In-house SEO versus Agency

When looking to improve your company’s online market presence, there are three options that you could take.

Firstly, you could go out and buy a book on SEO and learn it yourself, or give it to someone in the office to learn and implement.

While this is obviously the most cost efficient method, it comes with a lot of dangers and takes up valuable time and resources at your company. A great benefit that comes with attempting to tackle SEO on your own is the knowledge of your company and industry that you already bring to the implementation. However, the lack of knowledge of advanced online marketing techniques, experience in running campaigns, and the constant need to be ‘ahead of the curve’ in the industry aren’t easily learned by simply reading a book. In the end, most companies that attempt this tactic end up giving up after a few weeks, returning to square one.

The second option companies can employ is simply hiring an “SEO” person to work as an employee of the company. This is a popular tactic and is used successfully in some companies but not all. Once again, the nice thing with having an in house SEO employee is the access the person has to the company and industry. However, hiring the right person can be a difficult process. Unfortunately, there are thousands of people out there who claim to be SEO and internet marketing ‘guru’s. For the most part, these people simply read a book or a web tutorial or were an assistant or intern at an agency and assume they can apply it to a business easily. Even if you do find someone with relevant experience, it’s good to find out whether they have the resources and connections that can be found with an Agency. While an employee is one person, an agency is a collection of people working for the same goal. While it may seem cheaper to hire a freelancer to work in-house, in the long run, after spending months paying a freelancer and his resources with little results, a company my find themselves with a bigger loss than expected.

The third option is hiring an outside party, such as a marketing agency. While we could likely write a whole book on choosing the right company to work with, this option does provide some great opportunities. For one, a good agency provides excellent communication that allows them to gain as much information about your company and industry to almost act as if it were in-house.

Probably the biggest benefit of hiring an agency is the resources, connections and team you get from a good company. For the most part, you’ll get multiple people working on your campaign, accumulated experience directly related to marketing, and partners in the form of web designers, developer, copywriters, artists, etc etc. Most agencies employ both production time and research time to their projects, allow them to be ahead of the curve. In the long run, a ‘more expensive’ agency (versus in house help) could actually be more profitable.

The best thing to do if you’re considering hiring in-house, is to ask other business owners who have tried it in the past. See how their experiences worked, and decide whether hiring an SEO agency would be more beneficial.