I'm in a situation that I imagine a fair few readers here are in. I am employed by a company and internally am the "voice" of SEO, but it isn't my sole job. (Answers on a postcard as to what that voice sounds like!) I've wanted to contribute to YOUmoz for a while as a way of saying thanks for all I've learnt so far, so hopefully this will give cause for thought.

When I was employed as a university graduate (I'm in the UK), I had some experience with SEO although too much of it was theoretical. So when it came to auditing the company website, it was outsourced (twice!) rather than trusted to me to complete. As a result of seeing two reports last year, I found myself both excited and frustrated, which led to thinking about this posting.

The development of our site is also handled by a development agency (it’s a relatively complicated e-commerce site), and of course anything technical generally has a cost attached to it. Want a new form or a slight addition to how something works? Then that'll be a couple of hours of work (and a lot of hassling), and yes please, we'll charge you for that despite it being the same form as last time (oops, personal grievances coming out!). We only have so much development budget, and a lot of it is used in day to day stuff, so when it comes to SEO enhancements we need to prioritise, and we need our SEO agency to help with this.

To begin with, I wish that SEO consultants and companies would get a good understanding of how a company website is handled before recommending a lot of technical changes. Understand that there is only so much money in the pot if it is outsourced, or if you have the luxury of an in-house team, know that they'll have other projects. One of the companies sent us a report and rang us less two weeks later to see how many of the technical changes had been made...which was none.. And why was that - apart from the time, resource, and cost to work out, they hadn't helped us prioritise and understand whether the change would bring positive ROI. You try to prove to the directors of a company that a few days spent making the URLs SE friendly is going to be returned without some kind of backup - it isn't going to happen.

As a starting point, give us a list of things we can take action on (header tags, sitemaps, adding more text, etc) - this will give us something to do whilst we wait for the bigger stuff to be implemented, or as a "taster" to help prove how SEO can help. Also, and this is a big thing that people don't understand, we can resource these kind of changes using the in house press/web teams, etc. Then by all means give us the big stuff, but don't call us two weeks later expecting it to have all been done. I know we spent a fair chunk of money getting you guys in the first place, but we don't have bottomless pits of money and we need to evaluate it all.

So when it comes to the next time you find yourself asked to do an audit either as an individual or in your company, think about what the client will be able to do with the information; otherwise, you may find both of you wasting your time. Yes, I know you'll still get paid, but isn't there more satisfaction in getting paid AND seeing your client's website higher up the listings?!

I know there are companies out there that maybe do this and more, but given the amount of people out there "selling" SEO, the more people who understand the client side, the better. One of the audits we did even asked some of the questions above but didn't really listen to our answers, so make sure you read what the client gives you as well!

There are a lot of companies out there that need these services. They want to know how to do it, but they may not be able to action it all straight away - so give them a chance and help them out and you'll probably find yourself getting more referrals as well. I should mention at the end of this that I'm hoping to move out of my job into something which is more dedicated in the SEM category in the not too distant future, and having been client side, I will take a lot of the knowledge above about being client side with me and into my next job, wherever that may be.