Why SEMs Feel Overworked - Good or Bad?
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As I mentioned, iProspect thought it was good that search engine marketing and website design were often managed by the same person. In fact, the company thought it was “an advantage that cannot be understated when it come to gaining cooperation in the implementation of search engine optimization (SEO) best practices in particular.” Indeed, the more cooperation a search engine marketer could get on website design issues, “the better chance a website has of achieving high visibility within the natural search results of the major search engines.”
Since iProspect so clearly understands the need for cooperation and the benefits of working together in that area, it makes it all the more puzzling that the company seems to believe in major separation when it comes to IT and search engine marketing. “It is iProspect’s position that search engine marketing should be performed by marketers and not technologists…there are far too many traditional marketing best practices known and understood by most marketers and that are also utilized within search engine marketing, to entrust an organization’s search engine marketing initiatives to technologists who know little about traditional marketing.”
This begs the question of whether it is more important for a search engine marketer to have a good grasp of the technical aspects or the marketing aspects of their duties, and which one is harder to learn. Either way, the idea that it is somehow a bad thing for a search engine marketer to wear lots of hats is questionable at best. As Chris Sherman points out, “Search marketing isn’t like manufacturing, where assigning people to narrow, specific tasks makes sense and often improves productivity and efficiency.”
It also ignores the realities of today’s market. Many small companies really can’t afford to have a separate individual in charge of marketing, let alone SEO/SEM. In that case, it naturally falls to someone who is already handling IT and/or being a webmaster to handle other things that are related to the company’s website. For the companies who can afford to have a separate marketing person, or department, many are still adjusting to this relatively new medium. That will change as time goes on, but for now, SEOs and SEMs coming from a technical background may, on the whole, prove to be a positive rather than a negative thing.
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