Companies everywhere are finally starting to see just how much search engine marketing can benefit their business and have begun putting more efforts towards search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). The biggest question they have is, should they outsource their search engine marketing efforts or keep them in-house?
While outsourcing and in-house marketing efforts are both beneficial, for most business, outsourcing simply is a much better option. There are a lot of benefits that come from maintaining all of your SEO efforts in-house, however, there are also a lot of downfalls.
Some of the benefits of running all of your marketing efforts in-house include:
- Spending less time teaching vendors about your company, industry, and target audience.
- You’ll have a lot of control over every aspect of your campaigns.
Although those are some great benefits, the truth is, the more time your company spends on marketing, the less they will spend on something fruitful, like the job they were trained to do.
Here’s 5 reasons why outsourcing is a better option than marketing in-house:
- It’s Affordable
Your decision to outsource SEO should be based on the results you want and what it will cost to get them.
When you outsource your SEO efforts you may be paying a bit more upfront, but less in the long-run. That is because at first the marketing company will fix any mistakes and tweak your website which requires a lot of work, then in the long-run it will keep up maintenance and marketing efforts.
Search Marketing is not something that can be done once and then left alone. It requires constant attention and when you take care of that in-house you will be taking your employees away from the tasks that they were trained to perform on a regular basis.
When your employees are business marketing, your important projects will get overlooked and you may have to bring in a new employee to focus on those particular tasks.
Bringing in an SEO or SEM professional is extremely expensive, mainly because in addition to a high salary you’ll have to pay for benefits, utilities, taxes, and extra space to bring them in. These type of professionals don’t come cheap. If you make the mistake of hiring someone for $10/hr who is fresh out of college you will not see any return on your investment or significant strides in marketing at all. This is because professionals have experience, while college students “know” information which they have not yet utilized or tested in real-world scenarios. For the price of an expert you can get a lot more marketing efforts and ROI by outsourcing your SEO.
- Opportunity Costs
SEO requires expertise and skills that can only be acquired over time in order to be done effectively.
Training your staff to perform SEO will required lots of time and money.
Your staff will have less time to work on important projects, which will result in less revenue being generated.
Everyone has a learning curve, some may take a lot longer than others to grasp any sort of training. This makes it difficult to predict how long it will take to train everyone up to the same standards.
When your staff is fully trained you are likely to get different results from different employees. This means that some parts of your SEO campaigns will be more effective than others because of the individuals performing the tasks.
Another thing to consider is how exactly you’ll train your employees in SEO. Are you going to pay for courses? Or are you planning on paying an expert to come in and train your staff? Either way, it will cost you.
- Looking From The Outside In
As a part of your company, you may already have a specific idea of how things need to be done.
When you use SEO outsourcing the marketing professional doesn’t necessarily know your industry inside and out like you do, which is why they will perform extensive research and ask a lot of questions. What they DO know very well, is marketing, which means they will look into your industry in a way you never considered.
Hiring a company in order to outsource SEO allows you to break away from the same ineffective marketing your company has been stuck on. The marketing company will be able to bring in an outsider perspective that you otherwise would not have been able to get by doing all of your online marketing in-house.
- You Can’t Just “Set It and Forget It”
SEO is not just something that can be set and then left alone to do its part, it’s an ongoing process.
In order to get the best results your company has to perform SEO activities every single week, if not every day.
Things like, publishing content, building links and optimizing landing pages needs to be done regularly to ensure the best results.
If your company is planning on doing SEM and PPC advertising it’s important that a professional is constantly monitoring and tweaking the ads to ensure that you are getting the maximum leads and best ROI possible. This is difficult if you are tasking an employee who has other responsibilities to also keep up with this.
Outsourcing SEO will allow you to have the confidence that all marketing efforts are being performed properly and it will allow your staff to focus on more important things, like growing your business.
- Marketers Are Familiar With The Right Tools
SEO professionals don’t just use their knowledge and expertise to do their jobs, they also use various tools which track marketing efforts and the results that come from those efforts.
The marketing tools marketing professionals use normally cost quite a bit and require proper training in order to effectively use them to improve marketing efforts. Outsourcing SEO means you will be hiring a company that already pays for those tools anyways and whose professionals have already been trained to use the tools.
Unless you plan on hiring multiple marketing professionals who have already been trained to focus on your marketing campaigns, it will take time and cost quite a bit to get your employees familiar with the tools to use for your online marketing.
Outsourcing Is Simply the Best Option
It’s a much better idea to allow your employees to focus on what they have been trained to do and outsource SEO to a company that is solely dedicated in working on your campaigns and getting you the best ROI.
SEO marketing is one of the most profitable ways to market your business and you want to be sure that it is being done correctly, so why not trust a company whose focus and expertise is solely SEO?