A Quick Guide to Building an In-House SEO Team

Building an SEO team will depend on three primary factors: The type of business you have, your market, and the strategy you plan to invest in.

These factors can also play a role in determining the size of your team. For example, huge corporations will ideally work well with tens of people, whereas small businesses can settle on a three-person in-house team.

Then again, at the end of the day, size isn’t really much of a big deal. What matters is that everyone in your team gets to work harmoniously to achieve your desired goals. Combining their strengths and skills can make all the difference.

Once you’ve considered your particularities, that’s the time you start structuring your SEO team. For every in-house SEO team, it should comprise these specialists:

Usually possessing a mix of management and technical skills, the SEO manager is the one responsible for designing and implementing an SEO strategy within a company. They’re heavily involved in SEO work at the tactical, operational, and strategical levels.

The SEO manager is considered a leadership role in many organizations. As with managers from other industries, SEO managers are there to lead their team - whether it’s by delegating tasks, providing training and guidance, or keeping track of their team’s performance and progress.

The overall tasks of an SEO manager include:

An SEO specialist is someone who has an in-depth technical knowledge of search engine optimization. They’re basically a company’s go-to when it comes to technical SEO.

Although their job responsibilities vary based on the type of organization they’re working for (ex. digital marketing agency, digital marketing department of a company, or freelancing), most job postings for an SEO specialist are looking for candidates who are highly skilled at the following:

Link builders are responsible for acquiring all the links back to a certain website. They focus on promoting their clients’ content to other websites, particularly those that have strong authority, until they link back to you on their content.

Other than that, link builders are tasked to:

With content as one of the backbones of SEO, content writers are a vital piece of the team. They normally work with a content manager, but since they’re assigned in the SEO team in this case, they follow the SEO manager’s rules and guidelines for writing quality content to achieve higher rankings.

The responsibilities of a content writer include:

The social media manager is in control of an organization’s social media strategy in order to boost visibility and attract new customers. Most of the time, they set the tone and style of voice for social media posts, as well as the overall online presence of their company’s brand.

Being a social media manager entails the following duties:

Now that you’re aware of who should be in your SEO team and what responsibilities they should be fulfilling, it’s time to assemble a killer in-house team that will get you dominating search engines like never before.

Let’s be honest, forming an in-house SEO team can be a strenuous process.

Because you won’t have the mobility of large teams in place, you may need to hire more individual contributors for more aggressive strategies. It’s also important to have a team that’s composed of people with different SEO skills, so they’ll be able to tackle both technical and creative issues with ease.

So, how can you build an in-house SEO team that can deliver optimal results? Let these steps guide you:

First things first, develop the budget for your SEO team.

Discussing budget matters is extremely crucial. Building the right team won’t be possible without having the right budget. And, the right budget will enable the team to function properly.

Think of it as building a house. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to construct one without taking time to assess all of its cost first, would you?

That’s why you should take this step seriously.

Budget planning and development will require you to do some extensive research. You’ll have to benchmark the salaries of the top SEO professionals in your area.

The expenses of an SEO team will vary depending on what positions are filled and who fills them.

An SEO manager, for instance, earns around $60,000 to $100,000 per year. Content writers fall into the $35,000 to $50,000 range, whereas SEO specialists can expect a salary range of $40,000 to $85,000 annually.

Let’s just say that a good SEO professional usually commands anywhere between $40,000 and $80,000, depending on their experience. If you’re looking to hire a seasoned professional, your budget should be around $100,000.

Additionally, the budget should account for common SEO tools and training so that your team members will always stay on top of their game.

Keep in mind that there’s no right or wrong when it comes to assessing budget. What matters is that it remains a top consideration of your SEO strategy. Just make sure not to spend your money unnecessarily and still expect the results to stick.

Company size is another major factor to consider when forming an in-house SEO team. It can actually have a significant impact on the outcome of your SEO plan.

Let’s say you’re a huge company where individual managers are leading different divisions. Since each of them is in charge of their respective division’s portion of the website, the site itself becomes a cohesive whole.

Though it’s not impossible to implement a large-scale SEO gameplan, challenges may surface when you fail to scale your campaigns correctly. If this happens, you won’t be seeing the results you’re hoping to see from your campaign, leaving you utterly disappointed.

However, if you run a smaller business, you won’t have to worry about implementing an SEO plan without the involvement of management and politics at play in an organization hierarchy. Having smaller teams means bigger budgets, which makes it easier to keep up with SEO updates and changes as needed more effectively.

An SEO dream team is made of people who are equipped with exceptional skills in various backgrounds. The thing is, finding someone who masters all - or at least, more than one skill – can be a challenging task.

When evaluating your candidates, make sure that you closely examine their experiences, credentials, and perhaps even check in with their references. Use the interview as an opportunity to gauge your potential employees.

These general questions will help you assess if they’re really fit for the job:

Of course, you must also quiz them with basic SEO-related questions such as the following:

As much as you may want to hire your in-house members all at once, don’t do it. Instead, focus on getting the leader of the pack first – the SEO manager.

Besides being an expert (and maybe even a veteran) in the world of SEO, you should pick someone with natural leadership skills. They should be able to direct your SEO program and help you make decisions, such as what SEO strategy would work best and when to bring in more people to your team. 

Once you’ve assembled your rock star team and established your budget, your next move is to develop the goals you want to achieve.

For your strategy to be effective, you’ll need to prioritize action-oriented SMART goals, which means your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Time and again, SMART goals have helped companies of all sizes reach the top.

To come up with a successful SMART goal, you should ask yourself these questions:

Or, you can start your campaign by defining what success means to you. 

How much organic traffic do you have to generate to produce a good ROI? What pages do you want to rank on the first page of Google for your target keywords? What keywords should you be using throughout your content?

Don’t hesitate to be open to new ideas as well. Brainstorming sessions with the team can do wonders. Who knows, one of them might even come up with something spectacular that can give your brand a major push. 

Producing the best results means equipping your in-house team with the best SEO tools available. Here are some of them:

One of the best all-in-one SEO platforms out there, Serpstat has evolved from a keyword research tool into a growth hacking tool for SEO, PPC and Content Marketing. It comes with incredible features such as Keyword Research, Backlink Analysis, Rank Tracker, Site Audit, Keyword Clustering, and more:

Since your team will be teaming up with pay-per-click advertisers, they’ll certainly need SEMrush, a tool designed specifically for SEM marketing. A fan favorite in the SEO community, SEMRush also lets users easily access their rankings and track changes and new ranking opportunities.

SEO experts can’t get enough of Ahrefs, and we can’t blame them. It’s been deemed as the top backlink analysis tool on the market, as it allows users to reverse-engineer their competitor’s link-building strategies.

What’s more, you can use this tool to check and fix broken links on your website, get an overview of your best-performing pages, and many other incredible features.

If you’re looking for an excellent keyword finder tool that won’t cost you a single penny, Ubersuggest is definitely your best bet. This tool will give you hundreds of relevant keyword suggestions to use on your website. And it can help you measure your keyword performance.

Screaming Frog is another top pick for SEO professionals. One of the main reasons is that they can view websites in the same way as search engines do. It also informs users of duplicate content, bad redirectors, errors to repair, not to mention, areas that need to be improved for link building.

Your content writer/s will never run out of blog topics with this free SEO tool. Answer the Public is designed to help users create content around specific keywords to boost their rankings.

It presents a list of questions online users commonly ask about a particular keyword, providing you invaluable guidance as to what exactly your target audience is searching for.

There’s no denying that SpyFu has an amazing premium version, but a lot of digital marketers couldn’t stop raving about its free features. With it, you can do these two things: View the number of times a keyword gets searched while determining the ranking difficulty for that keyword, search your competitors’ keywords and get a detailed assessment of their performances.

If you’re curious to know how Google thinks of your website, you’ll certainly want to use Google Search Console. The tool allows you to view important SEO data, including impressions, clicks, and average ranking position. It also enables you to check and fix any technical issues your site might be experiencing.

Seolyzer is another free SEO tool that helps you determine how Google and other search engines see your website. It pulls information that crawlers leave in your server’s log files while they browse your website to identify and create the KPIs of your SEO.

While using one of these tools can already make a huge difference, we suggest you combine a few of them. That way, you have the guarantee that you’ll be seeing the best results.

Based on everything you’ve just read, we bet you’d 100% agree with us when we say that building an in-house SEO team requires meticulous planning, time, and of course, investment. However, following our tips will make the job less stressful (and perhaps even more enjoyable) for you.

Oh, and one more thing before we let you go: Make it a habit to push and motivate every single member of your team. Boost their morale every now and then to keep them going and strive to be their best.

We wish you the best of luck in forming your in-house SEO team!