Redeeming outsourcing as a strategy for SEO

Before I first started working on the SEO for the OZHut group of stores, I had contacted a few SEO companies out there at the time to see how much they wanted to charge and what sort of methodology they employed.

Most of the answers we got at the time involved a “packaged” deal around the $3,000 to $5,000 mark. When asked about how they went about doing SEO, all I remember hearing was “our engineers will work on that and I can’t tell you much more because these are ‘trade secrets’…”

Now really, that’s just silly. SEO isn’t rocket science. It’s quite straightforward and most people can pick it up, or at least understand how it generally works. As such, we’ve been doing most of our SEO in-house since then.

That being said, we’ve also outsourced certain functions of our SEO in recent times and have found that to be quite a fruitful exercise.

Here are a few good reasons why outsourcing parts of your SEO strategy can also work for you:

1) SEO development for a new site varies in its demand for resources

While the early stages of keyword research and setting up Adwords campaigns to test keyword data may be quite easy to do in-house, you may not have the resources to do extensive link-building and PR work.

Outsourcing this stage to a specialised link-builder or PR agency might be an easy way to ramp up for the short-term until you get good results.

This allows you to scale your efforts up and down as you need.

2) Some aspects of SEO have a higher learning curve than others

While basic link-building is quite simple, advanced inbound marketing can be a little bit more difficult to execute by yourself.

It typically requires a designer, developer and marketer working together on a project.

While you may be able to eventually get there, the demand for short-term results may be eased by calling upon someone with an already established team.

3) SEO is constantly evolving

While we definitely did not outsource our SEO strategy and efforts completely, we have worked closely with other agencies in the past to consult with us on improving our strategy.

These strategic arrangements have been beneficial in providing a richer, more robust plan.

Having another switched-on group to bounce ideas off is always invaluable.