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SEO Consulting – Outsourcing versus In-House

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be done by paying an outside firm or consultant or buy hiring someone in-house.  In this article I am going to talk about the pro's and con's of outsourcing SEO and keeping it in-house.

It's an Outsourced world

In a world where we can outsource printing, delivery, payroll, accounting, and most everything else it makes sense to also consider outsourcing your SEO work. The reason you outsource work is because it is not a primary objective for your company. Lets say you are a hosting company. Your money making activity is running banks of servers with a high level of dependency. You spend your days updating software, patrolling for hackers and viruses, and keeping up with demand. You should have an internal marketing department handling core strategy does it really make sense to build up a large department made up of specialists in SEO?

Here is a great list of why to outsource in general on the Wikipedia page on Outsourcing.

When outsourcing an SEO company be sure to get references and call them. Ask them questions about reporting and the relationship they have with their SEO consultant. You should hear things like: "We get extensive reports on work completed and results achieved." and "Anytime we have a question we get a quick reply and a complete answer."

Be wary of anyone who talks like this: "We guarantee a #1 placement." or "You will be #1 in less than 30 days." There is fine print behind these claims that they don't disclose like the fact that they are talking about long tail keywords that get you no traffic. If they are getting really fast results then there is a high probability that they are using Black Hat SEO techniques that result in short term results but end up with you getting kicked off the search engines forever. Read more about Black Hat SEO here.

Keeping it In-House:

For In-House SEO there are some serious considerations to be made:

• Mastery of Language - Search is a language driven activity.
• Research capabilities - Knowing where to look and also knowing when to learn more are key.
• Technical Expertiese - HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are basic here.

Keep in mind that SEO is a hot hot item these days and highly skilled SEO consultants are going to be hard to hold onto. Before you spend a lot of time and money training someone to become an SEO Consultant maybe you would be better off hiring one...

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