SEO (search engine optimisation) In-house vs outsourcing: which option should your company choose?
Introduction
This is a question which many business owners will have pondered over for some time, sipping on their cup of tea, and thinking well, should we hire an in-house search engine optimisation consultant in-house? Or perhaps, instead hire a digital marketing agency to help to get our business in the top position on Google?
Price
And sometimes a business arrives at their decision, based on price alone, that’s to say, you might be able to hire a full-time search engine optimisation consultant for let’s say £30,000 a year and they may help with the following tasks:
– Improve the onsite seo
– Build backlinks
– Write new content marketing
Should we hire a full time SEO consultant?
And to a lot of businesses, well, this might sound appealing having a full time seo consultant working for the business and trying to improve the seo, for say 35 hours a week.
Yet if you fork out the same amount to a local seo agency, well, that might mean they are only working on improving the search engine optimisation for a lot less hours, for example, they may only in comparison, say work on improving the businesses seo, for say 10 hours, for the same money?
Of course, rates vary depending on which search engine optimisation company your hire.
Yet here’s the thing, what you really need, is an seo consultant that has a huge amount of seo experience.
And we would say, in our opinion, often the really highly experienced search engine optimisation consultants either work themselves, or as part of a large agency.
That’s not to say, there’s still some really good seo staff in-house who can do a brilliant job, but often the really talented seo consultants, they don’t come cheap. So, if you hire someone at say 30k, well how much experience do they have?
If they have a ton of experience, well, that’s all well and good.
Yet, in areas like London, Bristol, Cardiff, well, you might struggle, to find an search engine optimisation consultant that’s hugely experienced at what they do, for around that money
TYPES OF SEO SERVICES
Here are the types of seo tasks that your seo consultant or agency should be working on, in order to improve your businesses search engine optimisation:
Technical SEO
The first thing to do is to see if there are any technical seo issues, these could be something as simple as a 404-page error, or let’s say a 301 redirect is needed.
Depending on the size of the website, for example if it’s a large e-commerce website, then to sort out the technical seo issues, well this might take quite a while, however if it’s a simple brochure website, say 10 pages, or less, well this work can often be completed in a shorter period of time.
You should create a marketing strategy
So, we would say it’s always a good idea to have a plan, whether it’s a business plan, or simply you shopping list which you have scribble down on a piece of paper, so that you come home from the local supermarket with the food that you need.
So, we think always a good idea to have a plan, and this is no exception with your businesses marketing.
We think your marketing agency should have a plan, they should therefore create a plan for what content marketing they are going to write, also they should plan of how they are going to go about building backlinks for your business, and also another plan how they will improve the on-site seo for your business.
Content marketing
So let’s say that you operate in a business sector, that is massively competitive, that’s the say your business is based, in a large city such as Cardiff, and you could have 100 directs competitors that are all based within the same city, which are also paying seo agencies, like ours, to improve the companies organic seo.
So let’s say that you run a family law practice in the city of Cardiff.
Now, let’s say that on average your solicitors are billed out at around £350 per hour, do you really want your solicitors to be writing the content marketing for your website? That’s to say if it might take them the whole day to write one long, 3,000 word article?
That’s when you could instead hire a seo agency, like ours at £70 an hour to do the same work? So our seo agency, offers fantastic value for money.
Link-building
Link building is massively time-consuming job, for example, to build one single quality backlink, whether its do-follow, or no follow,, it might take three days of solid work to obtain a quality backlink for your business.
Sure, you could build a business citation (NAP) in a much shorter period of time, but what we are talking about is quality backlinks, and they take a long time to build.
Therefore, even if you have one full time member of staff working on improving your organic seo, in-house for your business, you still might want an seo agency to help build backlinks for your business.
Graphic design.
You should think about whether or not you’re going to hire somebody in-house that can create graphic design work for your business.
For example, you might want to create an infographic, yet if the member of staff in-house hasn’t got the skill set to create infographic, then you might need to hire an seo agency or a web design company to help you. So sometimes you will still need the help of a digital marketing agency, even if you have inhouse seo staff.
Social media
Social media can take up a lot of time as well, because is not just about writing posts and publishing them on a regular basis, you often have to respond to your customers questions that they post, on say your Facebook account.
For example, let’s say that an angry customer that is not particularly happy with the service they have received,, writes a comment on one of your companies social media accounts.
Well, as the business owner, you will not want that customer saying negative things about your business on social media, without your business posting a reply back to that comment, so what we mean is, your often going to need someone managing your businesses social media on a daily basis, so that customer feedback is replied to promptly.
So, you do have to think about in regards to your businesses social media, whether you want to outsource that work to an marketing agency, or whether you want to employ somebody in-house to manage your businesses social media?
OUTSOURCING SEO SERVICES
Should you outsource your seo services?
This does depend entirely upon your business, and your marketing budget which you have available to you, what is for sure is that whether you employ somebody in-house to improve your seo, or if you were to outsource the seo work, you are going to need to invest in white hat, and high quality seo.
