Whether you’re a business new to SEO, an in-house employee, or working for an agency, there will be a time when you’ll need to outsource some type of SEO work. Maybe you had someone quit suddenly or your client asked you to do a big push on something. Whatever the reason, there are things to watch out for when you don’t have full control.

General Link Building

Link building is what is most commonly outsourced, especially by companies that have recently expanded their SEO efforts. If a company or agency says they just do link building and not a specific type of link building, you should ask for an example report. This will give you an idea of the methods they’re pursuing.

Most agencies that build links will use a combination of several methods, which is great. However, it’s important to find out what methods they’re using. For example, if they were building a lot of social bookmarks along with other forms of temporary links, your link profile would constantly fluctuate. This would look very unnatural and leave you with an inorganic profile.

If it’s so dangerous, why outsource it? Good link building is tedious and very demanding. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your own efforts are just as risky as hiring the wrong agency.

Pros:

• Instantly have experienced link builders working for you.
• Not having to deal with the difficulty and tediousness of link building.
• Easy to scale.

Cons:

• Link building can be expensive to outsource.
• Much less control than link building in-house.
• Not very flexible in doing something out of the agency’s routine.
• You typically won’t see your links until an entire month’s worth has already been acquired.

Things to keep in mind:

• Be extremely thorough with the first few reports for assurance that you’re getting what you want.
• Some companies use temporary linking methods, which taint otherwise natural looking link profiles.
• Be careful if there are any annual fees on links. This can cause your link building costs to increase exponentially with each new year.

Guest posts for link building

The demand for this has been increasing alongside the gaining popularity of guest posts. This outsources well if you find a good agency or contractor. It’s a chance to get good quality content on the web that links back to you or your client.

One of the main things that vary from agency to agency is how they discover potential links. For the highest quality, you want an agency that is doing manual outreach. If they’re looking for blogs via forums or third party websites, the quality of the websites decrease dramatically.

Make it clear that the agency is not to write posts representing your brand. You don’t need someone talking in the voice of your brand when they know nothing about you or your client.

Pros:

• Huge time saver. Guest posting is a very long process.
• An agency is already experienced in acquiring guest posts properly.

Cons:

• Little control over content topics.
• Little control over which sites are publishing your content.
• Posts will be live before you can evaluate them.

Things to keep in mind:

• Some contractors will put their company information within the author bio: in which case it’ll be easy to spot that an SEO agency wrote the post. This is typically not preferred.
• Specify whether or not you want authoritative sites mixed into the post.
• Be certain that they are not writing posts with brand narrative.

On-Site SEO

This is one is a little tricky. If you need to outsource your on-site SEO, your knowledge of such is probably limited. This makes it difficult to tell if the person you’ve hired knows what they’re doing. At the same time, on-site SEO is very important for a good website.

Do your research and ask for referrals until you find a company you trust and are comfortable with.

If you already have a full team, but no one with SEO knowledge, have a full site audit performed. This way you can see all major issues with your site and fix them internally. You should also consider monthly consultations in order to stay on top of potential issues or major changes to the industry.

Pros:

• Less expensive than hiring in-house, especially for quick but critical back-end fixes
• Consultants can be hired on a case-by-case basis.

Cons:

• If you’re looking to do more than just on-site SEO, outsourcing is more expensive than going in-house.
• It’s possible to rely too much on the agency.
• It’s easier for in-house staff to work directly with other departments.

Things to keep in mind:

• I can’t stress how important it is to do your homework and hire someone who is credible and trustworthy.
• If you hire for consultancy but don’t have the appropriate in-house staff, you may have to outsource additional work such as web-development issues.
• Remember what you’re hiring for. If you find yourself in a situation where you hire someone for on-site SEO, ignore their recommendations, and then wonder what you’re actually paying them for, you need to rethink the type of SEO you’re looking for.

Press releases

Press releases have been losing popularity over the past couple of years. They were previously a common way to generate links, but have since lost a lot of their juice.

This doesn’t mean they’re not worth getting; however, you need to push news that starts conversation and generates interest to get much out of them. Because of this, you should keep them as an internal process.

Pros:

• It’s easy to get several press releases out quickly through an agency.
• Fairly inexpensive to outsource.

Cons:

• It’s hard (not impossible) for an agency to write genuine and compelling content regarding a businesses operation, since they’re not a part of it first hand.
• If the content doesn’t start conversation and some stir within social media, the benefits are temporary.

Things to keep in mind:

• There are two types of press release services: ones submitted to several varying news sections and ones submitted to relevant and niche-specific locations.
• A third party company will represent your brand name.

Social bookmarks

This is another one that has been popping up a lot lately. Social bookmarks are temporary links, which, if pointing to great content, can generate good traffic. The problem is a lack of diverse landing pages.

Instead, you should target other media such as guest posts, infographics, new posts on your own site, and other forms of new content. It’s unwise to continuously pound social bookmarks for the same page over and over. This will look very unnatural.

Pros:

• You spare yourself the monotony and tedium of individually submitting to bookmarking sites.
• Very cheap to outsource!
• Social bookmarks are low priority, so the time you save is a plus.

Cons:

• Little to no control of submitted content.
• The content tends to be slapped together quickly.

Things to keep in mind:

• They tend to be written poorly so it’s good idea to submit to the top 10-20 social bookmarking sites internally, then outsource for the rest.

Social profiles

Nearly all social profiles provide a link back to your website, making them a great source for easy links. They require simple information similarly to local listings. They can take up a lot of time which, when you have a lot on your plate, is not disposable.

The biggest issue with these is you will still have to spot check your profiles and be sure everything is intact. The most reliable service I’ve found for this is Knowem.

Pros:

• You will save hours of time
• Not having to deal with the tedium of doing it yourself!

Cons:

• The quality can be lower than if you were to do it internally.

Things to keeping in mind:

• You should still go through your profiles and make sure they are all fully completed.
• You’ll still need to fill out the top 10-20 most popular profiles yourself to ensure quality.

Copywriting:

This probably has the widest range of quality out of everything. Freelancers usually provide the best copy, but have limited bandwidth. Third parties have great bandwidth, but lower quality copy.

If you need help maintaining a blog there are several services that can write on a consistent basis for you and provide quality content. Like anything else, however, it comes at a price.

Outsourcing guest posting can work, but I find the delay in communicating with a blogger and a copywriter inefficiently long, to the point where a blogger may forget you even want a post.

You could counteract this by getting something written first;, however, you run the risk of the blogger turning down the idea for the content.

Pros:

• Fairly inexpensive.
• Great if you only need content here and there.

Cons:

• Difficult to scale.
• It’s 10 times easier to have a copywriter in-house.

Things to keep in mind:

• Be very… very clear about what you do and don’t want in your content.
• Mention if you want basic code likeand tags within the content.

Directory submissions

This one gets talked about a lot, because it’s so commonly used and, for some reason, works way better than it should. However, most posts say you shouldn’t outsource this, because then you can end up with lots of duplicate or low quality descriptions. So what!

For the higher quality directories like Dmoz and Yahoo, you should absolutely fill them out manually. Most directories however, are the lowest of low hanging fruit. Save your poor interns gobs of stress! If you have the extra time to fill out directories manually, you’re doing something wrong.

Pros:

• Huge time and sanity saver.
• Super cheap!

Cons:

• Usually automated in some form or fashion, which brings down the quality of each listing.

Things to keep in mind:

• Even though most directory submission services ask you to put in one title and description,; however, if you contact them directly, they’re very open to mixing up several descriptions and titles to reduce duplicates.
• Fill out higher quality directories manually to ensure the best quality.

Infographics

Infographics can bring in a lot of traffic when done right. Due to the infographic boom over the past couple years, several infographic services that have popped up. This can be a great alternative if you don’t have the creative staff or time to dedicate to making an infographic.

Aside from the time it takes to create an infographic, they’re also a real challenge: coming up with a topic, gathering the proper data, creating the graphic, and then promoting it. You’ll need to inquire of the extend to the agency’s services. For example, some agencies may gather information and make a graphic for you, but don’t provide any promotion.

Pros:

• Infographics are challenging to create.
• Agencies dedicated solely to creating infographics will have more experience on what people do and don’t like.
• Through working with a full team you get better educated idea formation than you would on your own.

Cons:

• It can be hard to provide data without giving away sensitive information to an agency.
• Little control over the information and content.
• Can get expensive.
• With infographics containing so much information and visuals, it can be hard to explain what you’re looking for to an agency.

Things to keep in mind:

• Different agencies will do different things. Make sure to check which of these services they provide: data collection, creation, promotion, topic creation, content creation, and etc.
• Mention any additional data you might have to cover all potential creative ground.

Local Search

Local SEO is going to be a main goal for most brick and mortar locations. This involves making sure a business has a presence on local listing sites like Yelp, Google Local, City Search, etc.

Different agencies will go to different lengths in regards to local. Have a clear idea of what you need. You can either simply get your local listings filled out and updated or, if you’re a business with several locations, you may want to consider hiring for constant maintenance.

Pros:

• Local SEO has its differences from national SEO. If you don’t have direct experience, it’s beneficial to outsource.
• If you own hundreds of local locations, outsourcing can save your sanity. Managing several local locations can be a management nightmare.

Cons:

• It’s more efficient to do local in-house since any updates can be edited immediately.
• It’s easier to manage the content that goes up on your local listings internally.
• On a full scale SEO level, managing local listings on top of SEO can become quite expensive.

Things to keep in mind:

• Be clear about what services you are looking for: services can range from broad to very specific.
• Geographic Data plays a big role in local search signals, so it’s important to communicate seemingly mundane details. Changes to phone numbers or addresses are musts; corporate headquarters and store locations should be differentiated in Place listings.

Pay per click

PPC and SEO go hand in hand,; however people who specialize in one tend not to specialize in the other. PPC requires full-time attention and constant maintenance.

There are automated alternatives as well, but in a market that changes seasonally, these don’t work very well: by the time automation catches up, everything has changed again.

PPC can be outsourced fairly well. Since everything is based on ROI, you should always turn a profit with PPC. If at any point you’re investing more into PPC than you’re making, you should reevaluate your agency or strategy.

Pros:

• Based on ROI, so you should always come out on top.
• An experienced agency can increase your PPC revenue by an astonishing amount.
• Working with an agency can provide a new look at a PPC account that has previously only been internal.

Cons:

• Automation doesn’t always work well and a minor overlook can perpetuate into a bigger problem.

Things to keep in mind:

• Bringing a professional in-house will further increase the ROI. This is especially the case if the company charges on a performance base.
• If you plan to expand niches or grow internationally, an outsourced company will charge more, while someone in-house will stay at a similar wage.
• If you’re going into other countries and need to outsource it, make sure your agency can handle different languages; otherwise, you’ll need to hire multiple agencies.
• When starting with a new company, you should check your PPC account on a daily basis. What seems like a minor change can have dramatic effects.

Conclusion

Overall, I feel it’s always better to keep things in-house. Being able to have several departments work directly with each other on a day to day basis is an invaluable asset you can’t achieve through outsourcing.