At the start of the year, you may be reviewing this yourself and feel unsure whether to outsource your SEO or manage this in-house.
Of course, as an agency offering SEO, we naturally believe that using an SEO agency gives the best results and return on your investments. However, this isn’t just based on a feeling as highlighted we have seen the trend to move marketing in-house come around many times and sadly seen the negative results.
Let look at some of the main reasons why outsourced SEO can be more successful.
Do you have the skills?
To run SEO in-house you need someone who has both the time and sills to do this effectively.
SEO is more than putting a few keywords on a page and updating the metadata, there is a wide variety of on-site, off-site and technical coding skills required.
Using an agency will give you immediate access to people with the right SEO skills plus access to a much wider resource of marketing professionals that can include:
- Strategic marketing planning and management
- On-site SEO
- Development and technical SEO
- Off site SEO and outreach
- Creative content marketing
- Social Media
- PPC and Paid Advertising
- Design and image creation
- User experience and conversion
- Monitoring, analysis, and reports
- Competitor analyses
Having access to a wide range of experience not only ensure your SEO is successful, but also that it can effectively support and be supported by other marketing channels as part of a wider strategy.
Experienced agency SEO professionals normally have a significant amount of experience working within different campaigns and industry areas and may also have insights into your competitors and strategies that are particularly useful in your industry.
What are you prepared to invest?
How much do you have to invest in your SEO marketing?
The balance should always be based on investment verses return to ensure your marketing is an asset and not a money pit.
The cost of hiring someone in-house to handle your SEO and perhaps wider marketing can vary greatly depending on experience. While less experienced staff may be cheaper to employ you won’t always get a great return as they will often be learning on the job.
In the long run, what you save on wages you can lose on poor results and marketing mistakes that lead to wasted budgets.
The cost of a good agency is often cheaper than employing in-house and brings faster and better results plus eliminates the risk of rookie mistakes wasting resources.
How much flexibility do you need?
The future is unpredictable and businesses need flexibility in their marketing to cope with both positive and negative economic conditions. Running things in-house doesn’t always give you the ability to make quick changes and adapt your marketing.
Although SEO is the last thing a brand should cut it is far better to reduce your agency’s retainer instead of making redundancies in-house.
If your business is going through a strong growth period you may quickly want to expand your marketing, launching new service/product and this may mean a switch of digital strategy. It is far easier when hiring an agency to switch strategies and focus on a different marketing platforms without struggling to find resources in-house.
If you need to move quickly the right digital marketing agency can make a big difference and prevent costly delays.
Summary
Running online marketing like SEO in-house can often be a costly mistake due to a lack or skills, higher costs and limited flexibility in your marketing.
Finding the right partner agency can be much more cost effective allowing you to retain the control and services you need to run in-house, but still giving you access to the skills, return on investment and flexibility of working with an agency.
