Benefits of outsourcing
Outsourcing or insourcing tasks is a key decision. The benefits of outsourcing are that you get access to specialized expertise, you save on hiring and training costs, you get results faster, you can scale your efforts as needed, and you can easily switch agencies if the performance doesn't meet your expectations.
Conversely, there are also advantages to insourcing. You have full control over the process, full transparency in the work and usually lower hourly costs (but typically also lower efficiency). At the same time, the fact that your employees know your company and your industry and can work closely with the company's marketing department is an advantage for the work.
Review the roles in the text about seo strategy and consider whether you have the staff with the skills and time to handle all the tasks. If you choose to insource all the work, be aware that in addition to internal costs, there will at least be external costs for purchasing analysis tools and typically also for link building.
Of course, a combination of insourcing and outsourcing can also be a good solution. Many companies prefer to do their own copywriting, while the SEO agency focuses on more specialized tasks such as link building and technical analysis.
Insourcing SEO
Should you hire an in-house SEO expertor do you need to get help from an external seo agency? There are many opinions and arguments for one SEO solution or another, and ultimately it's all about finding the solution that works best for you and your business.
The fact that it doesn't have to be an either/or is certainly part of the discussion. You can have a combination of in-house SEO resources and an external agency. But for now, we're putting on the agency hat. So here are 8 reasons why it's difficult to insource SEO:
1) It's often cheaper with an agency solution
A skilled SEO resource typically costs a full adult monthly salary. Plus, of course, there are vacation days, sick leave, pension, and whatever other benefits there are for permanent employees.
An SEO solution from an agency can be in many different price ranges, but will always be targeted and tailored to your specific needs, so you pay for nothing more than the services you actually receive.
But as Jason DeMers writes on SearchEngineWatch.comFor most companies today, SEO will be the marketing initiative with the highest ROI, so it's often more interesting to look at the results of your SEO solution than the cost of it alone.
2) A good SEO effort requires many different talents
Serious work with SEO today requires mastering many things: 1) The technical partwhich focuses on the actual building of your site, 2) Content optimizationwhich is about optimizing your content, identifying the right keywords and generally working with SEO on the front-end of the site and 3) Link buildingwhich is all about getting the right links and creating a link architecture that works.
It can be difficult to get all these facets covered by a single in-house person. An agency will often be able to draw on many different resources, each with their own expertise.
3) Fresh eyes may be needed
If you work with a permanent SEO resource, there's a high risk that this person will develop a series of blind spots to the challenges you face. Often people will swear by the method they've used in the past and what has worked in the past, but as SEO efforts need to be dynamic and change over time, this is a dangerous way to go about things.
If you use an external agency instead, you can be sure that a number of people with different backgrounds and expertise will help define your SEO solution and efforts.
4) An in-house resource can't solve the big, time-consuming challenges
Some SEO tasks are quick and easy, but there are also many tasks that are very time consuming. If you have a single SEO resource on staff, it will often be impossible for that person to dive into the most time-consuming challenges on the to-do list. If you hire an external agency, there will be many people who can step in when large time-consuming efforts require it.
5) You already have an employee who can help with SEO
By now, most skilled web professionals can work with at least the most basic principles of SEO. So especially if you have a smaller site, it may be enough for them to take care of the day-to-day optimization work and then hire an agency to help with the SEO solutions that require a little extra.
6) You don't need such a comprehensive SEO solution
Maybe you don't really need a full-time SEO resource at all. If you have a smaller site, it will often be far more lucrative to contract an SEO solution with an agency rather than paying a full monthly salary for a permanent in-house resource.
7) Results are a long time coming
If you have hired a permanent SEO resource, they will only be able to put in a certain number of working hours per week. But if you want concrete and measurable results from your SEO solution quickly, it often requires a lot of effort over a short period of time. Such an effort will typically be far too extensive a task for a single person to accomplish. Agencies, on the other hand, can scale up and down their efforts whenever they need to, as they can continuously allocate resources to where they are needed.
8) Internal conditions can hamper SEO efforts
When you are a permanent employee in a company, you will inevitably become part of the company's policies and conditions. This is a good thing in a number of ways, but it also means that for the permanent employee, there are many things other than SEO success that characterize everyday life. Otherwise good initiatives can get lost in the politics of internal departmental agendas and priorities, problematic relationships and much more.
An external agency can inherently stay away from all this and instead focus 100% on delivering an SEO solution that delivers noticeable results quickly.
You might want to read our tips for Choosing an SEO agency.
