SEO marketing spend is a $69 billion dollar industry annually, and experts forecast it to eclipse $80 billion by 2020. With so many brands and publishers creating content, and websites competing for attention, it’s imperative to make sure your business appears close to the top of relevant searches.
Should SEO work be done in-house or outsourced? There are many benefits to building an in-house team if your business can support it:
1- Strong Internal Relationships
You have the distinct advantage of being able to partner with other internal resources as needed, including the IT team, which is often critical to implementation. This accessibility is also key to getting internal buy-in on strategies and tactics for quicker go-to market.
2- Ease of Resourcing
Having your SEO in-house also gives you closer oversight into the work that is being done and allows you to effectively allocate resources or teams to other projects. Internally one person may be able to oversee SEO for multiple properties, where an agency is going to charge more per property and any incremental work that is outside of the initial agreement.
3- Multiple Responsibilities
An in-house SEO resource can also lead content efforts across your digital properties, which all support SEO. If you have a blog or social media presence, those are some of the best channels to drive traffic and increase search rankings, as long as the content you are putting out is providing value to your customer. Because Google values quality and usefulness when considering page rank, the investment in content creation is key and something an in-house resource can own as part of an holistic SEO strategy.
4- Deeper Business Knowledge
An in-house team provides a depth of understanding of the nuances of your brand, strategy, corporate objectives, and even internal politics, that an agency simply cannot. But it’s important to be realistic about whether you have the need for an in-house team, and the means to support one.
5- More Control
The decision whether to build an in-house SEO team is reliant on how important organic search is to your business model and overall marketing goals, as well as your budget. If online marketing is critical to your business model, you should highly consider building some sort of in-house team to provide more control and influence over your business.
To achieve the greatest level of success, consider at least a small level of internal SEO staff, and if you can only afford one person, look at a more experienced resource who can truly speak the language with an agency partner. Having a person internally allows you to set realistic and achievable objectives and interpret performance metrics to understand where optimizations need to be made. If your program is completely offloaded to an agency you lose the control of really knowing how impactful it is, and that can risk failure.
Every situation is unique, but consider the benefits of an internal team before deciding to outsource. The control in-house offers can be key to building a strong SEO program that increases traffic and visibility of your business.
Jack Ogilvie is the co-founder of Techwood Consulting.
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