Should You Assign Tasks Other Than SEO to Your SEO Staff to Increase ROI?

Many business owners and managers assign tasks like business development, content writing, live chat, WordPress website handling, etc. to their SEO staff. Of course, the agenda is to get better ROI, but you are actually making loss with this approach. In this article, I will share how you are losing money by assigning additional tasks to your SEO executive or manager. Each owner or manager that leads a team of SEO must read this even if he doesn’t belong to the category of managers assigning additional tasks to their SEO executives as this will educate you about some important facts!

I always advocate hiring an SEO agency over an in-house SEO resource if you are not a digital marketing company for obvious reasons. One of the main reason is you wouldn’t be able to understand the reliability of the hired resource as you can’t judge whether he is doing his job correctly or not and you will also not able to understand his pain points to give him a working environment that can make him more productive. This is because you are not an SEO expert and you also don’t have time to invest learning it.

You might be interested in reading, why to hire an SEO company instead of an in-house SEO expert.

There are many SEO myths in the market and two most famous myths are listed below:

1. SEO is nothing more than submitting things here and there. It is a copy paste job
2. SEO (copy pasting content) will not take much time, so my resource is free to do some more productive things to give me better returns

In this article, I will address the second point because I have seen more than 50% of business owners have this mindset. Thus, they assign additional duties to their SEO executives to assure they get good returns.

1. SEO Experts need time for research, planning and monitoring
SEO is not all about submissions. If it was so, you may have hired anyone even with less educational qualification, with knowledge of computers instead of experienced and well educated staff. Apart from submissions, there are many things an SEO expert needs to do. Some of the key tasks are listed below for your better understanding:

• Research
  • Website
  • Competitors
  • Keywords
  • Traffic
  • Backlinks
  • Trust score
  • Content
  • Hot topics
  • New products / services / events
  • Market trends
  • Submission resources
  • Webmaster errors
    • 404
    • Soft 404
    • Index
    • Robots
    • Sitemap
    • And more
  • Planning
    • Content Writing
      • What to write (article / blog / press release / guest post)
      • Why to write
      • How many
      • Minimum number of words
      • Keywords to be used
      • Keywords’ density, proximity, prominence
      • Whether it should be an informative content or promotional content
      • What should be the tone of the content
    • Link Building
      • Where to submit
      • How to submit
      • Paid or free listing
      • Category
      • Hyperlink and anchor text
      • Keywords
      • Call to action
      • How much information should be revealed
      • Does this resource give instant approval
      • Does it even approve
      • Authority of the submission site
    • Monitoring (to see if the current strategy is working or not)
      • Keywords
      • Traffic
      • Backlinks
      • Trust score
      • Competitors
      • Changes in Search Engine Algorithms
      • Change in sales strategy to align marketing with it
    • Reporting (Keeping logs of all submissions to reuse it and prove he has worked during working hours)

All the above mentioned activities are just planning and reporting part. The actual submissions are not touched yet. Also, there are many more things than the above mentioned points that a hired SEO expert needs to do day in, day out. And trust me it needs a lot of time than people assume. Also, this is not a one time job. The SEO managers need to follow a cycle of monitor, review, plan and repeat to give better results.

You might find some (so called) SEO specialists that would finish the research task in less than 4 hours; some are so charged that they finish website research within an hour and trust me they are not superheroes of SEO, they still haven’t understood real meaning of SEO. This type of resource is just following the guessing game and performs submissions here and there which are of NO GOOD USE. As I always say, YOU BETTER DO ‘NO SEO’ THAN DOING ‘WRONG SEO’.

2. Submissions itself are time consuming
As we have touched upon the point SEO has more than doing mere submissions, now, it is time to touch ‘submission’ part. Of course, nobody can deny that we, SEO service providers / managers, make submissions on the web. However, the first thing to be considered here is MAKING SUBMISSIONS IS NOT A BIG DEAL, KNOWING WHERE TO MAKE SUBMISSIONS AND WHERE NOT TO MAKE SUBMISSIONS IS A BIG DEAL.

It is a tough job to find the websites which actually give benefits of making submissions. It takes time because SEO executives need to

• Find submission resources on the ocean of web
• Try to gauge its authority and credibility
• Outreach people if it is not a directory to get permission to make a submission
• Read submission guidelines
• Plan content and link building as per the given guidelines without forgetting SEO best practices set by Google

Once the SEO executive is ready with the weapons (content or other resource to be submitted) and soldiers (list of submission sites), this is the time to attack. I mean posting. Now, let’s understand the SEO submission process.

How To Do SEO Submission?

1. Open the website(s)
2. Login into the website
3. Click on the button to open form for new submission
4. Enter the correct data in the correct field (Title, Body content, Summary, etc.)
5. Make the required changes (add hyperlink, put HTML code if needed, reduce or increase content size, if needed, etc.)
6. Select correct category
7. See preview
8. Click Submit
9. Copy link and put it in the report

As you can see, for each website where the SEO executive is making a submission, there are 9 or sometime more steps need to be followed. Even if the SEO executive has supersonic speed of submission, we have to keep certain technical limitations in mind that eats time such as,

• Site and page load time of a submission site
• Internet speed
• System speed
• Human speed

Also, it is a tedious job without a doubt. Thus, after a level, the SEO executive has to be more cautious to assure, he doesn’t make mistakes during the submission because even a wrong category will get the whole process wasted by getting ‘Rejection’.

These two points must have given you a clear idea that SEO is a full time job. In fact, more than full time job. An SEO manager needs to keep on repeating the cycle of monitor, review, plan and repeat. Thus, if you are thinking that the SEO is free to perform content writing or some business development task, you are highly mistaken. Because even if he has time, I think it should be invested in researching new SEO trends, algorithm updates, etc. to upgrade the SEO knowledge which can be used to get better results for your business.

Now, let me touch the point I had made: if you allocate tasks other than running SEO campaigns to your SEO experts, you will actually lose money.

1. You are diluting the skills and time
The SEO manager might have good command over English or amazing communication skills, but SEO service is his core expertise. When he will try his hands on other things, then his time, efforts, etc. will be divided in multiple things. It will actually dilute his skills because all of these are full time jobs which he needs to do alone.

2. You will get an average or low quality work
When a single person is doing things that need different skills, then the results will be average, not extraordinary. He has to finish assigned task, so he will focus more on finishing the task, than bringing quality results.

3. You are giving them scope of giving excuses
If they will not get good results for SEO, they will not take responsibility of it. They will not dig deeper to identify and fix the problem that is not giving results. All they will give to their own-selves and management is an excuse. Whether they tell this straight on your face or not, but you are the one who is blamed to not let him use his expertise in SEO and make him do what’s not part of his job.

4. You are maligning the overall work environment
Each business owner aims to give the best work environment to his staff for all the valid reasons. However, you, yourself, seed roots of dissatisfaction in an employee by assigning tasks which are not actually in the job role of that employee. The employee may have agreed on your terms in the interview to do all the things because he wants the job, but when he actually does all these, he will realize this is not the job of a one person as he has to bring good results with SEO and also have to do other things which don’t give him required working environment to deliver his best. This will build up frustration and will be relayed among other employees, too. The result is maligned work environment.

5. Defame of your business brand
We, business owners, spend millions of dollars to build a positive business brand. However, the frustrated and stressed employees can use review sites or word of mouth to get the frustration out which will defame your company. You wouldn’t be able to justify yourself because you might be considered in raw of those rude bosses that gives excessive work to an employee which is not even part of their job role. The business owners understand the dilemma of another business owner, so you may not lose clients because of it. However, you will definitely lose some good current and future employees. Your recruitment process will affect negatively.

This is how you will lose money instead of making more.

Conclusion
I have worked for 10+ years as a digital marketing employee. I have done a lot of other tasks than digital marketing because I always love doing more. However, I understand the challenges, concerns and pain points of a majority of SEO managers facing this situation. They wouldn’t be able to explain or justify their situation because they need to retain the job. They will drag it until you or they give up on the situation. As I have worked very closely with entrepreneurs and running a digital marketing agency for more than a year, I know the pressure each business owner has to increase ROI in the shrinking profit margins. I wanted to share what your SEO team might be feeling so you can have an open discussion to create a better strategy. This can be a story of your multiple employees; I have only talked about SEO as I am one of them. Thus, when you delegate tasks, you must be well educated about the time and efforts needed for that job than just going with your own assumption.

The final decision is yours, but if you want my recommendation, then I would say let the person do what his designation says!

About Author: Ashvini Vyas

Ashvini (Ash) Vyas has 10+ years of practical experience in digital marketing and international business development. She has written 100s of articles on various topics to live her passion of helping people with her knowledge and expertise. In addition to directing Digital Marketers India, Ash also delivers keynote sessions and holds key positions in some international companies as a consultant, director of operations and mentor.

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