In House SEO & PPC - A potentially fatal mistake

Are you thinking of taking your SEO or PPC in-house? It might be one of the biggest mistakes your business can make.

For SME’s, doing SEO or PPC yourself can be a cost-effective, if a little time-consuming, way of saving money and making you feel like you are growing your business.

For some industries, like small-scale e-commerce, it can work well but once you reach a certain size and your expectations shift, keeping things in-house can lead to problems.

With B2B marketing, results can be much more nuanced.

If you have worked with an agency and decide to move your SEO or PPC in-house it can be a fatal error, particularly if you were getting good results.

That’s because finding SEO and PPC professionals who know what they are doing is tough. They either work for agencies, start their own agencies or work freelance.

For medium-sized businesses, in-house talent is often limited to entry-level positions and digital marketing managers who don’t tend to specialise in multiple disciplines.

They may have a decent understanding but gaps in their knowledge can be devastating to businesses with a limited marketing budget.
 

What are the worst mistakes a business can make regarding SEO and PPC?

1. Taking your PPC in-house and starting from scratch

Taking your PPC in-house seems tempting. Maybe you aren’t happy with the results, maybe you are expecting much more.

Maybe a new digital marketing manager has arrived and wants to put their stamp on things.

Whatever the reason, ripping things up and starting from scratch might not be a good idea.

With a particularly mature PPC account this can spell disaster. Campaigns may have collected years worth of data.

It is vital to check how a PPC account has been set up and carefully analyse the data before considering any sort of action.

Campaigns can be incredibly complex and set up in a way someone with limited experience may understand.

I am not just having a go at digital marketing managers, sometimes agencies get it wrong, we’ve seen some horror-shows in our time.

However, there are also a lot of excellent agencies out there that know what they are doing and spend months and years fine tuning PPC campaigns that generate good results. That’s why it is always better to have a quality PPC agency take a look at your account first.

Alarm bells ring when someone new enters the business and wants an unrealistic conversion rate or better CPA without looking at the whole account and understanding performance across the business.

Of course, as a business owner you want better quality leads and a better return on your investment but you should always proceed with caution.

It is far better to maintain a healthy relationship with the agency and collaborate on campaigns using their expertise rather than pulling the plug, or even get a second opinion from another trusted PPC professional or agency.

The good ones will tell you the truth, whether you have a good PPC account or a bad one.
 

2. Spamming Ai content

Since the start of the Ai revolution, businesses have been scrambling to make the most of LLM’s (Large Language Models).

Why hire expensive copywriters when we can get Chat GPT to write our article? We don’t need an SEO agency anymore, Chat GPT will do it all for us.

I have seen posts on Linkedin, news articles and even podcasts making bold claims about the benefits of creating Ai articles.

Well, there is a problem with this approach, a fairly big one.

Ai-generated content isn’t original, it isn’t always accurate and, although it can be quite good it quite often isn’t.

Large Language Models scrape websites, books, videos, and just about any existing content. This means none of the content Ai creates is unique.

Content that isn’t unique isn’t seen as particularly helpful or useful by search engines. This, as you can imagine, isn’t good news.

If you have a small marketing team and you have decided that content is the way forward, you might have heard various “facts” about SEO. We need content, and lots of it (we’ll get onto that)

“We need to rank for more queries!”

The temptation is to use Ai to create lots of new content. We can target 100 keywords and create 100 pieces of content, quickly.

So let’s imagine you create lots of new content using the Ai approach. What can you expect?

A quick check on Google Search Console shows an increase in impressions, even some clicks, great!

The big problem hits when Google’s Helpful Content algorithm update kicks in.

Google has been reacting to Ai and it has been brutal.

SEO’s thought that because Google hadn’t explicitly denounced Ai produced content it must be safe to mass produce it.

Websites that went down this path have found themselves receiving penalties, some have even been completely deindexed.

This can cause irreparable damage to your domain’s reputation. 

3. Too much content

Without a content strategy, we often see businesses reverting to creating blog posts. 5 years ago, putting out a high volume of blog content was considered a good strategy.

I have always been uncomfortable with the scattergun approach to content. My philosophy has always been to create content that serves your audience. It has to have a purpose.

Is the content genuinely helpful, is it great content that we can’t live without? If it isn’t, it simply shouldn’t be on your website.

Taking SEO in-house to someone operating on the SEO principles of even 12 months ago with a strategy of creating lots of new content can lead to the following problems.

• Content bloat
• Duplicate content
• Diluted authority

All of the above can make your website difficult to manage. Worse still, your in-house marketing team’s time is valuable and they are wasting it creating content that for the most part will never be found.

We have been spending more time reducing content bloat by actually deleting, in some cases, hundreds of old pieces of content. Just think of the hours spent on all of those blogs, and for what?!

A good SEO will spend time researching and understanding your audience, coming up with a strategy and offering guidance on the content you should be creating.

I’m not trying to completely discourage in-house content creation, far from it. Thought leaders inside businesses should be writing content if they have a hot take, paying attention to E-E-A-T guidance. 

4. Not using tracking correctly when running Google Ads

Google pushes businesses to use Google Ads. It doesn’t, however, push the complex tracking requirements Google Ads relies on to work well.

Without proper tracking, setting up Google Tag Manager, Google Ads Tracking, Key Events in Google Analytics and linking your Google properties, your ads are destined to fail.

Handing your Google Ads account to someone with limited experience can quickly turn into a colossal waste of money.

Different campaign types require different bid strategies. We have also found that P-Max works best with manual ads running alongside. It also has very mixed results for lead generation but Google won’t tell you that, they just want your money!

A Google rep also won’t help you refine your campaign the way an experienced PPC professional will.

In-house digital marketers will have varying skillsets. The complex requirements of Google Ads and Google Analytics in 2025 means the ones that specialise are usually freelance or working for agencies.

Training on these platforms can take months, only for the platforms to then change without warning.

A recent example of this is consent mode. Consent mode was made mandatory in 2024. As a business owner you aren’t expected to know about Google’s latest headache for marketers but, hopefully, your marketing team is!

Consent mode involved a fair bit of setting up, both on client websites and in Google Tag Manager. In some cases, with more complex sites, this took days, not hours and involved troubleshooting and a lot of testing.

Does your marketing team have the resources to do this sort of thing properly? There are questions over whether they should even try.

Imagine you are heavily reliant on your Google Ads, which, in-turn, are heavily reliant on the correct flow of data from you website via Google Analytics. Set up consent mode incorrectly and you might lose that flow of data.

This is not uncommon, we have seen it happen. Losing conversion data can stunt your ads and this can also be a fatal error. 
 

What should you do?

I’m not throwing in-house specialists under the bus. There are really good, experienced digital marketers out there.

There are also talented, up-and-coming digital marketers with a passion for learning and a desire to do things the right way. 

There are also bad agencies that can mess things up for you.

The bottom line is; it is important to carefully consider whether to bring SEO or PPC activity in-house. It is less about what you have to gain, rather more about what you can stand to lose. 

To avoid the pitfalls, be as informed as possible. 

Questions to ask an SEO professional

• Can they give you a basic understanding of how a search engine works?
• Do they think beyond just Google?
• How do they use data to make informed decisions?
• Which metrics are they looking at?
• Do they understand your audience and how do they intend to find out about them?
• What is their content strategy and how do they intend to execute the strategy?
• Do they have case studies/examples of previous campaigns?
• Can they tell you what is working and why? 

Questions to ask a PPC professional

• What are the core strategies they use when implementing new campaigns?
• How would they assess the pros and cons of an established campaign?
• Aside from conversions - how do they measure the success of an account?
• How do they manage risk in managing an existing account?
• What tools apart from Google ads do they use in developing new content and improving existing (can they offer examples)?
• How much (%) automation do they use in managing an account? 
• What are the challenges in the next 12 months in managing an account and what new techniques would they suggest be explored (ask for evidence)?