SEO Agency vs In-House Team: What’s Best For Your Business?

The average SEO team costs £343,000 per year in salaries alone.

If you cannot afford that, hire an SEO agency instead.

This article is for business owners who sit on the fence. For those who could possibly afford to pay the £343k at a later date, but maybe are unsure if that’s the right strategy.

It’s also for business owners who have never hired an agency or dedicated in-house specialist for SEO. The salary costs may be an instant turn-off or you may be wondering if you could just hire one person and make them do everything for 1/10th of the cost.

I’m Joshua Allerton, Managing Director of Hatch and Vox. Before starting our SEO agency, I’ve worked both agency and client side — the latter as a generalist marketer.

I also started a vegan confectionary store, where as many small business owner know, me and my partner did everything. Including the marketing.

I’ve experienced all sides of this debate and I’m here to share the 9 biggest deciding factors that any business owner should consider:

1. ROI
2. Expertise
3. Speed of ROI
4. Cost
5. Scalability
6. Control
7. Communication
8. Reporting
9. Notice Period

Finish reading this article knowing if you should hire in-house or outsource your SEO to an agency. The answer isn’t the same for everyone, but your insight into your own business will guide you to the right decision.

(P.S. there’s a way to do both and I share that right at the end)

Let’s start with the first factor.

ROI & Expertise

In House

In-house can make you more money. As your business grows and you start to the scale, you can afford to hire full time specialists.

With SEO, you find these roles can overlap. Your content writer does not only write blog posts — they write social media posts, eBooks, and even email newsletter campaigns. Your technical SEO can get their hands dirty with maintaining and building your website further.

Even with these increase in costs, you’ll end up making more than with an SEO agency — especially when your own staff are brand experts.

But, this is the end game, not the journey.

If your marketing team is a couple of generalists (or just yourself), hiring a full expansive team will ruin you. That’s why an SEO agency is perfect for business owners who can afford one member of staff, but need a full team behind them.

SEO Agency

SEO Agencies are teams of experts. Instead of a generalist having to resurrect it’s past learnings from decades ago in a lecture hall (mixed in with beginner’s courses on YouTube), you have access to people who are in the SEO trenches every single day.

Fine — your money gets you less time with said experts, but the ROI is a lot bigger. These experts know exactly what to look for and how to fix it.

If you want to get the value based on per hour rate, hire in-house. If you want results, hire an SEO agency.

Be wary of the agency you choose. Most SEO agencies are “too deep in the trenches”, they forget to see the bigger pictures — choosing to obsess over vanity metrics like impressions and rankings, instead of what really matters…

Conversions (and your return on investment).

The Hatch and Vox Way

ROI is our primary goal when you invest with us. Right from the start, we ask the important questions:

• What’s your most profitable service?
• What’s your average lifetime value per service?
• What’s your gross profit per service?

It may feel personal — or like you’re revealing secrets — but this helps us ensure we’re generating a return on your investment.

We track cost per lead on a periodic basis. It’s not as straightforward as PPC, but it should be treated the same. After all, if lead costs are going up and lifetime value is going down — why would you keep investing?

Speed of ROI

In House

Sometimes, the business itself is the biggest obstacle. Internal policies and workflows slow action down and you end up waiting 6 months for a simple redirect to be implemented (we’ve been there!).

Distractions also hinder the speed of your ROI. You’re in a middle of a campaign and an emergency appears. Or you just need an employee to work a few hours on a new idea. Your main SEO goals get sidetracked as you reassign tasks.

Both scenarios are easy to create with an in-house team, but even harder to overcome.

SEO Agency

Hiring an SEO agency isn’t perfect either. Agencies are notorious for high staff turnover rate. And when the economy goes through it’s cyclical down-time, redundancies are the first way to save money.

You feel like you’re starting again every 6 months with a new agency staff member. You’re constantly re-explaining yourself and discovering each staff member has their own way of doing things.

This slows down the speed of your ROI — unless you find an agency who does things differently.

The Hatch and Vox Way

We obsess over processes, workflows, and SOPs. Anyone should be able to jump into your account and know exactly what to do, when to do, and how to do it.

No matter if we bring on another Account Manager or you want to explore a new website design, our team can get right down to it.

Cost

In House

Salaries are your biggest expense when hiring in house. That’s where 90+% of your money goes to. And it’s the first expense you look at when you want to cut costs.

The biggest issue with this salary approach is you’re risking all your investment in time, not deliverables.

Salaries = money for time.

Fine — you can set targets and expect certain deliverables to be met. But, the process to fire someone (and the cost of rehiring) who doesn’t deliver is emotionally painful. You’ve seen this person everyday, developed a friendship with them, and probably helped out where you can.

It’s part of being in business, but its an ugly one you can avoid.

SEO Agency

SEO agencies CAN be different.

As agencies have multiple clients, they not only get a discount, but can “share” the cost of the latest tools and technology across all their retainers. Compared to what you’d pay for these tools, it’s extremely economical.

You end up getting a group of specialised experts with access to the best tools and technology for less than one employee.

Even better, instead of time, you’re investing in deliverables.

Retainer = deliverables = results.

Every month you’re expecting X, Y, and Z to happen. If it doesn’t, you’ve got reason to stop investing with that agency.

However, a high % of your retainer still goes on salaries. You’re just passing the problem on — which is fine — but this can still impact your deliverables. Especially if the agency has to let some employees go and you find yourself “restarting” every 6 months (see Speed of ROI).

The Hatch and Vox Way

We keep a lean team of in-house strategists.

Each strategist has access to a large freelance pool (each of different skillsets and price points) to get deliverables done.

For you, this means a higher % of your investment goes on actual deliverables, not just staff wages.

Scalability

In House

If you’ve hired before, you know how costly it is it — especially if you hire wrong.

When you’re ready to grow, you have to go through the headache of finding the right person, interviewing them, getting HR to approve, sending them the offer, negotiating salary, signing contracts, and then finally onboarding them.

How many missed opportunities flew by whilst you were trying to hire?

Not only in the potential growth of your SEO, but the other areas you neglected as you took the time to handle this yourself.

If you need more than one person to grow, imagine the time and money need for each one.

SEO Agency

With SEO agencies, you (normally) pay a set fee every month. If you need to scale fast, you let them know and then they’ll propose what they think is best. If they have set packages, you upgrade.

It’s a simple process, but often you lose control. Some agencies will try to scale the overall retainer when you only need one area.

For example, you may need more blog posts written each month, and the fee they send you includes more backlinks or there’s no real distinction between any deliverable.

You could end up paying for more than you actually need.

The Hatch and Vox Way

This is why we have separate content and backlink budgets.

Almost every client we’ve worked with gets to a point in their SEO campaign where it’s obvious they need more backlinks and nothing else.

It’s easier (and more transparent) for everyone to say “it’s time to increase your backlinks budget to £750 per month” instead of increasing the entire retainer collectively.

P.S. we make no money from your backlink budget. Every penny is spent on backlinks.

Control

In House

If you want control over everything, hire in-house teams. Some brands want to make sure everything is 101% perfect before releasing it to the world. They’ll spend hours in meeting arguing over the word choice in a blog post about giraffes.

(This is the internal roadblocks I mentioned in Speed of ROI).

In-house teams often miss the bigger picture. They become so ingrained in how their company operates that their presumptions are completely off.

SEO Agency

SEO agencies offer a different perspective. They work with multiple brands every day — some in your neighbouring sectors. They see what is working (and what is not working) across the industry, not just your business.

It’s why a strategy set by an SEO agency is usually better than an in-house team. They can see past your prejudices and presumptions, asking the right questions to get what’s really important to you, your brand, and your customers.

But there’s a risk that deliverables may be of poor quality. Instead of going back and forth internally, you have to deal with an outside party — which may operate on a different timeline to you.

The Hatch and Vox Way

We take different approaches depending on the level of control you want.

For example, law firms quite rightly want to double check our work before publishing. Saying the wrong thing can cause major damage to their reputation. We adjust our workflow and timelines to include a client review.

Other cases call for us to completely handover the content writing to someone internal. We simply create a content strategy, issue briefs, and suggest edits.

Some clients completely trust us and let us publish away — thanks to our onboarding document going into great detail about what we should and shouldn’t say or do.

We’re flexible and understand that trusting your business baby with someone else is hard.

Communication

In House

The beauty of an in-house team is you’re always connected to them. You can send them a Slack message wherever you are or call them into the meeting room at a minute’s notice.

The flip-side is if you constantly bother them, they won’t get any work done.

SEO Agency

SEO agencies tend to communicate through email and meetings.

If you’ve agreed the set deliverables every month, any extra requests will cost you more money. If you’re friendly with them, they may squeeze it in, but it might not be as quick as you like.

Some marketing agencies are now being added to the client’s Slack — or at least being able to communicate them through similar channels. This is great for clients who need more on-demand access, but will come at a higher cost. If you’re comfortable with that, great. If not, consider exactly what communication you need with your agency.

The Hatch and Vox Way

You get consistent email updates. For example when:

• A blog post has been published
• We have a question that’ll help with a deliverable
• We spot a new or different approach

You also get 1 hour with your strategist every month. This time is perfect to catchup on current progress, discuss any new opportunities, and find ways to overcome any roadblocks.

We don’t like to be all up in your face and expect a response to everything. But, we like to keep you in the loop.

Reporting

In House

Just like with communication, in-house teams allows you to have reports done almost instantly. With access to all your data, the reports can be detailed and give you amazing insights — allowing you to track metrics like ROI & CAC with accuracy.

Within a few moments, you can get a snapshot of your entire organisation and see how each department is helping the other.

But with multiple departments and line managers to report to, you may find yourself in hour long meetings discussing metrics that you don’t care about.

SEO Agency

Most SEO Agencies send either very minimal information or an info-dump filled with data you have no idea how to interpret. Even worse, they’ll arrange monthly meetings to read this report to you word-by-word.

If you have a well-versed Marketing Manager who handles the agency relationship, they may be able to translate and filter all the jargon for you. But, that’s still extra work for your staff.

The Hatch and Vox Way

We do send the info-dump PDF — but we never expect you to read or open it.

Accompanying the PDF is a 5–10 minute video that covers the important parts.

You know what we did, the results from it, and what we’re doing next.

It also means you have time to digest and bring your questions to the monthly meeting — instead of hearing it for the first time there.

Notice Period

In House

Just as hiring is long and difficulty, so is firing a in-house team. There’s multiple laws and procedures you need to follow whilst engaging HR. This leaves you inflexible and immobile to adjust to any market changes — or if you find yourself hiring the wrong person.

SEO Agency

Marketing agencies aren’t much better. They can tie you into a 6–12 month contract with no way to get out. You could claim poor work as a breach of contract, but do you want to waste more time and resources battling it in court?

Even if you did bring it up with the agency, you don’t want to ride out the rest of your contract on bad terms. Instead you want to be putting that money to better use.

The Hatch and Vox Way

This is why we offer one month notice periods.

I know exactly how it feels to be tied into long contracts with no way to get out from when I ran my vegan confectionary shop.

And I don’t want to put any other small business owner in that position.

Most of the time, it’s no one’s fault. Major expenses cropped us and you need to cut costs. Or you simply can’t afford it anymore.

It’s rare, but you could also hate our guts and just don’t want to see our face again.

Either way, we don’t want to waste energy trying to work or chase people who don’t want to or can’t work with us.

So, a one month notice period is the best way forward for everyone.

Is there a way to do both?

It can be hard to choose between hiring in-house or outsourcing your SEO to an agency. Especially if you’re ready to grow, but don’t want to commit either way.

There is a way to get the best of the both worlds:

Hire an SEO generalist in-house and give them to resources to hire agencies and freelances to get the work done.

It’s requires more budget than hiring a agency on it’s own, but you get the control and communication of in-house teams with the experience and speed of ROI from agencies. When growth picks up and expanding the in-house team makes sense, you already have a “inside person” to build the transition around.

If you’re still unsure about about whether you should hire in-house or an SEO agency, book a discovery call.

After 30 minutes, you’ll walk away with the right choice for you and your business.

(P.S. Agency isn’t always the right choice!)