WHY OUTSOURCE SEO SERVICES?
If you’re a modern business, odds are high that you’ve heard about the critical role of SEO in helping new customers find your business. It’s a powerful and affordable way to channel your marketing spend: into something valuable that pays off in the long-run.
Like many other services, SEO comes in various formats with different approaches. In your search for the best SEO service, you’re likely to start with the following question: do you want to go in-house, or outsource your SEO services? But wait… what does it mean, if you’re outsourcing SEO services?
Here, we’ll explore this topic in-depth to help you understand why an SEO outsourcing agency is a critical asset for your business’s digital marketing because of the expertise, high return and cheaper costs it offers.
Outsourcing SEO Services vs. In-House SEO
If you’re on the hunt for SEO specialists to begin the journey to high placements on search engines, the first fork in the road is whether to hire a full-time employee or outsource the service. Both solutions offer the opportunity to help you start ranking for the right keywords and generating more web traffic. An SEO agency, however, will offer budget efficiency and long-term results where in-house won’t – at least, not to the same degree.
In-house SEO requires you to hire and train an SEO professional, as an employee performing the necessary SEO tasks for your marketing. In-house SEO allows you more control over the team as they’ll be an employee working for your business. You’ll also get to allocate a specific salary, so you’ll maintain some control over how much you spend on search engine optimization.
But often, in-house SEO employees need extra help and you may need to create a whole department or start outsourcing specific aspects like content writing and copywriting. When you outsource SEO, you can hire an external company already fluent in the landscape, and able to create a customised strategy for you. Outsourcing SEO comes with some key benefits, including:
- Access to a whole team with diverse expertise in SEO services
- More cost-effective option with a greater return on investment
- Easier than hiring and training full-time employees and creating a department
- More time-efficient when done by experienced professionals, which also means faster results
- More capacity to diversify your strategy and adapt alongside Google’s algorithm
Why Outsource SEO?
Skills and Expertise
By outsourcing SEO to an agency, you’re gaining the benefit of collaboration between experts—working to achieve the best results for your business. Not only are each of the team SEO specialists and digital marketing professionals in their own right: they have the advantage of shared knowledge and collaboration.
This makes an SEO company difficult to match, in terms of collective skills and expertise. An in-house SEO employee or small team needs to be trained in the specifics of your business and SEO strategy, without the help of a wider team perspective. A quality SEO company will have a diverse team with a range of experiences so that they can quickly onboard you as a client and harness their expertise in various areas.
When it comes to the implementation of your custom strategy, an SEO company will understand best practices; referring to a knowledge bank within the team. As well as this diversification, the best SEO outsourcing companies will base their hiring process on acquiring employees with a strong skill set so you know you’re getting industry-leading work.
Cost
There are substantial costs that come with the in-house hiring process, from the resources you spend advertising, recruiting and interviewing, to the salary costs while employees are being trained and not working at an adequate efficiency. Beyond this, you also need to provide ongoing training and benefits for your in-house employees, which quickly become a significant cost.
By outsourcing to an SEO agency, you can spend all your budget on the actual service. There are also no associated training or equipment costs as external specialists are already well-trained and experienced in all aspects of SEO. An in-house team may be familiar with some SEO requirements, but because of their lack of diversity, they will require extra training in other areas with additional incurred costs.
What’s more, your in-house team may have to purchase specific software and digital marketing tools to assist in effective SEO, but SEO agencies already use the best products available on the market.
Maximise Efficiency
SEO requires strong attention to detail and effort for effective implementation that actually makes an impact. When you’re starting from scratch and developing an internal team, it can take a while for your team to begin performing effective work, let alone working at their maximum efficiency.
If you hire the most experienced in-house professionals in the industry, this time to reach peak efficiency will be reduced but the salary costs will be higher. If you hire a midweight SEO professional, they’ll probably require additional training to understand SEO more comprehensively, or you may need to hire more employees to create a diversified team that can manage the demands of SEO.
When you choose to outsource to a trusted SEO agency, you can capitalise on peak efficiency from the very beginning. An SEO agency will evaluate your business and its goals, creating a strategy based on keyword research and an informed understanding of SEO. Outsourcing your SEO means you’ll begin to provide real competition on valuable keywords and begin increasing your web traffic and sales much faster.
Diversify Strategy
If you ask five different SEO experts what’s required for proper SEO, you’ll hear five different answers. SEO is complex and ever-changing because search engine algorithms are never final, which means a diversified strategy is critical to successfully improving your rankings.
The sort of diversification over different platforms, approaches and content features is challenging for in-house individuals or untrained teams to pull off. It’s common and normal for a professional to be trained in some facets of SEO but it’s very rare that they can fully understand everything. This makes it nearly impossible for an in-house staff member to check all the boxes that Google is looking for. While Google’s algorithm is elusive, the continued efforts of an outsourced team can help your site rank higher on SERPs for longer.
How to Outsource SEO
Research Reputable SEO Companies
To reap the most benefits of outsourcing SEO projects, you’ll need to do your research to ensure the possible service providers are trusted, experienced and have the evidence to back up their work. Within the world of SEO agencies, there are a multitude of standards; the work they deliver will vary broadly.
Particularly, if you come across agencies or freelancers offering cheap SEO packages or guaranteed SEO results, these are a red flag and should be avoided. Cheap SEO packages are notorious for applying black hat tactics and improper techniques that put businesses in a worse position than where they started. Guaranteed SEO results should cause reluctance for another reason – there is no way to control Google’s algorithm, which means results can never be ensured.
Instead, select a few agencies that don’t offer attractive promises, but their website, reviews and case studies showcase their results and expertise plainly. Shortlist them for further investigation. You can check Google reviews as well as testimonials on their website, that relate to SEO. As a next step, see if they’re open to discussing a potential strategy. If they’re open with their response and come across as knowledgeable in an in-depth way, it’s a good sign you’re working with a pro.
Set Quantifiable Goals
If you’ve chosen your SEO service provider well, you’ll be on a sturdy path towards higher SERP rankings and increased web traffic. But because these results always manifest over the long-term, one of the most important SEO outsourcing tips is to set diverse and quantifiable goals to provide KPIs for your outsourced service.
This should be a priority for you and your service provider because when you can measure SEO work against goals, you have insight into how to improve it. If the goals are being met early, it tells them what’s working and if they’re not, and indicates where tweaks to deliver the desired objective.
Goals should be measurable and time-specific to best outline if you’ve reached it or not. Quantifiable SEO goals can include:
- A specific page or position ranking for relevant keywords.
- The volume of web traffic over a given amount of time.
- A percentage increase in web traffic against the initial results.
- The time spent on your web pages (a longer time means your visitors are interested in what you offer). Conversely, high bounce rates indicate that your website is not relevant to the user’s query.
Scheduled Monthly Check-Ins
Another cornerstone for effectively outsourcing SEO is to create a system where you consistently check in with your agency and receive updates on the results and strategy. A reputable SEO agency will regularly inspect the performance of their SEO campaigns against your current position and market, and will make improvements based on this data. This generally means that a long-term, monthly scheduled strategy is one of the best approaches you can have to SEO.
In this monthly schedule, maintaining a check-in to discuss new plans of action and the optimum timing can help you understand search optimization: helping you gain powerful insights into your digital marketing efforts.
Increase Budget as ROI Increases
An industry nugget of gold: set an initial budget, and increase it as your return of investment (ROI) increases. As mentioned, SEO needs to be implemented over time—without spamming search engines with too much content at once. When done properly, your rankings will increase to a point where web traffic reaches a highly desirable influx: resulting in an increase in conversions and greater ROI.
At this point, SEO is paying massive dividends for your marketing so it’s valuable to channel more finances into it to increase your position even further. More importantly though, when you’ve reached a valuable position in SERPs, you’re in an advantageous position because it becomes easier to rank for other more competitive and relevant keywords.
By increasing your investment in SEO at this stage, you can capitalise on all the hard work already done and exponentially increase your growth.
Outsource SEO Services at Vine Digital
Whatever stage of your SEO journey you’re at, we hope you found some useful information about why it’s more fruitful to outsource SEO to a reputable agency. Vine Digital is here to answer any questions you have about search engine optimization, keyword research, technical SEO: anything and everything relating to your organic presence.
We offer a team of experts over a diversified knowledge bank, which means we can quickly understand our client’s position and market: working collaboratively to create an SEO strategy that generates sustainable return on investment. By implementing strategies that reach peak efficiency quickly, Vine Digital can offer cost-effective pricing models and strategic planning: all at an affordable rate.
Get in touch today to speak to one of our specialists and see if we’re right for your business.