Hiring an SEO company vs Inhouse
Introduction
It’s a question that business owners will have most likely thought about for a great deal of time, that is, should they hire an agency or complete the SEO work inhouse?
This is a question that needs much deliberation, as normally SEO agencies will ask for SEO contract to be signed, and obviously hiring a team inhouse will mean contracts of employment are needed, so neither decision is one which is made without weighing up the pros and the cons of each.
The pros and cons of hiring an SEO agency
We are going to begin by weighing up the pros and cons of hiring an seo agency, now of course, this is what we are, yet we will try to be as less biased as we possibly can be.
Pros
Some very talented teams out there
Its fair to say that across the U.K there’s tons of really good seo agencies, some serve multinational businesses, which turnover billions per year, so as you would expect, the seo companies must be good if there to offer their services to these businesses.
Should be keeping their skill-set sharp
Google rolls out updates on a very regular basis, this simply means that the algorithm often sees many adjustments.
For this reason, you need an SEO agency that has its finger on the pulse.
A lot of time needs to be spent studying Google updates
Large Google updates, such as the “Google Hummingbird Updates”, or the “Google Panda updates”, or let’s say the “Google Penguin updates”, well, this means that any good SEO agency should spend a lot of time reading about what the updates means.
Experience
There are some truly awful seo companies out there, that’s for sure, yet there are obviously some rather brilliant companies as well. This means that what your company needs is a highly experienced team, and there are many businesses that can offer top quality work.
Therefore, whichever agency you hire, you’re going to need a company that’s good a building backlink, brilliant at writing content marketing, and good at technical seo as well, there’s many agencies which are good in these areas, its just a matter of hiring the right agency.
The SEO work you need, therefore needs to be white hat, and all work should always follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
The cons
Here are some of the cons of hiring an SEO agency:
Can be expensive
Some seo companies, like ours, well are really good at what we do, therefore, its safe to say that we don’t come cheap. This might not be considered a downside to hiring an agency, as in reality, this applies to any business which offers a valuable service.
However, what might be considered a downside is the fact that the costs might be too high for some businesses to afford.
Might be far away
You might hire an agency which is based far away, which may mean that when meetings are needed with your seo, well, it might be a long train journey to meet with the business.
Delay with messages
When you have an internal seo team, so by that we mean their directly employed by you, well, its easy to walk over to their room and have a chat about how well the SEO is going.
Also, if the staff are directly employed, well, it’s a piece of cake to say arrange a meeting, however, if you were to hire an agency, well, it might be a few weeks before they can meet, they might be slower sometimes to write back to e-mails, simply because they might be managing many businesses seo.
Serving many other companies
So this leads us on nicely to our next point, that is, seo agencies normally work for a wide range of different businesses, for example your SEO manager, that your used to dealing with at the agency, well, they might be talking to a law firm in the morning about their SEO, then a dentist in the afternoon, so an seo business is normally dealing with a lot of different clients.
Therefore, their time needs to be often set in a calendar, so they know what they are doing and when, however, with having staff inhouse, they are obviously just working for one company.
Might charge an hourly fee for extra work
An agency might have a set hourly fee which is charged when extra work is agreed, therefore if your monthly seo retainer is set at say £1000.00 a month, this might cover 30 hours say a month, and when this is exceeded, because the customer has requested more work, a fee might be owed.
