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 consultant 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.

  • 3
    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 choosing the shared resource model.

How Hiring Dedicated SEO Experts is Different from Outsourcing SEO

Should you hire a professional SEO Expert offshore as an extension to your in-house team, or should you just outsource and hand over 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.

  • 3
    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.

  • 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.

    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.