SEO Outsourcing Could Be the Perfect Answer!

Çağlar UğurApril 4, 2021April 5, 2021

SEO Outsourcing has been a hot topic due to the rise of digital marketing.

Now with the global pandemic, it’s becoming a vital challenge for any size of business.

We know this because search volumes in various industries have increased both for local businesses and big brands online.

Just take a look at the graph below. It shows us the search volume increase in the United Kingdom. The change is dramatic!

I got no doubt that firms will realize that of this big shift towards searching online sooner or later.

But the big question is how can firms adapt to this?

It’s not easy nor practical to all of a sudden hire SEO experts for small businesses.

We are talking about locally owned 1-2 men operation after all.

When it comes to big companies, traditional ones won’t easily invest in something they don’t know.

Forming in-house teams for such tasks can raise a red flag, for that matter.

This is when white label SEO outsourcing might come into play and does its job brilliantly.

SEO outsourcing is the process of hiring and working with an SEO agency or an SEO expert to increase search engine rankings.

In my opinion, if the right match is found, outsourcing search engine optimization might make perfect sense for the vast majority of businesses.

SEO Outsourcing vs. In-House SEO

There is a bit of a debate when it comes to discussing outsourcing or in-house SEO.

In-house SEO refers to hiring a team within an organization to do the heavy lifting of SEO works. To me, it’s a brilliant investment, but in practice, it doesn’t seem to work that well.

Over the years, as a digital marketing leader at various firms, it has been quite a mission impossible to convince the boards to form an SEO team.

That’s probably because the core business wasn’t performance marketing and most firms see digital marketing activities as a should do instead of must do.

Bottom line, in my opinion, if we are talking about an organization with many B2C keywords, it might be a good idea to go with in-house SEO.

On the other hand, for most B2B firms or big brands with only a few vital keywords or brand terms, outsourcing could bring incredible results without getting overwhelmed.

Cost of SEO Outsourcing

Mainly there are three types of SEO labor: backlink building, content writing, and technical works. These are the core works that create the cost for your SEO agency.

Most of the time, though, white label SEO firms charge you based on how many keywords you want to rank for and how competitive those terms are.

If you want faster results, that means your SEO partner would double or even triple the effort and get the job done. Obviously, that increases the hours put in it and eventually your overall cost.

Today, a single high-quality backlink might cost you around a minimum of 100 USD. Likewise, a thousand words well-optimized SEO article costs around the same.

Therefore, most companies can get the ball rolling by 1000 USD per month in SEO. Nevertheless, if you are trying to excel in a competitive environment or e-commerce, then the sky is the limit.

It would be desperate to look at SEO only from the cost point of view, though, because we have to look at the bright side as well.

ROI of SEO is incredibly high, and if you spend a 12K per year, you could easily double or triple that in revenue.

Imagine what happens when you hit the Google SERP first position with an e-commerce product with a search volume of 50K per month.

You will roughly get 30K people traffic to your website, and by a %0.30 e-commerce rate, you could end up making 90 unit sales of your product.

Multiply that by your profit per unit sales, and you can calculate the real ROI of SEO.

If you start looking at it this way, you could definitely get your hopes up when it comes to starting an SEO project, especially in e-commerce or SaaS businesses.

Let’s Discuss a Few Downsides As Well

To me, unless your SEO agency wants to go out of business, you are pretty safe, but still, there are a few downsides that are worth knowing.

SEO is an art. Search results can only be influenced. Not decided. Let’s say that you have been through all the necessary steps in terms of optimization.

Now for a given term, competitor landing pages would be visited by different users, and their behavior at your site really matters as well.

So there is no guarantee that you will always rank the first position. Most of the time, users are going to decide who ranks on top. At least recently.

Secondly, purposely built backlinks, a few black hat tricks to speed up the process might end up hurting your rankings as well.

When you don’t have a lot of knowledge in SEO, you might as well not be able to hire a knowledgeable SEO expert. This, unfortunately, carries some risks.

Lastly, when you outsource your SEO, most of the time, you don’t have control over the thousands of accounts, profiles, or sites that are going to be created on behalf of you.

If you like to have full control of your brand’s every single digital footprint, this might be an issue to keep in mind.