Search Engine Optimization: Agency, Freelancer, or Do It Yourself?

To achieve better SEO results, you have three options: hiring an SEO agency, hiring an SEO freelancer, or doing it yourself (in-house). But what’s the best option for your business? In this blog post, we’ll explain the pros and cons of each of these three options.

As an SEO agency, you might expect us to advise you to always hire an agency instead of a freelancer or to handle SEO yourself, but that’s not the case. Sometimes it’s simply better to hire a freelancer or set up your own SEO team. In addition, for some companies, it’s even better to go with a combination: in-house marketers who take the lead, along with an agency or freelancer who handles part of the work.

Below, we’ve outlined six scenarios to help you choose the right option. For each scenario, we’ve listed the pros and cons.

Scenario 1: Expanding the scope of work performed by your current (full-service) marketing agency

Are you currently working with a (full-service) online marketing agency, for example for Google Ads or social media advertising? If so, you might consider expanding the scope of their work. Another option is to scale back your advertising budgets so that the marketing agency can free up hours for SEO work.

Benefits

• You’re already familiar with the marketing agency, so you know exactly what you’re getting into. You don’t have to build a new relationship with other marketers or SEO specialists, and you don’t have to get used to a different way of working.
• The marketing agency is familiar with your business. As a result, they know what works and what doesn’t for your target audience. That saves time: for example, Google Ads data can be used for your SEO strategy.
• Having all the work handled under one roof is often convenient. You likely have a dedicated point of contact at the marketing agency, which means you don’t have to communicate with multiple parties and marketers.

Disadvantages

• SEO is often not the main focus of a marketing agency. Most marketing agencies focus primarily on online advertising. That’s not surprising: online advertising is easy to sell, you achieve a return on investment (ROI) more quickly, and SEO requires more patience. At many marketing agencies, advertising services have been expanded to include SEO or other specialized services. The downside is that at many large and medium-sized marketing agencies (with at least 25 marketers), the number of SEO specialists can be counted on one hand. Furthermore, they often lack expertise in all areas of SEO (technical, content, authority). Small agencies usually don’t employ any SEO specialists at all, so the work is carried out by an “online marketer.” You can probably already see where this is going: that’s not how you achieve the best results. Every online marketer has one area of expertise they’re really good at; the rest is just winging it.
• At many full-service marketing agencies, SEO work is handled by junior staff or interns, which means you don’t get the necessary expertise and attention from true experts in the field.
• SEO specialists at a full-service agency often have a large number of clients they work for. As a result, they can’t give you all the attention you need. That’s because online marketing agencies often employ only one or a few SEO specialists.
• SEO is a distinct field and completely different from online advertising. At many agencies, the level of expertise in this area is generally not “the best of the best.” As a result, you might not receive the best advice, and the best optimizations might not be implemented—which is a missed opportunity.
• Many online marketing agencies treat SEO as a “side project” because they want to maximize their revenue and don’t want to risk losing a client. As a result, you don’t benefit from the in-depth knowledge and expertise you need to achieve truly effective SEO results.

Tips for Hiring a Full-Service Agency

• Take a critical look at who works for the marketing agency and whether they actually employ SEO specialists.
• Ask who will be carrying out your work. Is it a junior or a senior? And is it an SEO specialist or a generalist in online marketing? After all, a marketer can’t be good at everything, so opt for expertise.
• Try to find out how long the marketing agency has been working with its SEO clients. Have they been working for their SEO clients for years? If so, that often speaks well of their quality and expertise.
• Choose a marketing agency that operates transparently and provides insight into its strategy, activities, and results. Also, be wary of long-term contracts that you can’t easily get out of. If the partnership doesn’t work out, you don’t want to be stuck with a poorly performing online marketing agency for a long time.

Scenario 2: Hiring a freelance SEO specialist

Another option is to hire a freelance SEO specialist. You can make various arrangements with a freelance SEO specialist. For example, the specialist can work remotely, at your office, or a combination of both. Most freelance SEO specialists have years of experience and have often worked as SEO specialists at a marketing agency.

Benefits

• With an SEO freelancer, you always know who will be working on your project and who you’ll be collaborating with. It’s easy to check how many years of experience the freelancer has, what references they have, and which aspects of SEO they truly excel at.
• SEO freelancers often have a high level of expertise, in part because they typically have years of experience.
• A freelancer will always feel pressure to deliver high-quality work. After all, if you’re not satisfied, they’ll lose an important client—and they often depend on just a few clients.
• It may be more cost-effective to hire an SEO freelancer rather than a marketing agency or an SEO agency. SEO freelancers’ rates range from €75 to €150 per hour.

Disadvantages

• Finding a good SEO freelancer can be very difficult. Good SEO freelancers are hard to come by because they’ve often already reached their maximum capacity in terms of clients.
• Within the field of search engine optimization, there are various tasks and areas of expertise. It’s very difficult to find a freelancer who has expertise in all areas or can perform all tasks. For example, many freelancers struggle with link building or lack in-depth knowledge of technical SEO.
• Hiring a freelancer is more expensive than hiring someone in-house for SEO.
• You’re dependent on a single person. If the freelancer is sick or on vacation, no work will be done on your SEO.

Tips for Hiring an SEO Freelancer

• Check whether the SEO freelancer is truly an SEO specialist or if they also offer a broader range of online marketing services as a freelancer. After all, no one can be good at every aspect of online marketing. So make sure you don’t end up hiring an all-around online marketer instead of a true SEO specialist.
• Ask for references and check them. Have they actually achieved good results? And why aren’t these references still clients of the freelancer?
• Ask how many clients the freelancer has. If you’re going to hire a freelancer, you’ll want to be sure that your SEO project gets enough attention. If a freelancer works for a large number of clients, you won’t get the attention you need.
• Pay close attention to whether there’s a mutual connection. When you hire a freelancer, it’s important that you’re able to work well together. If the freelancer is a good fit for your company, it will benefit the outcome.

Scenario 3: Hiring a Specialized SEO Agency

If you don’t want to build an in-house SEO team but still want to have access to all possible SEO expertise in the short term, hiring an SEO agency is a good choice.

A specialized SEO agency has in-house expertise in all areas, allowing them to help you take the next step. You can outsource all your SEO work to an external agency, ensuring that you’ll achieve good results.

Benefits

• You’ll have access to an experienced, multidisciplinary team of SEO strategists, consultants, technical SEO specialists, link builders, copywriters, and data analysts. Putting together an SEO team like this on your own takes a long time and is often too expensive.
• You don’t have to go to the trouble of finding specialists in all areas of SEO yourself, which is very difficult. There are simply very few truly good SEO specialists out there.
• Specialized SEO agencies work with a wide variety of companies. All the knowledge they gain can be applied to your website, online store, or platform.
• A specialized SEO agency stays up to date on the latest algorithm updates, SEO trends, the best tools, and the most effective techniques. This means you’ll be working with the best people in the field and achieving better results faster.
• An agency often has licenses for the best SEO tools in the world. The cost of these tools can add up very quickly for a freelancer or an in-house team. SEO agencies can spread these costs across multiple clients, allowing you to benefit from the various advantages these tools offer.

Disadvantages

• The costs of hiring an SEO agency are often high. That’s because SEO requires a lot of attention, time, and expertise. SEO isn’t something you can just do quickly on the side. It’s not uncommon to receive a proposal with monthly fees ranging from €2,500 to €25,000. The average hourly rates for SEO agencies range from €100 to €185.
• As a relatively small client, there’s a chance that various SEO agencies will assign a junior employee or even an intern to work on your project. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that—everyone has to start somewhere. But this does mean there’s a risk that your SEO project won’t receive the attention it needs from experienced specialists.
• You won’t always learn everything about SEO on your own. After all, the SEO specialists work at the agency, not for you as a client.

Tips for Finding an SEO Agency

• Ask an SEO agency who will be carrying out the work and who will be involved in the process. Be sure to ask critical questions about this as well. For example, it’s very important to know who you’ll be working with: an experienced SEO specialist or a junior? We recommend that you clarify this before you approve a proposal.
• Establish clear guidelines for sharing SEO knowledge and the lessons learned from the SEO process, so that this knowledge can also grow within your organization.
• Choose an SEO agency that operates transparently. If you’re not given insight into the keyword research, the work performed, or the SEO strategy, that’s an immediate red flag!

Scenario 4: Hiring an SEO Specialist

You can also choose to handle all SEO work in-house. This is often the best choice when SEO is crucial to your business or when your marketing team is large enough that adding a few FTEs isn’t a problem. Keep in mind, however, that you’ll need to go through a learning curve and hire specialists in all areas of SEO. This takes more time than you might expect.

Benefits

• Your own employees know your business better than outsiders. To achieve the best possible results, it’s important to optimize your website for your visitors. The better someone knows your customers, the better your SEO results will be.
• When you have one or more SEO specialists on staff, you can easily make adjustments. The specialist is truly part of your company, and you don’t have to wait for an appointment to be scheduled with an agency or freelancer.
• There are no delays in communication, which is often the case when working with external parties. If you need something, you can reach out directly to the SEO specialist or the SEO team.
• Most of the knowledge gained remains within your organization.

Disadvantages

• Finding experienced SEO specialists is very difficult. At many companies, job openings remain unfilled for a long time. Few SEO specialists are looking for a new position, and there is high demand for them. So, you’ll need to be patient to find a good specialist.
• Hiring an SEO specialist can be very expensive. It’s not unusual to pay a senior SEO specialist a gross salary of €4K+. On top of that, there are insurance premiums, payroll taxes, workspace costs, pension contributions, vacation days, vacation pay, licensing fees, training costs, and so on.
• A freelancer or agency often has a wide range of tools at their disposal, which yield significant efficiency gains. As a result, a freelancer or agency doesn’t need as many hours as an in-house SEO specialist.
• When someone works in-house, they’re often less up to date on all the latest developments. If the specialist has just come from an agency, that won’t be a problem yet, but after a few years, there’s a chance their knowledge will fall behind.
• There are few SEO specialists who are truly proficient in all aspects of the field—just as is the case with freelancers. That doesn’t have to be a problem, but for many companies, it does mean they need to immediately build a team of multiple SEO specialists.
• It’s not easy to let employees go if they aren’t performing as expected. Often, you don’t realize this right away, because SEO takes time. When you discover after a while that the SEO specialist isn’t performing, you can’t simply terminate the employment contract. It’s easier to terminate contracts with freelancers or agencies.

Tips for Hiring an SEO Specialist

• Choose an SEO specialist who has experience across various industries. In most cases, this will be a specialist who has worked at an agency and wants to focus on a single client by switching to “client-side” work.
• To keep your SEO specialist or SEO team on their toes, it may be a good idea to have an outside specialist take a look from time to time.
• Don’t skimp on SEO tools, because they help you work efficiently and achieve optimal results.
• Have an SEO specialist attend SEO meetups and other international events to ensure that their knowledge remains up to date.

Scenario 5: Train Your Own SEO Specialists

If it’s difficult to find SEO specialists, you can train people yourself. You have several options for training SEO specialists: (online) SEO training programs, courses, meetups, events, workshops, hiring external consultants, hiring speakers, or enrolling them in a training program.

Benefits

• If you already have someone in mind internally, you won’t need to hire new people. This saves a lot of time in the search for a (potential) SEO specialist.
• By providing in-house training, you give your current employees the opportunity to grow professionally.
• You can choose for yourself in which areas you want to train someone and which courses, programs, or training sessions you will use for that purpose.
• The knowledge gained stays within your company.

Disadvantages

• It takes a very long time to properly train someone. It often takes at least two years to train an SEO specialist who is knowledgeable in various areas (keyword research, strategy, data analysis, technical analysis, copywriting, link building, etc.).
• When you have someone take a training program or course, you’re only learning the basics. Learning SEO is mainly a matter of getting plenty of “hands-on experience.”
• Because you need to gain a lot of experience, it takes a long time before you’ve mastered everything. In addition, there’s a high chance that someone who is still being trained will make a number of mistakes that will affect the outcome. It’s important to keep that in mind.

Tips for Training an SEO Specialist

• There are many courses and training programs available, both nationally and internationally. Keep in mind that you often have to pay a fair amount to take a good course.
• If a paid course isn’t an option due to budget constraints, look for some good SEO books, read authoritative SEO blogs, and watch videos like Moz’s “Whiteboard Friday.”
• Events worth attending include BrightonSEO, Mozcon, Yoastcon, and Friends of Search.
• Also look for SEO meetups, such as the SEO Benelux meetups.

Scenario 6: The Hybrid Model—Outsourcing a Portion

For many companies, this is the best approach to SEO: handling some of it in-house and outsourcing the rest. To make this work as effectively as possible, it’s important to identify where your business could use some help. Is it in the area of strategy? Or perhaps technical SEO or link building? Next, you present these needs to an agency or freelancer.

Benefits

• You specifically ensure that areas of expertise in which your own marketers are not proficient are handled by specialists.
• Outsourcing some tasks and handling others in-house is more cost-effective than outsourcing everything to an external provider.
• You’ll ensure that in-house expertise continues to grow, especially during an SEO consulting project.
• You retain control over your search engine optimization. You can determine the processes, budgets, and objectives in-house and then find an external partner to support them.

Disadvantages

• This works best if you’re aware of your internal weaknesses.
• When SEO isn’t given the right priority internally, it gets pushed to the back burner because your in-house marketers have to focus on other tasks.
• Not all agencies and freelancers are open to this type of arrangement.

Tips for Outsourcing Part of Your SEO

• Be clear with the parties you approach and state right away that you will be performing part of the work in-house.
• If you’re unable to identify your own weaknesses, it’s a good idea to hire someone to do so. That way, you can be sure that you’ll ultimately outsource the right tasks.
• Attend SEO meetups and events, and network with other marketing managers and entrepreneurs to see how they address their weaknesses and find the right partners.

The choice depends on how you approach search engine optimization

To make the best choice, it’s important to determine where you currently stand with search engine optimization. Are you just getting started with search engine optimization? If so, it’s important to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

To make a good choice, ask yourself the following questions:

1. How is your business performing in terms of SEO? How much can you invest in SEO, and what should the return on that investment be? Keep in mind that the return on SEO takes time—at least 6 to 12 months.
2. What is the current level of internal SEO knowledge? What knowledge is missing? And what knowledge would give you a significant boost?

So what’s best for you?

We hope this has given you a better understanding of the options available to you for getting more out of search engine optimization. Feel free to contact us—we’d be happy to help.