To Outsource SEO Or Keep It Inhouse?

A digital marketing agency will be the first to acknowledge it – SEO is expensive. Would you not save money by keeping your SEO inhouse? Or is it better to outsource SEO?

Doing SEO properly can be a big job. The wider your range of products and services, the bigger the job gets. This can be pretty daunting for just one person to handle. If you outsource SEO you can pile on as much work as your budget allows and you don’t have to worry about how it is going to get done, you just know that it is going to get done and you will reap the benefits later on. Instead of having one person, maybe two, working on your SEO you can have an entire team of professional writers and analysts working on your site and getting you the best results that they can.

Writing great content takes equal measures of creativity and pedantic attention to detail. Time should be spent researching potential topics and working the search terms you are targeting into those articles. Appropriate pictures should be sourced and the articles need to be uploaded to your website with all the right meta tags and information filled in.

Then there is the reporting and analysis of the campaign and your progress. This takes a pretty analytical and detail-oriented approach. Someone who does not mind doing the same work month after month. Someone who takes joy in numbers and can interpret the vast mountain of data available to give you a comprehensive overview of how things are going in language that you can understand.

Finding all of these qualities in the same person can be nigh impossible. So unless you have the budget to employ a team of people to do your SEO, it is a better option to outsource SEO.

The major benefit of keeping SEO inhouse is that you have more control and can potentially get a better understanding of your industry in the people that you hire. This means that the content could potentially be more relevant to your audience, but that is not a guarantee.

You will need to have quite an extensive SEO campaign and enough work to keep your SEO team busy enough to warrant their salaries. Since it can be tricky to guarantee anything with SEO you are not going to have happy campers if you try to employ results based contracts – you will just have to trust them that their efforts are effective and going to bring returns in the long run.

If what they do is not effective, then you have the issue of making the department redundant and finding new roles for these specialist people you hired. It just sounds like less of a headache to outsource SEO to a company that already has an established process that works. If you are not happy with the results you terminate the contract and carry on with your life – no harm, no foul. Sounds like a case of have your cake and eat it too to me.