. The reasons are following:
- SEO companies can hardly contribute in terms of link building or content creation unless there is a major campaign associated with it.
- As mentioned above SEO is now very well integrated with different channels like Social Media, affiliate marketing and ads. Days are gone when SEO could have been a very different contract.
SEO does only 5 work (35% work can be done as different team but 65% of the tasks needs involved with other channels these days):
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Website optimization (Structure, robots.txt, webmaster console etc) 5% of work:
- This can be done as a separate task
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Keyword analysis (10% of work)
- This can be done a separate task
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Content creation (10% of work)
- Very difficult to do it as different task, it needs to be clubbed with campaign, the current engagement level etc.
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Content optimization – 10% of work
- This can be done a separate task
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Link building – 50% of work
- Previously it was possible to be a different task, now considering it to be a different task will not be a good suggestion. Very difficult to do it as different task, it needs to be clubbed with campaign for links/conversations and engagements..
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Suggestion on other signals – 10%
- Suggestions can be given but still it is not the best suggestions as the team is not involved in overall understanding on the project.
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Reporting and analysis – 5%
- This can be done a separate task (to some extent)
Balancing out will be difficult job unless there is a 3rd person (general a team from the company) involves in it. SEO team will like to implement something in a manner, whereas the other team will not approve of it. The discussion will consume more hours and resources.
When the agencies are different, the communication becomes really costly. Managing 2 agencies becomes very difficult or else the roles have be very well defined. We are working with Mudra (previously there was another agency) as our media agency for one of our client (For some of other clients, we have different agencies). In these cases, we are responsible for online success, they help us with creative, we call them and explain them our concept and need, they contribute. The other thing they check is computability and effect on branding. They don’t do marketing as such.
Big facts about SEO:
There are hardly companies that understand holistic approach to digital marketing as it needs a lot of work. We have mastered this since 2003 while working with many companies. The right mix is the call. Most of the digital marketing companies will have SEO division. SEO can still be a different team if:
- SEO team is only there to optimize the website, do the keyword research and all the on-page work + some part of link building. They should not be held responsible for online success.
- The website is all about content, like in case of a bollywood news site where everyday there is at least 20 pages comes up.