SEO is often seen as too complicated to bring in-house and as a result, many companies choose to engage SEO agencies to fully manage their ongoing SEO activities as the only option.
Is fully outsourcing your ongoing SEO really the best option?
SEO impacts and is impacted by a broad variety of factors and activities, ranging from ‘Technical Stuff’, Content, Online Visibility, Business Relationships, Brand, PR / Comms and so on.
Basically, almost any change on your website and any presence you have all around the Web can impact your SEO performance – either in a positive or a negative way. The negative impact also includes missed opportunities.
SEO should be fully integrated with your other activities, including those in sales, brand, product, comms and so on. Even your legal team should have a basic understanding of SEO for their sign off.
Considering the importance of SEO (= its great potential to drive leads and sales) and the fact that SEO impacts and is impacted by so many other activities, it makes sense to consider, if fully outsourcing this key function is the best option for your business.
You probably don’t have in-house resources to take care of your SEO needs on a full time basis. This may not be a problem.
Consider the following: SEO typically consists of addressing On-Page factors (including Technical) and Off-Page factors (your presence on other websites).
On-Page SEO typically requires one-off, large(er) amount of work to be done to address the technical factors, initial keyword research, existing copy optimisation, metadata, internal links, navigation, and so on. After the initial ‘higher volume of work’ done with a help from an SEO professional, the ongoing SEO work typically requires a much less time/resources.
Off-Page SEO is (should be) more about improving your online visibility all around the Web by focusing on strategies that improve your online presence in the right places around the Web, with ‘getting backlinks’ being the ‘side effect’ of your growing presence online. If your main strategy is to ‘get a link, get a link, get a link’ – you will likely end up with low quality online presence and any SEO benefits will be short-lived. Fully outsourcing ‘link building’ typically leads to this negative outcome.
As per above, especially Off-Page SEO needs to be integrated with your overall business/marketing strategy to work well and provide ongoing benefits, not just for SEO, but to support your business goals.
It is true that SEO performance needs to be monitored and reviewed regularly. Your On-Page SEO, including Technical, will probably need a more detailed review every 6+ months. However, with the right training, your in-house resources should be able to cover the ongoing work and you can get help from an ‘outside expert’ when/if needed.
Your Off-Page strategy, once developed properly, will be (should be) implemented predominantly by your in-house resources in marketing, PR/Comms, Sales and so on. Again, you will probably need to engage an ‘outside expert’ once in a while, however the majority of work can be done in-house.
As you see from the above, training your staff is the key. The purpose of SEO training is not to make all of them experts in SEO, rather to give them enough knowledge to understand how their activities can impact your SEO performance.
One day a few years ago, it was amazing to overhear a ‘legal person’ / ‘marketing person’ call, where the legal person was telling the marketing person: “But we need to consider the SEO impact here!” The legal person attended my SEO training a few weeks before that.
There may be instances where fully outsourcing SEO may seem as the only option. However, consider the alternative and the benefits of having your staff, who fully understand your business, contributing directly to your SEO success. And by training them, you invest in them by improving their knowledge.
A skilled SEO professional can help you develop your On-Page and Off-Page SEO strategy, train your staff, set up your reporting, help you integrate SEO into your processes and assist with the initial implementation, if required – all with a goal to bring your ongoing SEO work predominantly in-house.