In the Digital Age, businesses need to engage in search engine optimization (SEO). Unfortunately, the internet is all too happy to tell business leaders that it is possible for them to manage their SEO strategies in-house, perhaps even without a trained SEO expert on staff. If you are eager to keep your costs low, you might be partial to reasons for managing your SEO yourself, but the following reasons for keeping SEO in-house should not work to convince you that you can have a successful SEO campaign on your own:
To Keep SEO Costs Low
SEO is expensive for many good reasons. SEO professionals require ample training, and the best SEO experts continuously engage with education to ensure they are delivering the best possible SEO practices to their clients. SEO requires exceedingly technical tools, many of which are produced bespoke for individual agencies. Finally, it takes time to achieve results with SEO; clients may be working for months or years before they see significant changes to their search ranking. For all these reasons, SEO tends to demand a high budget.
Unfortunately, none of these concerns go away when you keep SEO in-house. Because you likely do not have the capacity to keep up-to-date on SEO strategies, you will need to hire an SEO professional for your staff; you will still need expensive SEO tools, and it may take even longer to achieve results with a limited number of professionals working toward your goals. In truth, in-house SEO can cost more than Phoenix SEO services, so if expense is your only concern, outsourcing SEO will always be best.
To Maintain Total Control Over SEO and Digital Marketing Strategy
If you struggle to relinquish control over any aspect of your business — if delegation is one of your weakest skills as a business leader — you may be tempted by this supposed benefit of keeping SEO in-house. It may seem that keeping SEO within your business may allow you to improve collaboration and coordination between SEO and digital marketing or that it may ensure that you can develop an SEO strategy that perfectly suits your business’s brand. Unfortunately, this is essentially a fallacy, and it is a dangerous one, at that.
Even as a business leader, you cannot maintain complete control over every feature of your business — and you shouldn’t want or need to. One of your primary functions as a leader is to find business partners you can trust, which allows you and your team to focus on other concerns, like sales or customer service, which are more directly related to the success of your business. If you try to maintain control over SEO by keeping it in-house, you will likely stretch your internal operations too thinly, risking business failure.
To Enhance Focus on Business SEO Projects
One fear that many business leaders develop with regard to outsourcing SEO is that their business’s SEO needs will be competing with the needs of every other client that an SEO agency takes on. How can you be certain that a third-party SEO provider is devoting the necessary time and energy to your business that it needs to see high-quality results? To eliminate the inevitability that an SEO company cannot focus solely on a single client, many business leaders opt to keep SEO in-house, ensuring that their staff will be using 100 percent of their knowledge and skill to achieve the business’s SEO goals.
However, unless a business hires a full team of SEO professionals, in-house SEO will probably not benefit from as many man-hours of effort as SEO campaigns managed by SEO agencies. SEO providers only perform SEO, which is not true of the rest of your in-house business staff, who may have diverse responsibilities associated with marketing, sales, customer service, and more. Because there are so many skilled SEO professionals at SEO agencies, you are more likely to see more time and energy devoted to your SEO projects, even though your provider will have other clients to manage, as well.
In most cases, bringing SEO in-house is not the best idea. If you want to make the most of your SEO strategy, you should partner with a third-party SEO provider you can trust.
