Almost all brands know that their search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO, is a key factor in their digital marketing success.
However, doing your SEO tasks, keeping up with all of the complexities and changes, and continually improving takes a lot of time.
Not all brands have the staff or bandwidth to manage their own SEO strategies themselves.
Whether they need to grow quickly or if they are just starting out, there are many reasons why a company might be looking for other options to stay on top of their SEO without needing to do it all in-house.
Thankfully, there is a solution called SEO outsourcing.
But what exactly is SEO outsourcing, and when do brands need to consider that as a strategy? In this article, we’ll answer those questions and help you understand the advantages of SEO outsourcing.
What is SEO Outsourcing?
SEO outsourcing is the process of finding an outside party to manage your SEO tasks and strategies for you rather than doing it with your own staff and employees.
These third parties can handle SEO tasks like:
- Competitor analysis
- Backlink building
- Optimizing technical and back-end aspects of your website
- Building wireframes for new templates
- Keyword research
- Organizing internal linking structures
- Improving content
- Fixing existing errors
All of these tasks are valuable in your SEO strategy, but finding the time to complete them within your own team alongside other important work can be difficult, leading to many of these tasks falling to the bottom of everyone’s to-do lists.
Outsourcing ensures that all the tasks of your SEO strategy are given priority and are completed when they are needed.
When Should You Outsource SEO?
SEO has the capability to bring about incredible results for your business with increased market share, search results, organic traffic, and revenue.
However, in order to get results in those areas, you need to dedicate a significant amount of time to your SEO management and implementation.
While many businesses know this, most don’t have the time or the staff to keep up with what needs to be done.
If you know that you are struggling to complete your SEO tasks or commonly find that SEO is pushed to the bottom of your team’s workload, it might be time to explore a different option.
You also can consider SEO outsourcing if you don’t have the budget to hire an in-house employee to manage SEO or have too much for a single team’s shared workload.
Who Can You Outsource SEO To?
There are a few different options you can consider when starting to think about your plan for outsourcing SEO. Here are the three main sources you’ll likely consider as you search to find the right third-party:
Independent Freelancers or Contractors
An independent freelancer or contractor for SEO is a single person who you hire, generally at a relatively low cost, to complete specific SEO tasks.
You might reach out to a freelancer with a single project that you need to complete but don’t have the time to manage yourself.
But they might not be SEO experts or be able to handle entire workloads.
SEO Agencies
An SEO agency is a business that specializes in SEO and completing SEO for businesses.
SEO agencies are a great idea for businesses that only need SEO work done but have more to manage than a single freelancer or contractor can do on their own.
You have an entire team working on your SEO goals and making sure that everything is kept up to date.
Full-Service Agencies
Full-service agencies or digital marketing agencies offer a wide variety of digital marketing solutions, including SEO.
These are great for businesses who want to outsource many different digital marketing tasks like content production, website management, or social media strategy.
However, they can be expensive if you only have a small amount of SEO work that needs to be done.
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Advantages of Choosing to Outsource SEO
There are many benefits and reasons why an organization would outsource SEO and rely on another party to manage the tasks and strategies of SEO implementation. Let’s take a closer look at some of those reasons now.
Regain Valuable Time
While SEO is critical to the success of your brand online, it’s a time-consuming and often tedious task.
It can also be hard to stay on top of the changing rules and regulations as search engine algorithms continue to adapt and change.
Having a professional handle your SEO tasks for you allows you to open up more time in your workload and the workload of your team.
It gives you time back in your day to focus on other things rather than the repetitive SEO tasks.
Cost-Effective Solution
Having an in-house SEO team member means that you need to have another salary open for a new hire, and you need to spend time searching for, training, and onboarding new talent.
And oftentimes, even if you have a dedicated SEO team member, they have other things in their day that take away from working solely on SEO.
Hiring a third party is often a much more cost-effective solution for growing businesses.
Quicker Results
Another benefit of outsourcing SEO is that you can often get much faster results than if you were managing it in-house.
Experts in SEO will understand the nuances of keyword strategies, backlinking strategies, lead generation, and technical SEO.
Because they know what to do and have a background in SEO, they will be able to help you achieve your goals much quicker than an in-house person will be able to do.
That can help you rise up the search rankings and rank for more keywords much more effectively than if you kept SEO in-house.
How to Outsource SEO the Right Way
Now that you understand what it means to outsource SEO and why it can be valuable to your business, let’s take a look at how to outsource SEO in the right way.
If you don’t take the right approach to outsourcing SEO, you can risk losing money and missing your goals, which can hurt your digital reputation in the long run.
1. Determine Your Goals
Before you can begin to think about what options to outsource SEO are best, you need to know what your goals are.
Do you want to rank higher for keywords, or appear on more search engine results pages? Do you have a concrete goal for the amount of new traffic you want?
Once you understand what you are looking for, you can then move on to the next step.
2. Figure Out What Type of Third Party is Best for Your Needs
As we mentioned earlier, there are three main sources for outsourcing SEO. Think about what your goals are and what type of third party is going to provide the best solution.
Do you need help in more than one area of your digital marketing, or need long-term support? Or do you just have a few projects that need completing?
3. Evaluate Different Agencies to Choose the Best
You should never go with the first third-party option you see automatically before you evaluate all of your choices.
You should spend time interviewing different agencies, and ask questions like:
- How many clients do you have?
- How many years have you been working?
- What services do you offer?
- What are your costs?
- Do you have any customers like us?
- Can you provide references or testimonials?
- What results do you expect to see?
4. Ensure You Receive Regular Reports
One of the most important parts of outsourcing is to make sure that you receive regular reports and updates on the progress from your outsourcing agency.
You should set expectations for regular reports so you can see exactly what your improvements are and see where you are going.
That will help you understand if you are moving in the right direction or should end the relationship.
5. Continually Assess Your Goals
You’ll want to ensure that you are continually assessing your goals and determining if you should focus on new objectives.
If you are hitting your original goals, you might want to think about other ways to grow and assess whether or not you should change your direction.
That also helps you determine if your third-party is benefiting your organization.
Wrap Up
SEO is a necessity for businesses that want to succeed in today’s modern business world. Without SEO, a brand won’t be able to be found online and will suffer some serious consequences to its reputation and reach.
If doing SEO in-house takes up too much time, there are many ways that a company can outsource their SEO to a third-party to manage it for them.
If done correctly, SEO outsourcing can help you achieve your goals while freeing up valuable bandwidth within your company.
Keeping on top of your SEO strategy is key for when you outsource your SEO to an outside source. To examine your current SEO strategy, try taking our SEO maturity assessment!
