Why To Hire Dedicated SEO Experts Offshore than Outsourcing

The age of the phone book is at an end. And there are no two ways about it. According to a Harris Interactive poll, 60% of people from the U.S. use the internet to find contact information.

The internet is a big part of people’s lives nowadays, with almost 236.5 million users accessing search services from search engines. What’s staggering is that a vast majority of these searches, about 89% of the total searches on the internet, are made for informing purchase decisions. In comparison, 71% of business purchase decisions result from it.

Just like marketing teams in the U.S. spending over $80 billion dollars on SEO services this year, you should also contemplate investing in it for successful digital marketing strategies. But how does one succeed at it? For any business, two conventional routes exist – either they outsource the SEO project to an external agency, or hire a dedicated SEO expert offshore and keep the control.

A recent trend that has gained traction is that of businesses outsourcing their SEO capabilities to agencies, with as many as 67% of organizations having been reported to do so. However, this practice is usually ill-informed, and they don’t take into account their market, particular situation, and target audiences.

Here, we will take a look at the reasons why.

Problems with Outsourcing SEO

A lot of businesses straightaway jump on the white-label SEO partners bandwagon. However, in this process, they tend to lose big on resources and results achieved. Let’s see how.

1. Communication

Any time you outsource any job to an external agency, communication takes a hit because the business process doesn’t take place under your roof. So much so that a study by the Outsourcing Center revealed that 16% of outsourced projects fail is because of poor communication.

2. Transparency

Outsourcing comes with a general sense of foreboding because of the reasons mentioned above. Add to that, a lack of transparency and what awaits businesses is nothing but lost revenue. This is such a big quandary for organizations that 10% of them attributed their unwillingness to outsource to lack of transparency.

3. Incomprehensive

Much like SEO is only one part of your broader focus areas, you’re only one client of the several that an agency has, and many a time, their work might not be as comprehensive as you want if you are chosing the shared resource model.

How Hiring Dedicated SEO Experts is Different from Outsourcing SEO

Should you hire a dedicated SEO expert offshore as an extension to your in-house team, or should you just outsource and handover your project? Let’s look at how hiring an expert can help you avoid the pitfalls of outsourcing your SEO needs.

1. Know the SEO Experts Leading Your Regiment

Since the choice of appointing the right personnel rests in your hands, you can be more scrupulous as an organization while assessing the capabilities of an individual SEO expert. This way, you can also ensure that the individual you hire is better aligned with the organization’s objectives and therefore has a far better chance of contributing substantially to increasing the ROI.

Apart from that, it’s the very nature of SEO being an inbound marketing strategy that makes it pertinent to hire an offshore expert. In fact, with 59% of marketers reporting that inbound practices provide the best quality leads for them, an offshore expert that knows your clients and needs in and out is more suited to develop achievable KPIs that sit well with the company’s objectives.

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2. Have Greater Control and Plan Your Success

An undeniable benefit of a dedicated SEO team is that you can take more control than project-based outsourcing and manage SEO processes alongside the latest trends. You will be able to manage your team more transparently.

For example, in 2019, Google’s new BERT algorithm turned a lot of heads as SEO professionals learned that to convert users, the content has to be developed in line with user intent rather than keyword strings.

A dedicated SEO team working in line with a defined digital marketing strategy can work wonders for you. In fact, 66% of content marketers rely on such strategies, with 86% of them led or managed by a dedicated remote team or person. With a defined strategy carried out by a dedicated remote team, your organization can control how well it adapts to new trends of the market.

3. Define the Right Team Structure

While deciding how SEO should fit into your company, the way to go is ‘made to order.‘

With the control process in your hands, you can define your ideal SEO team structure that builds on the following:

Have separate teams for product and service.
Content should be a team of its own.
PPC and SEO should be separate teams.
SEO should come within e-commerce.

Take a look at the image below to see how an SEO team is structured on the basis of the above for an e-commerce VP.

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4. Witness the Progress Along the Journey

An organization hiring a dedicated SEO expert offshore has complete control over their creative freedom and can witness the progress of the strategies applied by them and also remodel it if the need arises.

The first step to this end can be building a mind map to gain a holistic overview of their strategies and how these can come to define future processes.

With it, you can envision strategies and combine ideas more easily as you arrive at them by seeing how they fit in the bigger picture. It reduces the load expended by strategy decisions on your creative process, and you can brainstorm effectively as a result.

Ways to Build a Dedicated Team of SEO Experts

What does a dream SEO team look like?

Like it goes for most other things in SEO, the answer is it depends.

However, there are a few key things that you should have in place if you want to build a strong offshore SEO team.

1. Content Team

With almost 4.4 million blog posts being published every day, you need to have a team that can build quality content that not only helps you rank but also make conversions. In other words, your content team should be able to:

Have a good grasp of your niche’s content.
Cover entire topics in one post.
Incorporate social proof, stats, and sharing elements that make it relevant.

2. Web Development

The thing that most needs attention in SEO is the technical aspect of it because code is still its foundation. Just by having someone on your team that knows how to code, you can avoid technical SEO issues that could jeopardize your site’s performance.

For example, with the simple act of cleaning up technical issues, Todd McDonald increased its client’s organic traffic by 32.69% and improved transactions by 30.01%.

2. Link Building

One of the most vital SEO skills, you need someone that can garner people’s attention to your content by doing things like:

Blogger outreach.
Infographic promotion campaigns.
Link prospecting.
Unlinked mention link building.
Broken link building.

4. Marketing and Promotion

Finally, you need someone that can direct the end goals of your SEO and content marketing efforts and making sure that your traffic consists of your target customer.

Conclusion

SEO can be complex, and it’s crucial that you do it right for a number of reasons. Not only does it have a 14.6% close rate, but it also contributes to 70% of click-through on organic search results.

Instead of reselling your SEO needs to an external agency, you can just as well hire a dedicated SEO expert from them and avoid playing catch up on progress reports with agencies. Keep in mind your unique needs, goals, and budget and ensure to bear the aforementioned trends in mind, and you are good to go.