For years, managing search engine marketing (SEM) was the domain of the sole proprietor, the in-house expert, the one guy or gal who knew what they were doing. As those pioneers succeeded, visibility of their efforts was raised, a larger industry was born, and more resources – and scrutiny – were put toward it.

How do you build a great SEM team? As with anything, putting together a championship team requires:

Understanding the positions you need to fill.
Identifying the skills and experience to fill those positions.
Finding a great coach or manager to bring it all together.

The Skills
The most overlooked position is the quantitative expert. This isn’t just an analytics person. This is a highly analytical thinker with a deep love for data – intellectual curiosity paired with an eye for details. Your quant guru regularly loves diving into the data head-first. Most of this diving leads to extremely tactical recommendations (which can provide great value). But occasionally, true ‘pearls’ of wisdom result and can drive huge gains.

They also need to know a lot about your business, who your audience is and what messages resonate with them. This means someone who can understand the parlance of internal marketing meetings, who knows where and how to get your promotional calendar and, perhaps even more importantly, can educate others on how effective the SEM program is, why it deserves the credit it deserves, and how their team’s role fits into the bigger marketing picture.

It’s worth noting that the “perfectly optimized page” above won’t be perfect for all verticals, or for all brands – not everyone has the ability to add customer reviews to their product pages

Although there's no one-size-fits-all solution, hopefully the above list will give you some guidance on how to perfect your on-page SEO.