Top 10 Reasons to Outsource Your SEO in 2023

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SEO

What Is SEO Outsourcing? Why Consider It?

Most marketing teams have so much to do and not enough time to do it. This is often especially true for search engine optimization (SEO). Some people hear the word "outsourcing" and think that means your in-house team is never involved – that should never be 100% the case. SEO outsourcing will save you time and drive results, but a disconnected SEO team is a recipe for disaster. In fact, the best SEO "outsourcing" involves a tight partnership between your in-house team and an SEO agency, ensuring organizational goals and marketing team KPIs and campaigns are aligned with SEO efforts, as well as sourcing in-house industry expertise when appropriate.

 

Busy work

​​SEO can be particularly complex because of changing algorithms, fierce competition, and a general lack of understanding of the field. It can also take a while to achieve the desired results. However, those results can pay huge dividends over time.

Juggling expectations about time, money, and human resources devoted to this service can be one of the most difficult challenges for anyone trying to win at SEO, which is why companies often choose to bring in outside help to get things done quickly and at lower costs.

There is often some apprehension and worry when it comes to outsourcing any aspect of a business. This is because it means you will need to instill your trust in a third party. The concern is understandable, but that just means that any company considering this move should only use qualified and proven providers.

The Impacts of Outsourcing SEO: Positive or Negative?

Outsourcing something as monumental as SEO can have an incredible impact on your business and the levels of productivity for your in-house marketing team. It can be either a disastrous (negative) impact, or a positive one. It's risky, and it is not a quick win – it's a long game – but it can definitely be a rewarding game worth playing.

These are the top 10 reasons why any company serious about their digital marketing should consider outsourcing their SEO efforts, or "nearsourcing" them using a fractional marketing agency. With all these benefits at hand when outsourcing SEO services from an agency, the pros far outweigh the cons. Let us take the time to explore each of these at length.

Get Back Valuable Time

This is the first and most basic benefit of outsourcing your SEO efforts. Optimizing your site pages and content to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs) takes a lot of time, especially if those handling it are not highly experienced. Having seasoned professionals assume this role for your SEO campaigns will save your company much-needed time.

Cost-Effective

Piggy bank
SEO is difficult and complex. It usually isn't worth the time and cost to train an in-house full-time employee on SEO – they may not have the right skillsets to begin with, or the training itself may take months. Plus, they may not have enough time in their day to actually do SEO once they learn it. Marketing teams tend to be so busy as it is.

If you want it done right you will need someone with years of experience or a team of diverse professionals that specialize in specific areas of SEO and digital marketing campaigns. Outsourcing SEO services will provide your company with an entire team of experts for considerably less than it would cost to house them within your own walls.

An SEO company or agency can provide a large amount of value for comparatively little cost. Remember that SEO pays dividends over many years. Getting SEO wrong from the start can be far more costly than the cost to get it right.

Faster Results

Especially if you already have a fair amount of organic traffic, a digital agency or SEO service provider can take what you have and put a full digital marketing strategy behind it, i.e. a keyword strategy, lead generation and content marketing strategy, and the like, so that you can start seeing results quickly from the content and traffic you already have. Many times developing and implementing a proper SEO strategy on a site with otherwise decent traffic and content can lead to relatively fast results.

By outsourcing SEO, you can also count on work beginning immediately, instead of facing the usual delays that come from pre-planning and planning before execution in-house. After all, less experienced professionals will still need time to learn and work things out before they even start, whereas proven SEO professionals face little to no learning curve.

What's more, your SEO efforts should be continually measured, tested, and improved over time – that's why it's called Search Engine Optimization. Doing a minimal SEO effort in-house and then dropping it over time is a sure-fire way to see results plummet.

No Learning Curve

If your company is just starting out with SEO, chances are the people who take on the task will spend quite a bit of time simply learning the ropes, taking away time from content optimization and generation of material in general.

SEO experts are, well, experts. They know their way around SEO and all its common challenges. This means they won't waste time having to learn anything new. They are ready right off the bat.

Stronger Marketing Strategy

Many companies do "SEO" by simply writing content and hoping that it will generate organic traffic and leads. While hope itself is great, it has little to do with proper SEO.

A high-quality SEO company will help you develop a competitive strategy in these areas:

  • keyword strategy
  • content strategy across various channels (blog, YouTube, social, etc) and types (guides, tutorials, topic clusters, webinars, etc)
  • thematic content creation calendar
  • content marketing (getting leads and business from your content creation)
  • link building (getting backlinks from valuable domains)

A full-fledged digital marketing agency can take what you have and put a digital marketing strategy behind it, meaning ensuring that your SEO efforts are connected to your video creation efforts, social media efforts, email campaign efforts, etc, while ensuring that your SEO efforts aren't negatively impacting your conversion optimization (CRO) efforts, the overall user journey, and user experience. Some SEO companies that specialize in SEO can actually have a detrimental impact on your overall digital marketing because they don't consider the impact of their efforts on aspects such as user experience, conversions, and the like – SEO should not operate in a silo.

Ensure White Hat SEO Practices

A good SEO company will ensure white hat SEO practices, meaning the "good" types of practices that will improve your SEO, rather than harm it, which is what "black hat" SEO methods can do. For example, a black hat SEO tactic would be getting backlinks from spammy websites and directories that will actually end up harming your SEO and domain authority score.

Gain Acess to Powerful SEO Tools and Expertise

SEO firms generally have access to the bleeding edge of SEO tools, which can be expensive or difficult for marketers to justify a full suite in their budgets. What's more, it can take years to fully learn and harness the power of these tools, such as SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs, not to mention more enterprise SEO tools such as seoClarity and BrightEdge.

SEO is also a part of a larger set of services offered by digital marketing agencies. Not only do you gain access to SEO expertise but also expertise in related disciplines. This means that when your company outsources SEO services to a digital agency, it gains access to a whole team of digital experts, tools, and resources to help with your needs.

Optimize Your In-House Team

Burnout is a real problem. Overworking people and forcing them to do menial tasks repeatedly can and will have an emotional and psychological impact on their state of mind and productivity.

After a while, SEO work can, in fact, become monotonous. Keyword research requires long hours combing through pieces of content about the same topic and running through huge lists of phrases, investigating their search volume, and how they perform. Over and over again.

When you have a full team handling the work, you resolve the issue by rotating them every so often. But what happens when the team is small or composed of only a single individual?

Sparing your in-house marketing team from this type of work by outsourcing SEO solutions will make them happier, and it will let you assign them to other tasks. There are several other areas of digital marketing that also require your team’s attention. By removing the tedious demands of SEO from their plate, they're free to focus on those other things, further optimizing the use of your in-house resources.

Keep Up With Trends and Tools

Marketing trends
Proper SEO requires the use of several different tools and an understanding of shifting trends. For example, Google changes its search algorithm around 500 times per year. In most cases, the changes are minor but still important.

SEO agencies are always keeping up with changes in the industry and all the new tools available. They have to. This is their bread and butter. By outsourcing your company gains access to a constantly updated source of information.

Get An Objective Perspective

It can be easy for people wearing a company shirt to lose themselves in passion for the brand. This is not a bad thing, but it can lead to some problems when evaluating work objectively. When you are too close to something, recognizing cracks and flaws becomes more difficult.

This is probably one of the most understated benefits of outsourcing your SEO services to an agency: you will have people committed to sincerity. Someone from your in-house team may choose to or be consciously unable to perceive mistakes in his work because his job depends on it; Whereas agencies need to be impartial and get results because it is their reputation at stake.

This means you will be able to get thorough, efficient, and detailed assessments of what is going on from objective third parties.

Outsourcing / nearsourcing SEO services does not need to be a risky proposition or a wild gamble. It can be a positive turning point for any company, as long as they take the proper time to investigate and evaluate available providers.

Weigh all the options, make an informed decision, and watch your costs decrease and your results soar.

Are you worried about outsourcing SEO or any other digital marketing service? We understand. Feel free to get in touch with us with any questions or concerns. We’re here to help!

​Original article written by Joe Yaker

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About Seth Viebrock

In no particular order, Seth has built websites for famous artists like Justin Bieber and Mariah Carey, led a team as CTO at a social network startup company, co-presented at Stanford and the International Society for Neuronal Regulation Conference on an EEG study in consciousness, traveled to Tokyo for data center network security assessments, worked on world-class e-commerce software as a software engineer, and provided Drupal expertise for Estee Lauder and their many international brands. Seth grew up with the web, starting his first web design company at the age of 16, and this company in...
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