In-House Search Marketing Interview – Anthony Kirlew
Anthony Kirlew (OldSchoolSEO) is a well known member of the Search Marketing community, having experience on both the agency and in-house side. This interview occurred prior to Anthony moving to his new in-house position (congratulations on the new position).
Q. What has been your biggest challenge for your in-house marketing efforts?
A. Working with developers or managers who just don’t get SEM, but let their egos take over to where they continue to question your suggestions and recommendations (and not for the sake of learning) because they can’t fathom that you know something that they don’t understand.
A close second would be working with management that really doesn’t understand what the results of SEM should be. This is a reminder to anyone looking at taking an in-house position to make sure you discuss “traffic and ranking” goals and expectations explicitly before you start; this way, your success will be documented and no one can question whether or not you are doing what you were hired for.
Q. What do you think are the important things to look for when looking at recruiting a member of an in-house SEM team?
A. Skills—a good mix of all things that comprise SEM:
- Organic search marketing (including site coding)
- Link building (and link baiting)
- An understanding of what really matters (e.g., Results vs. Toolbar Page Rank)
- PPC / Paid Search
- Social Media Marketing
- Metrics analysis and tracking
- A good overall business sense. Many execs don’t realize what an integral part of a company the SEM person plays and they miss out on valuable industry insight that comes around in SEM circles or other competitive analysis than a good SEM Consultant can provide.
Experience: If I were hiring my replacement, it would be for a management position, so I’d want to make sure the person had several years of experience directly doing all of the above, not just one component such as paid campaigns. I would also want to see results—the numbers don’t lie. If there were one strength I’d want to see, it would be Social Media Marketing because anyone who does SMM well usually gets good results with traffic.
Q. How do you address the concern that prevents some companies from taking Search Marketing in-house – that it’s too difficult for them to understand and keep on top of, so they must use an agency?
A. I love this question because it comes around so often in many ways. My off the cuff answer is “of course it’s not rocket science, but I don’t think it’s a fair comparison.” You could argue that search marketing is harder to master than rocket science because if you go to “rocket science school” and get your “rocket science degree,” then you are done and no one questions you—you are a rocket scientist. In our field, you don’t need a degree or even specialized training, but you do need to be committed to continually learning as things change so rapidly. Also, a lot of what is “shared” in our industry is speculation or hypothesis based on someone’s experience, but others are often quicker to debate it rather than embrace it or test it. This just says more about where the (SEM) industry is and how people respect it (or not).
