SEO: Should You Do it In-house or Outsource?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the fundamentals of a successful digital marketing strategy. And while it’s tempting to try your luck at managing your own SEO strategy, there’s a good chance that instead of improving your ranking, you’ll actually harm it.
In this post, we’re going to discuss seven top reasons why you seriously consider outsourcing SEO services for your website.
Top Reasons to Outsource SEO Marketing
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1. Save Money
Your budget plays a key role in every business decision. To decide whether you’re going to assemble an in-house SEO team or hire an SEO agency for the work, the first thing you need to do is compare the costs of both options.
SEO involves more than just optimizing your site for keywords. It’s a highly technical undertaking; a full-fledged SEO campaign requires systematic backlink research, competitor analysis, and many web optimizations. This requires a sizable investment if you hire an entire team.
Just your company’s content marketing strategy needs to be extremely comprehensive. A study conducted by Aberdeen concluded that year-over-year growth for unique site traffic is almost eight times higher for leaders as opposed to followers in the content marketing industry.
You need to invest in video marketing as well because people are more likely to consume information in the form of videos compared to text. A study concluded that videos on social media generate 12 times more traffic than text and image combined!
To gain the maximum benefits from your content marketing strategy, social media promotion is also a must. Social media platforms are one of the best ways to increase back-links and spread quality content organically. In fact, Moz considers social media engagement to be the 5th most important factor that determines search result rankings.
The point is that if you want to rank higher than your competitors in search results, you’ll have to hire a number of different people with diverse skills.
As alluded to above, adding people to your team comes with a lot of costs, including training, utilities, benefits, taxes, and logistical costs. On the other hand, hiring an SEO agency can cost around $3-4k per month. And you won’t need to worry about new members adjusting to your work environment, HR policies, employee management, and all the other headaches that come with expanding your workforce.
And as experienced professionals at SEO agencies have already acquired all the knowledge required to run an SEO campaign, you’ll receive better results at a lower cost.
SEO agencies also end up costing you less because of economies of scale. Agencies have a large clientele, which means they can reduce their margins for each client significantly. This makes them a more affordable option, especially for small to medium-sized businesses that have limited resources.
2. Opportunity Costs
Businesses incur an opportunity cost with every decision. And the opportunity cost of in-house SEO is a tremendous amount of time and dedication that could be invested in core activities. Instead of working on projects that have high returns, your staff members will be busy learning the ropes of SEO.
In the SEO world, “Content is King.” Search engines are constantly working to make their algorithms more sophisticated so they can accurately indicate the quality of a website’s content. This means that to execute an effective SEO campaign, your staff members need to constantly write and publish content that’s relevant to the current industry trends.
This can take up a lot of their time that could be spent on more productive things. Hiring an SEO agency that specializes in content marketing will guarantee quality content on a timely basis.
There’s also a steep learning curve to managing SEO. Employees will need time to get the hang of things and, during that time, your productivity won’t be particularly impressive. Hiring a reputable SEO agency will guarantee results right off the bat.
3. Bring an Outside Perspective
Belonging to a specific industry limits the perspective of a company. Managers tend to focus more on conventional practices as opposed to emergent trends. However, an SEO agency will ask all sorts of questions because they’re not accustomed to these rules and practices. This can help bring in new ideas and provide you with an opportunity to think outside the box.
Good employees are passionate about their company. This isn’t a drawback, but it can cause a bias to develop when evaluating work.
It’s basic human nature to gloss over flaws if you’re attached to something. Also, an employee won’t consciously look for faults in their own work as it reflects poorly on them. But an SEO agency will evaluate their work efficiently, as they have a reputation to maintain.
4. An ongoing Process
The world of SEO is constantly evolving. The top-performing keywords for every niche change daily. Consumer behavior and preferences are also shifting constantly.
More importantly, Google tweaks its search engine algorithm around 500 times a year! Even though most changes are minor, they result in a huge impact on search engine rankings. For example, you may have noticed the tremendous amount of attention that Google’s Panda update got. This update effectively wiped out millions of websites from Google’s top results. That’s how devastating a simple update can be for your website.
Also, it’s much easier to acquire a Google penalty than you’d think. If your in-house SEO team is not aware of any changes made to Google Webmaster guidelines, your sites will acquire a penalty. A penalty means your ranking suffers. And sometimes this penalty may also result in ranking suffering permanently.
An in-house SEO team will not be equipped to deal with such changes on a regular basis because they’ll be a part of your company and not a part of the SEO industry. This means they’ll miss out on the latest trends and discussions taking place in the SEO community.
5. Relationships for Link-Building
Another aspect of SEO is link-building. One of the most effective ways to build quality links is to get popular blogs to reference your services in their content.
For good link building, you need good relationships. A mutually beneficial relationship exists between service providers, where they reference each other’s services to boost their search engine rankings.
As your staff will be newly trained in SEO marketing, there’s a very slim chance that they’ll know which sites to target for link-building. That means they’ll have to invest time and effort into building relationships with other sites.
It can take years to build a good reputation in the SEO community, so a lot of your staff members’ time and effort will be consumed in fostering these relationships.
But an experienced SEO agency will already have established relationships with various service providers. This will help them in building quality backlinks in no time.
6. You Probably Have a Digital Marketing Agency
If you run an effective business, the chances are that you already streamline a lot of business processes by outsourcing work, such as content creation and application designing to a marketing agency. The UI of applications can be a key factor in bringing in more customers for your business. So make sure you hire an agency that also specializes in application design.
Your existing digital marketing agency may handle website maintenance, social media, and graphic design.
The thing is, all of these are aspects of SEO and can be optimized to increase your search result rankings. There’s a good chance that the digital marketing agency also offers SEO services.
With a little more investment, you can avail the benefits of SEO-optimized content. If your current digital agency doesn’t provide SEO services, it’s better to hire a company that’s a one-stop solution.
If your current digital marketing efforts are sourced in-house, then it’s a good idea to adopt lean business practices, cut down on costs, and hire a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO as well. This will allow you to focus on the things you do best: your core competencies.
7. Outperform Your Local Competition
The business world is highly competitive. One simple mistake can cost you a fortune. Similarly, implementing the right strategy at the right time can help you outpace your competitors.
Focusing your efforts on SEO campaigning can provide you with a massive competitive edge. If your competitors are not concerned about SEO, the chances are that they’re not ranked in the top search results.
This provides you with a great opportunity. By optimizing your online presence to rank higher, you’ll generate more leads and paying customers. In addition to boosting revenues for your business, the best thing is that your competitors won’t know what hit them.
By hiring experienced professionals, your chances of coming out on top will increase dramatically.
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