SEO is an inbound marketing strategy. It helps you build brand authority and offers a decent return on investment. It has tons of other benefits.
However, today, we’ll explore how hiring an SEO agency can offer more advantages than hiring an in-house SEO team.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with using your internal team for SEO, hiring external specialists brings additional benefits that you might not get from your full-time employees.
And among all, the top benefit is that it’s cheaper than hiring and managing full-time employees.
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Hiring an SEO agency saves money:
Hiring an SEO company is a highly cost-effective solution for your business if you don’t have to manage or update hundreds of pages regularly.
Here is the breakdown of how it’s way cheaper than hiring full-time employees to run SEo campaigns.
If you want to run an in-house team for a small website, you at least need an SEO specialist, a copywriter, a designer, and sometimes a technical guy to run your website effectively.
Let’s say you live in the USA, you might have to pay all of them around $15K-$20K a month.
But the cost goes beyond just salaries. You’ll also need to invest in a wide range of SEO tools, software, backlinks, and ongoing training to keep up with the ever-changing SEO landscape, all of which can significantly raise your operational costs.
On the other hand, if you outsource your SEO strategy to an SEO agency, you might need to pay $3,000/month for the same workload.
For example, consider a local business, such as a dental clinic, that has only a few service pages (e.g., teeth cleaning, cosmetic dentistry) and a basic contact page.
Since the site doesn’t require daily updates or a significant volume of content, maintaining a full-time team of SEO experts, writers, and designers is unnecessary.
You can get your SEO done at $1000 a month.
The other example can be a niche e-commerce store specializing in eco-friendly products.
With limited product offerings, they might only need a handful of product pages and a couple of informational pages about their brand.
Hiring a full-time SEO team would likely lead to overspending, as the site wouldn’t require continuous updates.
In both scenarios, outsourcing your SEO to an SEO company or an SEO expert allows you to pay based on the work required.
You can do it on a budget:
Let’s continue exploring the financial benefits before diving into some other advantages of hiring an SEO agency.
Suppose you’ve decided to implement SEO for your small business, but you’re facing budget constraints. You may not have the resources to employ a full-time team and provide them with the latest SEO tools and software necessary for effective optimization.
In this case, you have two options: either cut expenses from other departments to hire a dedicated SEO team or partner with an SEO company that can deliver results within your financial limits.
To understand this, consider a scenario where you ask an agency to optimize a single article and rank it for multiple keywords. The agency will charge you specifically for that task.
This will give you the flexibility to allocate your budget more efficiently.
In contrast, if you were to rely on an internal team, you’d face additional costs, such as salaries, and the overhead of maintaining SEO tools, even when the team may not have enough work to justify their costs.
By hiring an SEO agency, you can break down your needs into smaller tasks, assigning them only as your budget allows.
For instance, a fintech startup from the USA reached out to me to improve their online search presence and generate leads. Since they were bootstrapping their startup, they were unable to hire a full-time SEO team.
Instead, they dedicated $1,000 per month for the first few months to kickstart their SEO journey. We focused on optimizing their primary service pages, and we were able to rank their website within the first five months.
This means that when you’re working with financial constraints, the most practical solution is to hire SEO services for targeted tasks rather than committing to a full-time team that may not be fully utilized.
SEO agencies bring unmatched expertise:
One of the unmatched benefits of hiring an SEO company is its extensive market exposure and expertise. The experience that an SEO agency brings to the table is significantly more comprehensive than that of a small business team.
While your in-house experts focus on maintaining smooth operations and ensuring a positive return on investment (ROI) for your business, SEO agencies are accustomed to navigating various challenges across multiple industries.
They have helped numerous businesses overcome obstacles, giving them a forward-thinking approach to SEO.
What’s truly inspiring is the innovative strategies that SEO agencies continually develop.
With access to advanced SEO tools, they introduce new methods to simplify the optimization process.
For example, many agencies have recently begun employing unique strategies to identify underserved keywords. This helps businesses target clients with less or no competition.
SEO is fundamentally about expertise, creativity, and strategic planning. While your internal team may have a solid strategy, they might become stuck in their strategy unless they identify it as ineffective.
For instance, after the AI boom, search engines have become much more content-conscious, making it difficult to rank solely through massive backlinks as was common in the past.
To succeed, businesses now need to focus on strategy, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), semantic SEO (the use of LSI keywords), and branding.
In challenging situations, small teams and freelancers may struggle to navigate these complexities. Conversely, SEO agencies come with diverse experiences and strategies to implement, helping businesses remain competitive even during downturns.
This collective knowledge enables agencies to achieve more substantial results than individual freelancers or small in-house teams can typically provide.
Hiring well-reputed SEO companies lowers the risks:
Working with SEO companies is generally safer and less risky because their reputation is on the line.
When you assign a task to an established agency, they strive to meet your expectations, as their branding hinges on delivering results. They understand that without a strong reputation, a business cannot flourish or expand.
Therefore, hiring a well-reputed SEO agency is always a great option. These companies are less likely to make mistakes and are committed to fulfilling their promises.
In contrast, hiring a freelance SEO expert or a full-time employee can be a little risky. If they make a mistake, your only recourse may be to let them go.
The agency will take your pain:
SEO is a continuous process. It has various factors, including keyword optimization, on-page and off-page strategies, and user experience.
If you maintain an internal team, you must ensure they are using ethical, white-hat techniques and implementing advanced SEO strategies.
So, it’s not just hiring and forgetting. It’s about taking full responsibility for everything.
If you don’t have a check and balance, your team might adopt black-hat tactics, which may deliver quick results but leave you vulnerable to penalties from search engines.
With each Google algorithm update, your business could be just one mistake away from significant ranking drops and traffic loss.
Additionally, you’ll need to invest in your team’s ongoing training and maintain regular communication to keep them aligned with your business goals.
This often comes with its own set of challenges, including potential security risks and employee turnover.
So, why endure all this hassle when you can achieve similar or even better results without the headache?
Instead, why not focus your energy on core business functions and leave the SEO complexities to the agency? Especially, when it’s safer, better and cheaper?