Should You Outsource Your SEO?

Featured article by Susan Melony, Independent Technology Author

When you’re a small business, you have to focus on your SEO. SEO is what’s going to give you organic visibility when people are searching for products, services, and topics related to what your business provides. 

While there is an initial investment of time and sometimes money required for organic rankings, the efforts tend to yield long-term results that compound on each other. This is in comparison to paid advertising. With paid ads, the benefits end when you stop paying. 

There’s a big question that faces you as a business that wants to remain relevant and competitive—should you do your SEO work in-house, or should you outsource your SEO to a professional company?

We’ll talk more about the things to bear in mind as you decide. 

Understanding the Basics of SEO

The goal of SEO is somewhat simple—you want to make sure that people who are searching online can find you. With SEO, they’re finding you organically as opposed to paid search, which relies on bidding on keywords to show up for certain terms. 

While the goal of SEO is seemingly simple, the implementation isn’t. 

There’s a lot to know, including how on-page and off-page SEO differ from one another. 

There are so many different factors that determine search engine result pages (SERP rankings), and it’s the complexity and number of these factors that lead to the challenges of SEO. 

Technical SEO includes how mobile-friendly your site is, your site speed, how crawlable it is by Google, rendering site structure, structured data, indexing, and more. 

Then, your non-technical on-page SEO includes content creation using the right keywords, and off-page SEO include things like link building. 

You have to keep all of the different SEO components aligned with one another, and it ends up taking a lot of time and effort. 

You can try to do it yourself, but you’re likely going to find it takes a tremendous amount of time to be poured into it. You can also opt to do it in-house, but that’s going to be a major investment to bring on full-time team members with the skills you need. The third option is working with an SEO agency. 

What Do SEO Companies Do?

SEO companies or agencies help you improve your online visibility. They might do this in a wide variety of ways, such as making changes to your website design and existing content, developing a comprehensive strategy, and then helping you create future content. 

An SEO firm might begin by auditing your site before coming up with a customized SEO strategy, and then they’ll ultimately implement the strategy. 

When you work with a third party to outsource SEO along with managing your entire optimization strategy, they might just help you with certain key tasks that are agreed on, like keyword research, technical SEO, or link building. 

When Should You Outsource Your SEO?

Certain situations are especially conducive to outsourcing your SEO work. These include:

– You need a higher level of expertise. There’s a lot more than just adding keywords to your content to think about. A good SEO company is going to look at more than your rankings and your organic traffic as they come up with a strategy for you. They’ll also be able to specifically identify how you can reduce your paid spending in a strategic and effective way. 

– You’re just starting out. Maybe you’ve put very little effort into your SEO to this point, in which case you should strongly consider outsourcing some of the work. 

– Similarly, if you want to scale up and take existing SEO efforts and campaigns to the next level, outsourcing may be beneficial. As an example, maybe you need to focus on building relationships with bloggers and publishers so that they can ultimately turn into links. That means a professional SEO or link-building company may be a resource you need. 

– SEO isn’t something that you’ll see results from quickly, but you can speed up the process if you outsource some or all of the work to professionals. A larger specialized SEO team is going to know how to get results faster than you can on your own. You’re also going to save time and money on things that would otherwise end up being potentially costly mistakes. 

The Benefits of Outsourcing Your SEO Work

Whether you outsource some or all of the work, there are a lot of benefits. 

First, you can significantly reduce the costs you’d otherwise pay to try and do it in-house. It’s unlikely you have people with enough expertise, so you’d probably have to start hiring employees, and you’d still have to train them. If you were going to try and upskill your existing employees, that costs time, and it’s going to take a lot of time. 

When you outsource, you get high-level, deep expertise. 

SEO also has a steep learning curve, and again, trying to train employees on that isn’t an easy undertaking. 

You’re going to significantly improve your ROI if you work with a company that knows what it’s doing. 

Even if you outsource your SEO, there are a lot of things you can do in-house to save money and improve efficiency. For example, maybe you partner with an SEO company to handle the technical elements of your strategy, but then you still produce your content in-house based on the guidelines the outsourced SEO professionals provide to you. 

If you are thinking about partnering with an SEO firm, you need to know your primary goals, and you need to be as specific as possible with them. Yes, you want more traffic to your site, but you need to know why you want that. Do you want to increase your sales, or are you more interested in brand awareness?

Where do you operate, and who are your primary targeted customers?

What specific SEO services do you need? 

Finally, from there, you’ll start to think about the timeframe that you hope to work with the company for—remember, even when you’re working with experts, it takes time to rank.