Hey guys, in this article, we are going to discuss what you need to know about outsourcing your SEO. So keep reading.
You could be at varying points in your business. Maybe you’re entirely new to the concept of SEO, and you have no idea where to get started. On the other hand, you might know the importance of the value of SEO, and you want to focus more time and attention on it, but you don’t have enough time or maybe the specialized skills to make that happen.
One option available to you is outsourcing. You can outsource your SEO in different ways.
Also, you might outsource all of your SEO work to an agency that does everything, for example. You could also outsource specific parts of it, like content creation or link building.
In general, the following are some of the things you should know before you leap to outsource your SEO work.
When Should You Outsource?
Some of the specific reasons you might decide to outsource your SEO work include:
- You don’t have the time to manage SEO campaigns
- Maybe you’ve been working on SEO, but you aren’t seeing the results you’d like to
- Your team may not have the technical skills for all that SEO requires
- Another reason to outsource would be not having people on your team who can do things like website updates on the backend that affect SEO
When you decide to outsource, you might have a dedicated team of professionals working on your site. Not only is this going to help you get better results and gain visibility, but you can also focus your time on other things that require your attention.
What Are Your Options?
We briefly touched on this above, but if you’re going to outsource your SEO, you have some different options as far as how you approach this.
These include:
- You can hire independent freelancers. There are pros to this approach because they may have more time to dedicate exclusively to your work, and they’re somewhat low-cost in many cases. The cons are that they might not have all the skills you need or be fully up-to-date on all best practices. If you have larger-scale needs, a freelancer isn’t always the best option, but if you have certain things you need help with, this can be a good strategy.
- Contractors are another option. They’re a bit like freelancers, but you typically hire them for more long-term, ongoing work, whereas you might pay a freelancer on an as-needed basis. SEO contractors can do technical SEO work in many instances, but they’re still just one person, so you don’t have that team approach.
- SEO companies are more expensive than freelancers or contractors usually, but you’re working with an entire company, so their ability to do large-scale work is greater. They’re also highly specialized and typically stay very up-to-date with the most recent changes and best practices in the industry.
- There are also full-service digital marketing companies that don’t just do SEO work. They can often do web design, pay to advertise, and more. You’re working with the same team across the board for consistency, but the downside here is that a full-service agency is likely to be the most expensive option you encounter.
Considerations Before You Outsource
If you’re weighing whether or not it’s right for you to outsource some or all of your SEO, ask yourself the following:
- How are you measuring the success of your SEO campaigns currently? Do you have metrics in place you can use to determine your ROI? Are you using regular reporting, or would you benefit from having a professional or agency handle reporting for you?
- What are you using to determine the search terms you should focus on? What is your keyword research process like?
- How are you developing content for search optimization?
- What amount of time are you or your team able to dedicate to SEO every week? Is it enough?
What Are The Benefits Of Outsourcing Your SEO?
While we’ve briefly talked about some of the above, below we go into more of the specific benefits that come from outsourcing your SEO:
- Reduce the costs of hiring and training employees. When you have an in-house team of SEO experts, it’s going to be a lot more expensive than partnering with a freelancer or even outsourcing to a full-service agency. Along with having the team in place, you have to regularly invest in their training and development because of how quickly SEO changes and evolves.
- There’s a steep learning curve to SEO, and again, there’s never going to be a time when your in-house team is going to have everything mastered because it’s always changing. When you outsource, you can get a team of experts that hit the ground running rather than you having to deal with the learning curve.
- You’re likely to get faster results than you will if you do it on your own. SEO and digital marketing companies know what works and what doesn’t, so you can get those quick wins and build a viable long-term strategy. You can save yourself not only time but also money because you’re avoiding expensive mistakes.
- It’s challenging to scale your SEO if you’re trying to do everything yourself or in-house. You can get a lot more output when you outsource. For example, an agency can help you scale your link building significantly faster than you’d ever be able to do it independently.
- Even if you have the basics in place, you likely need more expertise. You need to be able to create campaigns that show an apparent connection between not just your rankings and organic traffic but also things like your revenue and market share. It would help if you were fully capitalizing on organic search, and then, as a result of that, you can reduce your spending on paid advertising in many cases.
There are, of course, cons to outsourcing your SEO, like the costs, but many companies that jump in find that it pays for itself many times over. You have to make sure you hire an experienced company that can show you proof of their results.