To Outsource or not to Outsource SEO

Marketing
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Hi,

We’ve been doing all our SEO for clients in-house so far. We really try to be conscientious and play by the book so as to get good rankings. But as the volume of new projects increases, we’re finding that the amount of time spent on SEO is disproportionate and overtaking the time spent on design/development.

As our core business and competency is with design/development, we’re contemplating outsourcing the SEO. And there seem to be a whole range of SEO companies offering all kinds of service. Some are so cheap you wonder how they’re able to do the actual volume of work involved for that price, and others are so exorbitant that we can’t justify the cost.

Also, we’re

So a couple of questions:

  • How many of you designers/developers do their own SEO? How many outsource?
  • Any bad experiences outsourcing SEO? (We’re pretty particular about not doing anything dodgy/spammy eg. arbitrary blog comment posting for link building)
  • Can anyone recommend a reputable and reasonable SEO agency here in Victoria, Australia?
  • What services/skills can SEO specialists provide that we’d be hard-pressed to do in-house?
  • Are there SEO companies out there that will spend the time required to get to know the client’s industry well enough to search out relevant industry directories/sites to make link building entries etc?
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I am not against outsourcing but with caveats. What is most important is that you have good people working for you. Just going out and buying 1000 links is often a very bad plan. you need people that will take a very personal interest in promoting and marketing and building links to your site. you do not need people to do the same over and over again. you need people who actually think for themselves and wants to help you win. search people are much more difficult to find but when you find them it can be a real game changer.

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@dvduval - That has been the source of our hesitation - knowing how hard and time consuming it is to understand the client, each project/site, the target market and the target market’s search behaviour and then to apply SEO appropriately.

I agree with what you’re saying.

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