SEO… Should you really keep it in-house?

Outsourcing vs. insourcing your SEO

Actually, for best results it takes a collaborative approach.

Assessing whether to outsource versus doing specialist tasks or projects yourself is a common occurrence in almost any business. No doubt by now you are all too familiar with the pros and cons of it all. “If we do it ourselves, we save money”, or, “if we do it inhouse we will need training, therefore we spend the money we had saved”.

Building in an SEO strategy and implementing it in your business successfully is no different. There are absolutely pros and cons to doing it yourself versus outsourcing. But the reality is it takes time. It takes time to learn specialist SEO techniques such as creating and optimising xml sitemaps (and time to learn the jargon!) to understand coding for SEO, and how to write for SEO including knowing what content is needed and when (yes, content needs to be relevant and well-timed for release).

Resources and Time

You can dedicate an employee, to upskill and work on your online presence. Or, you could spread the tasks across a team of people as your very own in-house SEO team. However, from our experience we have seen that other work priorities will often fall by the wayside and results are not delivered to expectations or able to be sustained long term…….and SEO is a long-term strategy that needs constant love and care.  

And, it’s not only personnel skill that is required. You need to consider, do you have the technology, time or budget to maximise the investment inhouse?

Partnering with an agency, means you can focus on the bigger picture for your business, and allow your staff to focus on their current value add responsibilities. On the flip side, it’s tricky for an agency to receive a full picture of what’s happening internally to best write for SEO.  In-house staff would need to allocate time to clearly brief the outsourced party on the direction of requirements and will sometimes supply draft content to be rewritten/ reviewed for SEO. 

That’s why SEO is best done together.  

Industry knowledge

By outsourcing your SEO to industry experts, you can guarantee their in-depth knowledge will be used to create a strategy that works to maximise your return.

You DO need to make sure you select your SEO partner carefully. Choose a team who knows the game well, is willing to collaborate and guide your business for success. A team who is constantly learning, researching, monitoring the online landscape and keeping abreast of search engine changes to algorithms. Your SEO specialists should also be able to apply their skillset to combine SEO strategies, conversion strategies and a content strategy.

Ultimately, whether to do SEO your self or not depends on how competitive your industry is. The more competitive, the more time and resource it takes. Therefore, perhaps….can you afford not to outsource?

If you’re still undecided about what’s best for you, get in touch with us at More SEO and we can help you get started. We will help develop a strategy and work with you on the best approach to achieve great results.

Sunday, 06 October 2019