Outsource SEO Services: How To Do it Effectively + Benefits

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January of 2023 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

As a marketer or business owner, you’re fully aware of the immense benefits that SEO can offer your brand.

But you also appreciate that a search engine optimization program takes time and the work of expert personnel to yield sustainable positive results.

The trouble is that many businesses don’t have these human resources available in-house. This leaves them with two options: hire and train an internal SEO team or outsource SEO to a dedicated team of specialists.

In this post, we’ll break down everything you need to know about the second option. We’ll cover the benefits of outsourcing, discuss your various options, and explain what to do to pick the perfect SEO partner for your business.

But first, what exactly do we mean by SEO outsourcing?

What Is SEO Outsourcing?

Search engine optimization (SEO) outsourcing is the practice of contracting out your company’s SEO activities to an external team of SEO professionals.

An outsourced SEO team can develop and implement an entire SEO strategy designed to improve your search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to your website.

Alternatively, they can take care of specific aspects of your SEO program, such as keyword research, content creation, link building, and technical website optimization.

Outsourcing SEO is beneficial for businesses that lack the internal resources or expertise to consistently build organic visibility on their own.

What SEO Services Can You Outsource?

SEO outsourcing services can enhance a company’s SEO strategy by allowing businesses to focus on core tasks while benefiting from expert assistance in SEO management, which is crucial for achieving high rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Depending on your specific needs and marketing goals, an outsourced SEO team can manage one or more core SEO activities, such as:

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of identifying the terms and phrases potential customers use to search for products or services related to your business.

It’s essential for SEO because it helps ensure that your content is aligned with your target audience’s search behavior, boosting your likelihood of appearing in search results and attracting more qualified traffic.

Using premium keyword research tools and analytics software, an outsourced SEO team can build a complete picture of the topics and solutions your ideal customers are searching for. These insights can then be used to optimize your existing pages and develop new content as part of effective SEO strategies that target customer-relevant terms.

Content Strategy and Creation

Content strategy and creation is about planning and producing articles, guides, videos, infographics, webinars, and other materials that attract potential customers to your site via search engines.

High-quality content that aligns with search user demand helps to increase your site’s authority and relevance. This, in turn, can boost your site’s ability to rank prominently in search results.

By outsourcing your SEO content development to SEO agencies, you can tap into the expertise of skilled writers and strategists who know how to create SEO-friendly work. High-ranking content pieces almost always incorporate relevant target keywords, adhere to SEO best practices, and, most importantly, provide tons of value to the reader.

Link Building

Link building is the practice of earning links from other websites back to your own.

It’s vital for SEO because search engines interpret backlinks as endorsements of your site. As a rule, the more backlinks you receive from relevant, reputable websites, the higher you’ll rank.

An outsourced SEO team can help identify potential sources of high-value backlinks and use tactics like guest posting, outreach campaigns, and broken link-building to secure more links. Partnering with SEO outsourcing companies can provide businesses with effective and cost-efficient solutions for managing these complex SEO needs.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on enhancing the technical aspects of your website to improve its ability to rank higher on Google.

It includes optimizing your website structure, improving page speed, and ensuring your site is mobile-friendly.

A technically sound website is crucial for delivering a more positive user experience and making it easier for Google to crawl and index your website.

Some of the ways an outsourced team can manage your technical SEO include conducting regular site audits, managing redirects, and improving site navigation. Hiring an SEO outsourcing company can further enhance these efforts by providing a specialized focus on technical optimizations.

Local SEO

Local SEO is all about increasing your company’s search engine visibility for location-based searches.

It’s estimated that up to 46% of searches have local intent, making local SEO particularly important for businesses that rely on local customers.

An outsourced team can help maximize your local search visibility by optimizing your site for local keywords, managing local business listings (especially your Google Business Profile), and creating dedicated content for specific service areas.

Monitoring and Reporting

Monitoring and reporting are crucial components of a successful SEO strategy, allowing you to track the performance of your SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions.

By regularly monitoring key metrics such as traffic sources, keyword rankings, backlink quality, and conversion rates, an outsourced SEO team can provide valuable insights into what strategies are working and where adjustments may be needed. This ongoing analysis helps ensure that your SEO initiatives are aligned with your overall business goals and are adapting to changes in search algorithms and market conditions.

Looking to Outsource SEO?

Dominate Search with the 4X SEO Company of the Year. We develop custom SEO Services proven to get you more customers.

Request a Proposal

What Aspects of SEO Can’t You Outsource?

While it’s possible to outsource virtually all day-to-day SEO activities to an external professional or agency, some areas of your SEO program will inherently require your direct involvement.

Brand Vision and Strategic Alignment

Your SEO program needs to be seamlessly integrated into your broader brand strategy, reflecting your company’s mission, vision, and core values.

This alignment is critical because it ensures that all SEO efforts support the business’s overarching goals and communicate a consistent brand message to the target audience.

For example, if your company’s long-term goal is to position itself as an industry leader in sustainable practices, this goal will need to guide decisions about keyword selection, content themes, and link-building strategies.

While an outsourced SEO team will be skilled in general best practices and technical optimizations, they won’t have the deep understanding of your company’s long-term vision and specific market positioning that an internal stakeholder has.

Content Authenticity and Expertise

While content creation can be outsourced, the authenticity and expert insights specific to your industry often require input from within the company.

This is especially true if you operate in a highly specialized vertical, such as healthcare, finance, or law. Content in these fields must not only be engaging and SEO-optimized but also accurate and compliant with specific professional guidelines.

SEO Training and Company Culture

Encouraging an SEO-friendly culture within the company is something that can’t be fully outsourced.

Training staff to understand SEO basics, encouraging SEO best practices in content creation, and fostering a general awareness of SEO among various departments are internally driven initiatives that support long-term SEO success. The same goes for promoting collaboration between your SEO partner and other external stakeholders, like design agencies, digital marketing teams, and web developers. Ultimately, it’s up to you to ensure all parties work together to make your SEO program successful.

What Are the Benefits of Outsourcing SEO?

Here are some of the main advantages of outsourcing search engine optimization (SEO) to seasoned professionals.

Free Up Time

Perhaps the most obvious advantage is that it gives you and your team more time to focus on other high-impact business activities.

Instead of spending hours fixing crawl issues, reclaiming broken backlinks, or analyzing keyword sets, outsourcing means your business can concentrate on doing what it does best and still reap the rewards of better search visibility.

Benefit From Expertise and Experience

Outsourcing SEO to seasoned professionals lets you tap into their combined years of experience in delivering results for clients across a range of projects and industries.

This breadth and depth of knowledge make them well-equipped to tackle even the most complicated SEO problems.

Eliminate the Time and Cost of Hiring

Building an internal SEO team is expensive. Recruitment, training, salaries, software, and equipment don’t come cheap.

What’s more, getting a newly formed team fully up-to-speed can take weeks, if not months.

Outsourcing SEO means you can avoid all the overhead costs associated with creating an in-house team and start making progress on your SEO campaigns immediately.

Scale More Rapidly

Once you have an entire team of experts working on your SEO program, you improve your ability to grow your business more quickly. The cost of outsourcing will remain relatively stable while the revenue you generate from more organic traffic will continue to grow.

Potential Downsides of Outsourcing SEO

Despite the benefits, outsourcing SEO can sometimes pose a few risks and challenges.

However, it’s important to note that you can avoid these problems by carefully selecting the right SEO partner (more on that later).

Lack of Industry-Specific Knowledge

Outsourcing SEO often means working with agencies or consultants who serve a wide array of clients across different industries.

While they are experts in SEO, they may not possess in-depth knowledge about your specific industry’s nuances, language, customer behavior, regulatory requirements, or competitive landscape.

This could mean they come up with a generic SEO strategy that fails to capture unique opportunities or address specific challenges your business faces.

Communication Barriers

Effective communication is essential for any outsourced service, particularly SEO, where strategies and goals must be clearly understood and agreed upon by both parties.

Communication challenges, such as differing time zones, can delay response times and slow down decision-making processes.

Language differences and cultural nuances can also lead to misinterpretations of strategies or goals.

Black-Hat Practices

Outsourcing SEO services carries the risk of partnering with firms that employ black hat SEO tactics—practices that violate search engine guidelines.

Such practices can include keyword stuffing, cloaking, or using private link networks. While such practices may seem to work initially, they can result in severe penalties from Google, including potential removal from search results. These penalties can damage your brand’s reputation and take significant time and resources to recover from.

When Should You Outsource SEO?

Now that we’ve covered the pros and cons of outsourcing SEO, under what circumstances does it make sense to pursue this option?

SEO outsourcing might suit you if you meet one or more of the following criteria.

You Lack Time, Resources, or Expertise

Effective SEO isn’t as simple as optimizing your site for a few target keywords, creating a handful of blog posts, and then sitting back as your traffic, leads, and sales skyrocket.

The world of organic search is extremely competitive. Thousands of brands across every imaginable niche constantly battle for limited real estate on Google’s results pages. Long-lasting success in this type of environment requires thoughtful planning, diligent execution, and non-stop analysis and adjustment.

If you don’t have the internal bandwidth, tools, or knowledge needed for this ongoing process, outsourcing your SEO is probably your best bet.

You Need Consistent and Reliable Results

Experienced SEO professionals know how to find low-hanging fruit that deliver quick wins and how to design and implement strategies that yield lasting results that grow your business.

This knowledge ensures that your SEO program is founded on best practices that are known to work. On the other hand, an inexperienced SEO practitioner is liable to make costly errors and miss valuable opportunities for growth.

You Need to Scale

As we mentioned earlier, the onboarding period for an outsourced SEO team is pretty short. Once they understand your business and marketing objectives, they can instantly get to work on your SEO campaign.

Moreover, outsourced SEO teams benefit from a range of expert personnel, established workflows, and best-in-class technology. This means they can achieve a far greater level of productive output compared to a typical in-house team of SEOs.

Looking to Outsource SEO?

Dominate Search with the 4X SEO Company of the Year. We develop custom SEO Services proven to get you more customers.

Request a Proposal

What Are Your SEO Outsourcing Options?

Now that you’re up to speed on how outsourcing SEO could help your business, you’re probably wondering what outsourcing options are available.

There are three main ways to outsource your SEO.

1. Hire an Independent SEO Professional

The cheapest approach is to offload the bulk of your SEO tasks to a capable SEO freelancer or contractor.

This is a particularly good option for smaller businesses with modest SEO goals. This is due to the simple fact that a freelancer or contractor is only one person. No matter how talented they are, the scope of your SEO projects will be inherently limited.

This approach also requires a considerable degree of oversight on your part. Finding someone who can deliver consistent, high-quality work and isn’t distracted by other client projects is no mean feat.

Moreover, this approach may also require more hands-on involvement by you and other members of your team. For example, contractors will often provide SEO recommendations that only your internal team can implement.

2. Hire a Full-Service Agency

The second option is to hand over the controls of your SEO program to a full-service agency.

These companies offer SEO as one of several digital marketing services. For this reason, they are a great option if you’re looking for assistance across multiple marketing channels.

Unlike hiring a solo vendor, outsourcing work to a full-stack agency gives you access to the knowledge and creativity of a diverse team of marketing experts.

However, since SEO isn’t the core offering of many of these companies, you might not receive the sophisticated level of service you need. That said, plenty of full-service agencies are capable of delivering top-tier SEO work.

3. Hire an SEO Agency

The last option is to team up with a specialist SEO outsourcing company.

These companies live and breathe SEO, earning their keep by helping clients succeed in the world of organic search. Members of an SEO agency will regularly share ideas and ensure they’re up to date on the latest developments in the field.

This exclusive focus on SEO allows such agencies to devise and implement rock-solid strategies capable of delivering truly outsized results for clients. Utilizing SEO outsourcing services enables businesses to focus on core tasks while benefiting from expert assistance in SEO management, which is crucial for achieving high rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, this exclusivity also means you’ll need to hire other vendors if you want support for other marketing-related work.

How Should You Outsource SEO?

Whether you recruit the help of an independent SEO professional, a full-service agency, or a specialist agency, how should you find the right SEO vendor for you?

Here’s the six-step process you should follow.

1. Clarify Your Goals and Service Requirements

The first step is to determine exactly what you need from an outsourced SEO team.

For example, you might only need help to conduct keyword research and competitor analysis to give your in-house content team direction for the next quarter’s editorial calendar.

On the other hand, you might need broad-spectrum support across everything from technical SEO, on-page SEO, local SEO, content marketing, and link building.

So to figure out what level of service you need, you first need to iron out your goals and set a realistic SEO timeframe for achieving them. Keep in mind that SEO campaigns typically take at least three to four months to start delivering measurable results.

The more specific your objectives, the more clarity you’ll have about what you do and don’t need from an outsourced team. Vague targets like “I want more traffic” or “I want to rank at the top of Google” just aren’t instructive enough.

When deciding what your SEO goals should be, ask yourself questions like:

• What sort of traffic would be most valuable to you? The answer should dovetail with your business objectives. For example, suppose your company’s priority is to increase revenue from new customers by 20% within six months. In that case, your SEO goal might be to double traffic to bottom-of-the-funnel content.
• Are there major gaps in your customer journey that SEO and content marketing could address? Where are they?
• When it comes to lead generation, how does organic search compare to your other channels?
• How much revenue do you want your SEO program to generate within a year?
• Are there specific brands you want to emulate or compete with?
• Does your company serve customers across multiple geographical regions or within one specific location? If the latter, do you need to improve your local SEO?
• Do you already have content on your website? If so, which topics have performed best? What does this suggest about where you should focus your content efforts moving forward?

Your outsourced SEO team will find it much easier to design a strategy that meets your needs if you clearly understand the big-picture outcomes you want to achieve.

2. Evaluate Different SEO Service Providers

The next step is researching various SEO service providers that could suit your business.

When evaluating a given provider, your first port of call should be to check out their website. If their site seems clumsy and poorly designed, or if the site is hard to find in the first place, it’s probably safe to assume their SEO services won’t be that good either.

But if they do have a high-quality website, you should hone in on their reviews, testimonials, and case studies—especially those relating to businesses in your industry or niche. These will give you a pretty good sense of what it’s like to work with them and what kind of ROI they can deliver for a business like yours.

3. Create An SEO RFP (Request for Proposal)

Once you like the look of a company, the next step is to create an SEO RFP.

Think of this as a detailed brief of what you need from your outsource SEO projects. This document will serve as a comprehensive guide for potential service providers, helping them understand your business needs and how they can best serve you.

Once potential vendors respond to your RFP, you can compare their proposals and make a decision on which provider to team up with.

Your RFP document should include the following:

• Background information about your business: Provide an overview of your company, such as your industry, history, key products or services, and market presence. Detail any significant milestones or relevant company culture aspects that may influence your SEO needs. This context helps potential vendors tailor their strategies to fit your specific business model and industry dynamics.
• Your SEO goals and current SEO performance: Clearly outline what you are aiming to achieve with your SEO efforts. Specify goals like improving keyword rankings, increasing organic traffic, or enhancing conversion rates. Provide data on your current SEO performance to give vendors a baseline from which they can plan improvements.
• The SEO services you think you’ll need: Identify specific SEO services you believe are necessary, such as keyword research, content development, link building, technical SEO audits, local SEO, or ongoing SEO management. Being specific helps vendors propose a detailed strategy that addresses all your needs.
• Your SEO budget: Provide a range for your available budget. This allows potential vendors to propose solutions that are realistic and feasible within your financial constraints, ensuring that the services they recommend can be delivered without compromising on quality.
• What you expect from a suitable vendor: List the qualities and capabilities you expect in a vendor, such as responsiveness, creativity, transparency, a proven track record in your industry, and the ability to meet deadlines. You may also want to know about the team members who will be working on your project and their qualifications.
• Selection criteria: Detail the criteria you will use to evaluate the proposals, such as strategy alignment with your goals, cost-effectiveness, innovative solutions, vendor reputation, and client testimonials or case studies. This helps vendors understand on what basis you’ll judge their proposals.
• A request for the project cost estimate: Ask for a detailed pricing structure for the services offered. This should include any one-time fees, ongoing monthly service costs, and any other potential expenses. This information will help you assess and compare the financial aspects of each proposal.
• A deadline for proposal submissions: Set a clear deadline for when proposals must be submitted. This ensures that the process stays on schedule and that you have enough time to thoroughly review each proposal before reaching a decision.

Bonus: Get a head-start on your SEO RFP by downloading our free template.

4. Finalize Your Selection

Once you’ve received and assessed your proposals, it’s time to reach a decision.

However, whether you’ve identified a single standout candidate or a handful of potential suitors, it’s worth arranging an in-person or virtual interview with each vendor before finalizing your selection.

This will give you an opportunity to clarify any points in the proposals that may be ambiguous, discuss their proposed strategies in more depth, and understand their communication style and workflow processes. It will also help you gauge whether the vendor fits well with your team dynamics and business philosophy.

Depending on the details provided in each proposal, here are some questions you might consider asking during the follow-up interviews:

• What are the typical turnaround times for specific deliverables?
• What metrics do you use to measure success for different workstreams?
• How will you understand my audience’s needs?
• How will you measure campaign performance? And how will you adjust if campaigns are underperforming?
• How often do you typically update clients on campaign performance?
• Do you assign each client a project manager?
• Do you provide a client dashboard/ project management portal?
• What tools do you use?
• Do you use subcontractors?
• Are your team members Google-certified?
• How do you stay updated with the latest SEO and algorithm changes?
• What is your process for integrating SEO with other digital marketing efforts?
• What happens if we decide to part ways? What is the process for contract termination, and how is the transition handled?

Once you’ve completed the interviews and reviewed each vendor’s responses, pick the one that best aligns with your SEO goals and business needs.

Next, negotiate the terms, focusing on scope of work, deliverables, timelines, and payment details, ensuring all are clearly outlined in a signed contract.

5. Onboard Your New SEO Partner

Once the contract is signed, begin the onboarding process.

This typically involves introducing them to your team, providing access to necessary tools and data, and setting up initial planning meetings to kick off the project.

During these initial discussions, make sure to restate your objectives so that the strategy they use is aligned with your vision.

This is also an opportunity for both parties to agree on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to evaluate progress and to establish a clear communication cadence and reporting schedule.

6. Hold Your Outsourced SEO Team to Account

While it’s important to give your outsourced SEO team enough time to implement the new strategy before you see results, active oversight is crucial.

Pay close attention to monthly and quarterly performance reports and ask your team to explain their reasoning for any notable campaign adjustments. Use these discussions not only to understand their decisions but also to ensure that these align with your overall business goals.

You should also schedule regular review meetings to evaluate progress against your KPIs, discuss any challenges, and refine strategies as necessary. This process will help maintain transparency, ensure accountability, and facilitate open communication—all vital for successful collaboration.

Ultimately, the goal is to build a harmonious working relationship in which you and your SEO team are on the same page.

Time to Outsource Your SEO?

Outsourcing SEO is a great option for businesses that want to develop a successful SEO program but lack the time, resources, or personnel to do so internally.

We’ve seen there are three main ways to approach outsourcing: hire a freelancer or contractor, a full-service digital agency, or a specialist SEO agency. Whichever route you take, it’s essential to clarify your SEO goals and ensure that any potential partner can live up to your unique service requirements.