Earlier this week, I made a blog post about a study featured in DMNews that claims in-house SEOs tend to wear too many hats. While the article and many other bloggers wondered if this might not be a sign of companies not really placing enough value on an SEO's time, Bruce Clay's Lisa Barone made a great blog post that asked if we were really sure that this multitasking was a bad thing.

From the article:

Multitasking doesn't always equal overworked (don't you remember college?). Sometimes it's part of a company's plan for integration. It ensures their email campaigns get a marketing touch, that sites are designed with an emphasis on SEO and that all projects seamlessly fit together. What good is it to become pigeonholed into one mundane task, forgetting about everything else that is going on around you? How would that benefit the end user? If every aspect of your search marketing campaign needs to be intertwined, why wouldn't you have the same person work on it? Why can't one person run an entire campaign for a small company? When did multitasking become a bad thing?

On this level, I completely agree with Lisa. Any search engine marketer worth their salt has a strong understanding of lots of types of online marketing as well as site design and usability issues...otherwise, they wouldn't be able to work to put together a site that both ranks well and converts traffic. I think this is a point that many people miss when they start focusing on all the hats that SEMs sometimes wear.

On the other hand, Lisa goes on to say:

As the search marketing industry grows and matures it will naturally become more segmented. Bob will be in charge of site design, John will take care of the email campaigns and Joe will handle the advertising. Each will be an expert in their respective fields and will be able to handle their share of work without consulting the other. But is that better? Wouldn't you prefer that everyone works together in the pursuit of one common goal, building a tight integration between tasks? Isn't that the mantra that's been drilled into us since kindergarten?

This is the point where I think we vary a bit in our beliefs. While I think it's important that a good SEM have a strong understanding of all things related to web sites, it's just not realistic for more companies to work in this "jack of all trades" style. When one person tries to tackle too many specialities, you tend to end up with workers that are average, or a little above average in many areas and with no workers that are truly outstanding at any of them. When a company grows and you begin to have enough staff to allow for specialization, things also work just fine...so long as you still provide a decent level of cross-training, or a supervisor that understands how to balance the needs of each area of the web site.