Help, I Need Somebody. Help, Not Just Anybody: SEM Help Wanted. Help!
Agencies Discover That Experienced Search Engine Marketing Staff is Near to Impossible
to Find, Hindering Their Attempts to Grow a Search Marketing Division
By Sage Peterson
October 2004
At a recent industry event, an agency competitor confided in me that he’s having a really tough time finding staff that can adequately perform SEM. “You guys have an advantage in that you have built a training infrastructure,” he pointed out. “SEM-only companies can hire people without SEM experience, and teach them the skills to drive results - we have to hire people with that experience because we don’t have a training program or enough depth in our existing bench to develop one.”
Agencies have learned that building a search engine marketing team is much more difficult than they expected. I’ve heard this from a number of agencies. Search remains a very specialized marketing skill. An AD:Tech Conference attendee suggested that search is the “rocket-science” of online marketing. He was not that far off the mark.
The SEM beast is a ferocious and untamed animal. It is surprisingly complicated, and phenomenally difficult to do well. Agencies have discovered that producing positive ROI for clients in PPC search advertising is as illusive as it is time consuming - seeking out a profit is beguilingly difficult for most.
Let’s examine the problem of building an SEM team: Only a search engine marketer with real experience and genuine expertise can produce results. But like many new industries – no one is graduating from college with a degree in search engine marketing. The training and proving ground for search engine marketers is at search engine marketing companies. And, there aren’t many large SEM companies. There are three, maybe four, large (30+ staff) search engine marketing companies in the United States.
The usual job boards won’t find staff with search qualifications. You won’t be advertising locally for this expertise – those with talent and real experience are spread out across the country.
Next, search engine marketing companies jealously protect their primary asset: their well-trained staff. Most have employment agreements with enforceable non-competes. If you are building a search engine marketing division within an agency, you are a competitor, and these agreements will surely bog you down.
Worse, search engine marketing has become increasingly complicated with an ever-growing list of acceptable and unacceptable practices and search engines that constantly shift partnerships and algorithms. The on-going learning necessary to stay current is significant. Even if you lure someone from an SEM company, you need a training program to keep them on the cutting edge. Without an in-house SEM development program your employee(s) skills will quickly become stale, and their tactics progressively less effective over time. Think about it – their old firm, their old boss, won’t take their calls when they have a question once they are with a “competitor.”
Even if you identify a bona fide search engine marketing expert who is not bound by a non-compete and is willing to re-locate, there is still the biggest challenge. None of the tools on which they relied to drive client success will follow them to the new division you are building. Search engine marketing companies have made substantial investments in proprietary technology – some going back five or more years. Much of the search engine marketing knowledge, the intellectual capital of the organization, is actually coded in proprietary tools - tools to which your new employee will no longer have access. Sure, there are commercially available tools, but they are primitive compared to the industrial-strength tools available to the veteran SEM firms.
Hiring away some practitioners may technically get you an SEM team, but you will still be competing with a much more heavily armed competitor – and your clients will know it. Nobody wants to make this kind of investment in time and staff, only to be second- or third-best in a space. For this reason, agencies typically choose to partner with leading SEM companies or outsource entirely. Agencies who insist on building an SEM practice in-house face an uphill battle and a significant recruiting challenge - a bit like the rest of the Beatles song, “…never needed anybody’s help in any way…” Just remember how the song continued, “but now those days are gone and I’m not so self assured…”
If you really need “Help” and you’re ‘not so self assured…’ my counsel is that your agency either partner or outsource. Because you do appreciate me being ‘round…”
