4 Frustrations for In-House SEOs

6:05 AM
We've all had those moments where we feel that we've explained our point perfectly, there's no way they can say no, none whatsoever. Then the daftest most inane negative response leaves their mouth and you wonder why you ever bothered in the first place.

Sometimes working as an in-house SEO can feel like a Sisyphean task, if Sisyphus had been told by his boss that once he was done he had to go clean out the Augean stables before leaving for the night.

Here are four examples of frustrating scenarios that many in-house SEOs will encounter over the course of their career, along with some ideas for how to work them to your advantage.

The Adamant Refusal

I received an email last week from a student in my SEO class at Georgetown University. He'd listened to what I'd said, about how having multiple URLs for your home page wasn't an ideal situation.

Looking at his work site he realized that both the www and non-www versions worked with no redirects, and no canonical tags. So he contacted the IT team to get it fixed. They responded with a resounding "NO".

In fact, they claimed that canonicalizing to the www version would inform the Internet that their domain no longer existed, which would cause disasters such as stopping their email from working, while also causing the death of several kittens (that last one was implied, not explicitly stated in the email).

The response to something like this is to use facts. Gently explain to them why they're wrong, and what the opportunity cost is of not actually doing something beneficial to the site.
We've all had those moments where we feel that we've explained our point perfectly, there's no way they can say no, none whatsoever. Then the daftest most inane negative response leaves their mouth and you wonder why you ever bothered in the first place.

Sometimes working as an in-house SEO can feel like a Sisyphean task, if Sisyphus had been told by his boss that once he was done he had to go clean out the Augean stables before leaving for the night.

Here are four examples of frustrating scenarios that many in-house SEOs will encounter over the course of their career, along with some ideas for how to work them to your advantage.

The Adamant Refusal

I received an email last week from a student in my SEO class at Georgetown University. He'd listened to what I'd said, about how having multiple URLs for your home page wasn't an ideal situation.

Looking at his work site he realized that both the www and non-www versions worked with no redirects, and no canonical tags. So he contacted the IT team to get it fixed. They responded with a resounding "NO".

In fact, they claimed that canonicalizing to the www version would inform the Internet that their domain no longer existed, which would cause disasters such as stopping their email from working, while also causing the death of several kittens (that last one was implied, not explicitly stated in the email).

The response to something like this is to use facts. Gently explain to them why they're wrong, and what the opportunity cost is of not actually doing something beneficial to the site.