As a web agency, your clients will likely ask you whether you can handle their entire SEO campaign, to save them the trouble of sourcing a specialist.
Managing SEO campaigns would boost your revenue and make your web agency more enticing to potential clients. However, it brings several challenges.
You will need to create an entirely new service offering, decide upon a pricing structure, build, and populate a landing page, and choose how many internal resources you will dedicate.
The steepest challenge of all is how you will fulfil the service itself.
Without the right team of SEO experts, you will be unable to assist customers with their campaigns without directing far too much time, money, and human resources away from other parts of your web agency.
A potential solution is to outsource your SEO or create an in-house team.
These are the benefits of both outsourcing your SEO or bringing it in-house and how to choose the best option for your web agency:
Benefits of outsourcing SEO
It saves time
Outsourcing your SEO services can save your busy web agency heaps of time.
By having an external SEO team handle each order, your in-house team can stay focused on other business areas.
Additional expertise
Another benefit of outsourcing your SEO is the expertise you will gain from working with an external team. Your web agency team must manage several services and cannot become true SEO experts.
Instead, you can outsource your work to dedicated experts who will effectively become temporary employees. They will likely consist of content writers and on-site technical experts.
When your client receives the work, they will be impressed by the quality and speed of the service, as if it was your own.
Cost saving
Arguably the most compelling reason to outsource your SEO is due to the potential cost saving.
Although you might imagine that relying on an external team costs money, it pales in comparison to the price of recruiting SEO experts, paying their wages and the hidden overhead costs involved.
Process more orders faster
A key obstacle that prevents your web agency from scaling faster is a lack of capacity. When you only have a small team, you will limit the number of client projects you can onboard simultaneously.
Turning prospects away leaves money on the table, which outsourcing could rectify. You can double your team size overnight and ensure you process far more orders in a short space of time.
Retain clients for longer
When you offer SEO as a service, you can hold on to existing clients by cross-selling them this additional service.
By outsourcing SEO, you can afford to keep existing clients on your books without compromising resources that could be used on new clients.
Benefits of bringing SEO in-house
Control
An in-house SEO team gives you complete visibility over their progress.
What’s more, if there is an issue, you can rectify it immediately, with control over how quickly you complete the project, what the service consists of, and the ability to guide the team directly.
Brand awareness
An in-house team will understand your brand and its service offerings inside out. There will be no need to repackage the service as your own or to make it feel more authentically ‘yours’.
Access to expertise around the clock
Outsourcing is fantastic because it gives you direct access to SEO experts, with no painful learning curves necessary. However, you will never own that company, so the expertise is only temporary.
If you would like to expand SEO expertise within your business, you can only achieve it through in-house recruitment.
How to work with the right external SEO partner
Creating an outsourced SEO offering is critical if you want to scale your web agency quickly, increase the number of clients you take on, and improve the chances of them working with you for longer.
But how do you create a working relationship with the right SEO partner?
This list will help guide your approach to finding the right external team to collaborate with:
- Set a specific challenge for your external partner to help you with (i.e., fulfil five projects within a month)
- Find an external partner that uses white-hat techniques
- Ask for a trial run if you are unsure
- Build a strong channel of communication between your team and the external agency
- Set a clear framework (i.e., delivery time, weekly meeting dates, pricing structures).
If you are looking for a trustworthy SEO partner to collaborate with, reach out to us today.
