Last month my wife and I were hosting a Mother’s Day brunch, at our house, filled with family and friends. It was a beautiful day, celebrating the most important women in our lives, discussing the usual; kids, food, sports, weather, politics, and work.
Half way through the day I found myself belly up to the kitchen bar chatting with my cousin who owns a manufacturing company. We were discussing his operation and inevitably his SEO program. Now, let me frame this conversation by telling you he is already an SEO client of mine and we have had this discussion before. I consider him to be knowledgeable when it comes to this subject, which is why he caught me off guard when he said, “Seriously Josh, doesn’t SEO just boil down to making your site crawlable for spiders, and generating high quality content?”
In his mind, making a site crawlable and creating great content were exclusive and independent of any other factors, combining to form an easy path towards SEO success. He had the benefit of an outsource SEO partner, me, shielding him from the time, effort, and cost associated with the implementation of a successful SEO program.
My cousins’ comment perfectly describes the thought process of many business owners and decision makers that I meet who are considering an SEO campaign. They want to know “why can’t I just do this in-house?”. My answer is always, “you can…but”.
SEO Outsourcing
The choice to outsource SEO makes sense for so many companies because it entails a focus on over 200 ranking factors which Google’s algorithm uses to promulgate rankings, and by the way, these algorithms change hundreds of times per year. This means that planning and executing a successful SEO campaign requires many different areas of expertise. From strategic planning, to website architecture, to server settings, to SEO copywriting, to link building strategies, to overall project management and eventually to revenue tracking. With all that involved, an impactful strategy is not something that can be easily executed by one or two people.
Why Use an SEO Outsourcing Company
Outside the technical challenges faced by many organizations who attempt to bring SEO in-house, these organizations also face a mountain of monetary challenges. According to Forbes, talent acquisition and human capital are the largest concerns for growing companies in 2018. Creating and posting job descriptions, sorting through resumes, setting interviews, making offers, counter offers, on-boarding, providing benefits, providing a salary, and god forbid back filling these positions comes with an exorbitant cost. Using an SEO Outsourcing company takes all these costs off a company’s plate and provides them with the services of an entire SEO professional team. That team isn’t looking for other opportunities, taking time off, requiring SUTA or FUTA payments, and if they don’t meet the agreed upon milestones you have an avenue to recoup those charges. Would an employee give back his or her salary if they didn’t perform to your expectations? LOL, NO!
Outsource SEO to Keep Up with SEO Changes
SEO is always changing and keeping up with the industry is a full-time job in and of itself. It requires continuing education and training to produce results. If you decide to bring on an inhouse team for your SEO needs, remember, it will require you to pay for them to stay up to date on all the SEO trends, changes, and data. If you don’t, you run the risk of being out of touch with the newest updates, such as Googles’ recent Speed or Mobile updates, leaving your rankings on page two, three, four, and beyond.
The right outsourced SEO team is competing with thousands of others to produce the best results, so you can be sure they are footing the bill to train and educate their consultants to make an impact on your campaign.
Proven Results & The Right SEO Outsourcing Company
The most important factor in choosing an outsourced SEO firm as opposed to hiring someone in-house is the ability to show proven results. To bring on an internal employee with a portfolio of successful SEO campaigns you will need to spend upwards of $75,000 per year, for only one person. That person then would need resources to hire a team and the costs exponentially increase.
There is little assurance this employee and his or her team will produce results. Yeah you can fire them, but then your back at square one without any top rankings and no organic traffic. When hiring an SEO firm, you have control of expected results, and you can use prior clients to predict those results. This is a huge advantage, especially when positioning yourself internally for marketing budget.
From a cost-result perspective outsourcing SEO is a company’s best choice. While losing some control over the day to day and the overall process, outsourcing allows for greater control of ROI, which ultimately is the goal anyways. Its much better to be like my cousin Sven, and spend your time thinking SEO is easy, as opposed to learning the hard way and wasting time, money, and energy doing it in-house only to eventually call the SEO Experts in to fix the mess.