For the businesses of our times, having a website is a default need. At the first point, it is the website, and the brand’s online presence helps generate customer interest in any product or service. There are many techniques and strategies to make a website attractive and user friendly to the users, but the immediate need is to ensure people see it when they conduct searches online.
This can be ideally done by optimizing the content of your web page. Not only to make the pages attractive, but optimization means aligning the page contents well with the changing search engine algorithms to rank on top of the search engine result pages (SERPs). To ensure this, you need to practice search engine optimization strategies, which is not just a one-time push but an ongoing exercise.
Search engine optimization can be done in-house by hiring SEO specialists for your organization and outsourcing the same to SEO agencies. Let us examine here the advantages and disadvantages of both in-house and outsourced SEO to identify which is the best choice for you.
Advantages of in-house SEO
Even though many businesses now prefer to outsource search engine optimization to professional agencies, doing SEO in the house also has some advantages. While weighing the benefits against the drawbacks of in-house SEO, we may consider the following point.
- In-house SEO will bring about a positive cultural shift
Good SEO experts working in-house can be game-changers for any business enterprise. For your optimization efforts to be successful, the SEO team needs to have a notable spot in your proverbial company table. Being an internal stakeholder of the business, SEO experts will help drive some most needed cultural changes in any organization.
On the other hand, this can also be a con if not driven properly. To act as a real change agent, an SEO expert must be assertive. While hiring the SEO experts for in-house working, one needs to conduct due diligence by deriving the actual deliverables. Sowing seeds for a change is possible with internal SEO; this is achieved only if the experts possess the foundational knowledge about the business and what it is trying to accomplish.
- Instilling a sense of ownership
Another obvious benefit of internal SEO is that you can have a sense of ownership compared to outsourcing your SEO process. The person you hire also may work more efficiently by only keeping your company’s objectives in mind than working for a client. By coordinating with the other internal teams, working together will help create a camaraderie sense and help accomplish the goals in a better way.
This mindset can be achieved with an agency, too, as long as you choose the right professional. Offering a dedicated team, a reliable SEO agency can also provide the service the same as how an in-house team works. For this also, one needs to practice due diligence to make the right choice of the SEO agency.
Advantages of SEO outsourcing
Next, let us explore the significant advantages of choosing an SEO agency to outsource your business SEO.
As we know, maintaining an in-house SEO team requires you to hire not only SEO experts but also content writers and design creators for support. Apart from the cost of about $50K for SEO experts, hiring a content writer may be an additional expense of nearly $35K on an average. As your needs increase, hiring a full battalion of SEO team headed by an SEO manager can bring this figure to much higher. For this, you need to have web auditors, on-page and off-page SEO specialists, and technical SEOs, etc. in the team. Outsourcing to an agency, which consists of all these specialists by default, will be much cheaper.
SEO is not merely a primary skill to master. For doing keyword research, content making, off-page, and on-page SEO, technical SEO, link building, etc. requires a high level of expertise and experience. It is hard to get all these together in a professional when trying to make time-critical recruitment for in-house. However, a professional SEO company may have all these advanced resources on board to offer end-to-end SEO solutions for their clients.
Compared to in-house teams limited to focusing just on your business objectives, SEO agencies will be a broader understanding of the market conditions and changing customer needs to custom weave the most advanced SEO strategies from time to time. SEO is a very competitive field, and the distinguishing factor between a successful campaign to an average one is the strategical approach. This is possible only when those who handle the campaigns know the changing avenues of search engine ranking and SEO approaches.
Considering the above factors, one fact becomes evident that when you have only an internal SEO team, you have only access to limited expertise at any given time. As SEO is a special practice that is continuously evolving, with an internal SEO team, you may run into many challenges over time as the search engine algorithms change or on changing industry waves. By having access to the bigger picture, the bouncing ideas from another experienced person can surely help resolve the troubling challenges of SEO many times. It is also seen that even the in-house SEOs tend to take outside help from time to time when they run into challenges which they are not able to solve.
Altogether, choosing between SEO in-house vs. outsourcing it to an outside agency is a matter of personal preferences and budget. For example, for large-scale enterprises which do not have any budgetary restrictions and have the scope of getting the best resources, handing SEO may make more sense. However, for small to medium scale enterprises who are thriving to grow and make their mark, getting an expert agency’s support is more advisable. Even in the case of big corporates, outsourcing SEO can be significantly beneficial if they want to focus on their business development’s core needs.
