Should You Hire an Agency for SEO or Stay In-House?

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TL;DR:

• Hiring an agency can provide expertise, flexibility, and cost savings, but may lack deep understanding of your business.
• Considerations for hiring an agency include pricing, expertise, reputation, communication, and outcome orientation.
• In-house SEO teams offer a deep understanding of your business, brand, and ICP, leading to more specific and resonant content.
• Automating SEO best practices with tools like Letterdrop can help achieve SEO goals without the need for an agency.

To hire in-house SEOs or not to hire in-house SEOs — that is the question, whether you're just starting your investment in SEO or coming to the end of a contract with an SEO agency.

You need to know the pros and cons of outsourcing versus keeping SEO talent in house, as well as the implications of where your business is at, before making the decision.

Make the wrong investment, and your SEO visibility tanks.

Hiring an SEO Agency: The Pros

SEO agencies come already equipped with a team with varying expertise in different areas of SEO — link building, strategy, the works.

This comes with an obvious set of benefits:

• You can pick and choose an agency according to very specific needs
• Agencies eliminate the need for you to pay salaries and benefits to an in-house team
• Agencies are adaptable, having to constantly keep up with industry changes and various clients

There are also full-service agencies that can help you tackle SEO from top to bottom, which gives you more bang for your buck in the long term.

Anna Sonnenberg is an experienced contractor for B2B SaaS. Here's her opinion on hiring in house vs outsourced writers:

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Top 12 SEO Agencies to Consider

We've put together a list of what we believe to be the top 12 best SEO agencies out there on the market today, if you want a deep-dive into what they cost and what they can do for you.

Here's the list:

1. Animalz
2. Foundation
3. Draft.dev
4. Hit Subscribe
5. Brafton
6. North Star Inbound
7. Ten Speed
8. Siege Media
9. Nowsourcing
10. Omniscient Digital
11. Smart Sites
12. Elephate

Why Hiring an SEO Agency Might Be Wrong For You

It goes without saying that hiring an agency, especially a full-service agency, can get expensive in the long run.

More importantly, agencies simply can't get the same deep understanding of your ICP, your business, and your goals that in-house SEOs can.

This can mean less impactful content that doesn't move the needle.

Other notable drawbacks include:

• You don't know if you're a priority versus other clients — bigger agencies might send you their "B Players", putting you at a disadvantage
• You have to invest in the tooling you want to use separately from the agency cost — if you want to use X tooling and the agency doesn't have expertise in it or won't buy it themselves, it comes out of your own pocket
• You typically have to handle content distribution yourself

We created a SEO agency checklist to help you make sure your agency is delivering on what they say they are.

You can drive SEO results yourself without the help of an agency just by using tools like Semrush, GA4, and Letterdrop.

Considerations for Hiring a Good Agency

Here are some other considerations you need to take into account when hiring an agency:

• Does the agency pricing model and target market fit your business stage? You want to drive results. Cheaper agencies might fit your budget, but might not actually get you to where you need to be. So carefully consider the tradeoff.
• Does the agency show evidence of its expertise? These can be successful case studies on their website, their clients' user experience, or examples of client outcomes.
• Does the agency have a good reputation? Reviews and testimonials on sites like Clutch or G2 can tell you whether the agency delivers on things like quality and customer service.
• Do they take the time to understand your business? "Good writing is good thinking." It's impossible to create great content unless you actually understand what you're writing about. Many agencies don't have a process in place to sit down and really dig into your ICP, market, and product.
• Are you getting their B-players? Larger agencies tend to be understaffed with too many clients. Even if they've produced great work for previous clients, you might be working with their worst writers.
• Does the agency communicate well? Timely responses that fully answer your questions are crucial as they affect the end-to-end content production process.
• Is the agency outcome-oriented and goal focused? Does the agency advertise a clear strategy for improving ROI? Is there evidence that they delivered on it? Or is it a content mill churning out mid-level SEO filler that won't build your content moat?

Hiring for SEO In-House: The Pros

While in-house hiring does pose longer-term cost implications, it comes with serious benefits:

• In-house teams have a deep understanding of your business, brand, and ICP. This means SEO strategies and content are more specific, more consistent, and more likely to resonate with real buyers
• Companies with in-house teams keep full control over the internal hiring and strategic process, allowing for more efficient and transparent internal operations when it comes to SEO
• In-house SEOs have access to expertise within the company itself (execs, product managers, customer success, sales reps, etc.) This allows for more unique, expert content without additional cost
• Cross-training between the marketing team and other teams can help diversify their skillsets

Hiring In-House Is A Long-Term Investment

It goes without saying that hiring a full-time team of in-house SEOs means:

• Salaries and benefits
• Training costs

But in our opinion, it's the better choice: investing in turning your employees into experts will mean more ROI in the long term.

Automate SEO Best Practices Without an Agency

Once again, you don't need an agency to tackle SEO best practices.

In fact, Lauren Funaro from Scribe saves $5,000 a month on agency costs and 11x'ed paid signups within a year of using Letterdrop.

Don't believe us? Hear it from Lauren herself, and check out our Scribe case study.

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How does Lauren do it?

Letterdrop can:

• Automate technical SEO best practices (internal link building, add missing target keywords naturally into the text, add alt text to images, etc)
• Identify search intent and provide an EEAT guide specific to your content
• Handle content distribution — automatically repurpose video to text, URLs to LinkedIn posts, automate engagement, and more
• Integrate with Gong to pull sales call insights and create first drafts of related content
• Provide real-time data on pages that need an SEO refresh and why
• Provide insight into how much revenue can be attributed to content

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Go In-House For Better Informed and Targeted SEO Content

While SEO agencies can help take care of strategy, they can often fall short of expectations when it comes to the execution of more specific and technical SEO responsibilities.

Nothing beats an intimate knowledge of your ICP when it comes to delivering SEO articles that are actually capable of driving qualified inbound traffic — and ultimately, revenue.

We can help you deliver on your SEO goals without the additional costs and headaches that come with hiring an agency.