I think another major con with working in-house is how it limits your experience in verticals other than who you’re working for. As you know SEO in the travel vertical is very different to, say, B2B or personal finance. Whilst it’d be great to handle other campaigns on the side this is extremely difficult if you’re fully committed to your in-house role.

I think it’s important to consider the size of the company you are going to work for as an inhouse SEO and what other skills that have inhouse.

I worked very briefly for a small company after being assured I would get full support from all staff there. I didn’t. The single guy who was considered the ‘IT Guru’ completely influenced some major changes within the company that he had neither the skills or the experience to maintain and he became very troublesome and obstructive in my efforts. The owner and other staff never had time to do anything that was asked of them either so there I was trying to do the SEO, PPC, website changes, blog posting, link building for 3 websites. Nightmare! It was impossible to manage AND implement the work required to meet the demands and targets expected by the business owner.

My advice for anyone considering an inhouse SEO position would be to find out the following:
How many websites are you expected to work with?
What are the targets for each of those (traffic/ranks)?
Are you expected to manage PPC budgets for each of those sites as well as optimising them for organic search? (And what are the budgets for the PPC campaigns)
What support is available inhouse/externally? (E.g. web design/development, server maintenance/changes, website updates, staff available to assist with writing, link building, blogging, etc)
What decisions are down to you and which are down to someone else? (Ie do you have control of how much is spent on what?)
If required will there be a budget for employing additional staff specifically to assist with the online marketing?

Some companies when looking for inhouse SEO’s expect too much from one person and have no idea of the support network that is required to effectively manage an online marketing campaign.

It sounds as if you have a great support network around you Shane. Thanks for sharing your experiences.