Businesses, particularly small businesses, can benefit from a professionally developed search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Today, the internet has transformed how you market your business to your target audience. A strategic SEO and digital marketing plan makes even the smallest businesses visible to relevant users around the world, allowing them to compete with larger brands. However, this is only effective if you have an experienced SEO specialist or a team of SEO professionals working for you.
Small business owners must decide whether to hire an SEO expert or outsource their digital marketing services to a local SEO company. If you’re a local business in Montreal, your first approach will be hiring a local expert.
However, these come with various SEO benefits and drawbacks, such as having dedicated talent and working with the best SEO company for small businesses.
Let’s get started and have a look at the pros and cons of building an in-house SEO team for your business.
What is SEO and its Different Types?
Search engine optimization (SEO) improves various aspects of your website to increase its visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing.
Consider the last time you searched for something you wanted to buy online. You went to a search engine, typed what you were looking for, and clicked on one of the first results. This is SEO in action: you want your business website to be recognized as a top result for relevant searches that bring you to the top results.
SEO services address various aspects of your website that influence how search engines perceive its quality and relevance to user searches, including:
Technical SEO: These are the technical aspects of your website that affect user experience, user interface, loading times, and parts that users cannot see but search engines like Google consider the most.
Local SEO: Local SEO services optimize your website for users searching for your product or service near your location or service areas. Considering the previous example, if your business is in Montreal, your Montreal SEO company should target people who are looking for your store or services in your local area.
On-page SEO: On-page SEO is about optimizing your website’s content based on relevant keywords. This includes optimizing your product pages, category pages, homepage, and meta descriptions.
Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO encompasses various approaches and marketing strategies, including guest posts, broken link building, the skyscraper technique, HARO outreach, and other similar tactics, to enhance online presence and domain authority.
Hiring an In-House SEO Professional: Pros and Cons
This option requires your recruitment team to search for potential employees. Depending on your SEO requirements, you may hire a single in-house SEO specialist or a team to manage the various aspects of optimizing your website’s SEO strategy.
Pros
1. Make quick changes to your SEO strategy
Having an in-house SEO specialist on your team enables you to adjust your strategy promptly. They are paid to focus solely on your company’s SEO marketing efforts, allowing you to reduce the time it takes for your changes to take effect.
2. A focused team dedicated to your website
SEO agencies have multiple clients, so your point of contact (POC) and everyone involved in your SEO strategy are most likely working on other projects. If the agency you’re working with has taken on too much and is struggling to manage all of its clients, your company’s SEO marketing strategy may be overlooked.
You won’t have to worry about this risk if you hire your own team. As long as you hire quality talent to manage your website, your SEO marketing strategy can help your company expand its online reach.
3. In-house collaboration
This does not necessarily imply working from an office; one of the advantages of an in-house SEO team is that you can see how they work together to achieve a common goal. Many SEO agencies provide results without explaining how they ended up at those results. You must believe that their team worked as hard as they could to achieve the best possible outcome.
Some business owners may prefer not to take this risk and instead rely on their team. Their team is working toward the same goal and has access to similar resources and information about the industry and business. As a result, some companies prefer to be able to monitor their team’s process.
Cons
1. Expensive hiring process for an entire SEO team
When you outsource your SEO team, you only pay for the services they provide. As an employer, you will be responsible for all of the costs associated with finding a skilled employee.
According to Glassdoor, the average employer spends $4,000 and takes approximately 24 days to hire a new employee. Consider the following costs, along with the time and effort required to hire an employee:
- Job sourcing
- Pre-hire assessments
- Background checks
- Recruitment outsourcing
- Job board fees
- Marketing
- Sign-on bonuses
Once you’ve hired an SEO specialist or an entire SEO team, think about the ongoing and one-time costs. This includes:
- Monthly Salaries
- 401k benefit, allowances, and monthly rewards.
- Statutory benefits such as insurance, paid sick leave, Social Security, etc.
- Equipment costs
- Paid SEO tools and productivity softwares
In addition to these expenses, you risk incurring the costs of a bad hire. These are employees who, despite a promising application, do not meet the required performance and quality standards. This entails incurring the costs of hiring and promptly replacing them.
2. Your SEO specialist must wear several hats
You must choose whether to hire a single SEO specialist or an entire team. Hiring a large number of employees results in increased costs associated with onboarding new employees. Employing one or two, however, requires them to be a jack of all trades in all aspects of SEO.
Rather than working with experts in a single area of SEO, you’ll be working with a team with multiple responsibilities.
3. Slower work due to multiple responsibilities
Your SEO strategy can only move as quickly as your employees can. With so many aspects of SEO required to develop a successful SEO marketing strategy, your team’s capabilities may be limited by their responsibilities and the tools at their disposal.
This may put you at a disadvantage because your team will need to prioritize specific tasks. While having an in-house agency allows you to make quick changes to your SEO strategy, it also means deferring some tasks to prioritize others.
Conclusion
Having an in-house SEO team comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Now it’s up to you to decide what’s the best solution for you. Whether you want to build one in-house and take full control over your SEO, or just outsource it to an agency and sit back waiting for promised results. We hope this article helps you understand the process and make the right decision for your business.
