In-house SEO vs SEO Agency Which is Better?
Monday was my 6 month mark at SEER Interactive, and I believe its definitely time for my first blog post. Looking back at my time at SEER, its clear that its been one of the biggest learning experiences of my professional life so far. I was in the SEO field for 3 years prior to SEER, but the last half year has taught me more about SEO than the previous 3 combined. Being surrounded by a team of other talented Search Professionals every day who continue to refine an evolving process has definitely been a prime contributor to that.
I came to SEER from an In-house SEO position which is a completely different world than the Agency environment. There are pros and cons to working with each and I wanted to share the un-candy coated truth today, based on my experiences.
Expertise
I have to start off by saying, when youre exclusively working with one industry you get to know the industry pretty well.
The In-house SEO is entrenched in their industry all day, every day. Lets say you have an internal SEO Specialist for your online store that sells toys. If youre doing the SEO for this store, you will see the trends for toy sales and search volume for toy related keywords every day, all year. Youll know what market trends make traffic spike and which make traffic plummet. Youll know what works and what strategies are wastes of time in your niche.
The agency SEO Specialist may not be immersed in the same field all day, however they get to see market trends and algorithm shifts for a variety of industries and websites. They can see how the most recent Google algorithm change affected different types of websites with different functions and goals. They can see how a change in the economy, a different time of the year, or even what SEO strategies affect businesses in the financial sector and at the same time see how it is influencing the health industry. Agencies get a more comprehensive view of the SEO industry as a whole and see more of what affects search engine rankings.
Workflow
At an In-house position exclusively meant for SEO, you get good at creating work for yourself. At the start of an SEO project there is an industry analysis, keyword research, page targeting, content development, link building strategies however, after the initial kick off tasks the project is running on all of the initial research and strategy. When your job is to do SEO for one website, 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, you need to make sure that youre continuously working on something new, looking for finding new opportunities for your website to be optimized, and making sure you still have a job. I have to say, you definitely get good at finding every possible optimization opportunity!
In the agency, after doing all of the initial kickoff work you can follow your strategy. You have other clients to work on, so you dont continuously search for alternative strategies. If something works, it works; if it doesnt work, you do your research, find out what does work, and refine your strategy. Why look for alternatives if something is already working? You make changes only once it stops working, not just because you feel the need to be continuously working on something. Besides, there are other clients that need work done for them, so there is never a loss of SEO tasks to do at any time.
Exposure
Again, lets go back to the toy store. You are exposed to this industry every day as an In-house SEO Specialist. You see what works and what doesnt. However, when you find out something doesnt work thats it; you dont touch it anymore. Why bother wasting time on a strategy that doesnt work?
Lets again bring this back to an agency. Theyre working on the Toy Store and a certain strategy doesnt help their important keywords rank. Youd move on like the In-house SEO Specialist, however this same strategy may work for a University that is also a client. Since I started at SEER, Ive explored realms of SEO that I never even set foot in because it was already determined by another Senior SEO Specialist that they didnt work for the website I was involved in. Getting your feet wet with all of the different areas of SEO is a definite with an agency.
Pace
One of the biggest changes from switching to an agency setting was the speed at which day to day operations took place.
Going back to the online toy store example again, youre in the process of getting a great link on the blog of a daycare with a great online presence. Theyre inviting your toy industry specialists to talk about what toys are most popular for each age bracket, geographic location, and income class. The best part is you can link back to your site as many times as you want with whatever anchor text you desire! What is the problem here? Youre waiting on your content writers to deliver the content. What do you do while you wait for this?
Lets say this toy store was using an agency and the same lack of content situation is presented; the SEO Specialist at the agency would take this break to work on another client project. Just because youre waiting on someone for one SEO Project doesnt mean that you need to be a sitting duck. Like I said earlier, there are always other clients with SEO tasks to be completed!
The Final Word
My take on the In-house vs. Agency debate has two conclusions:
- As an SEO Professional, I have appreciated my time in an agency more than an In-house position. The experience with various industries, the opportunity to be exposed to various SEO strategies and see what kinds of sites/industries they fail/succeed in, and the fast pace are why I prefer my current set up. I can see why someone would prefer to be exclusive to one website that they can master, but I prefer the versatility.
- From the perspective of a company looking to have SEO done, I think the optimal solution is to have an SEO Agency work with an In-house SEO specialist. Usually the In-house SEO Specialist has other non-SEO tasks that come their way, so having the agency behind them to work with will yield the best results in my opinion. This isnt always possible however, mostly because of budgets, so honestly Id have to say an SEO Agency would be my preferred choice. The agency is engrossed in SEO all day, so its their job to only focus on that. Plus, if it comes time where the company doesn’t need full time SEO anymore, they wont have to worry about reallocating someones job functions in the company.
Ill finish with saying Im glad to be part of a team like SEER. Working with a great team of intelligent Search Professionals with different strengths and weaknesses makes me learn something every day. Its also the reason its taken me 6 months to write a blog post when youre surrounded by great minds, its tough to determine which bits of SEO wisdom are wise or just old news.
Does anyone else have experience working with/in an In-house and/or agency setting? Id love to hear other perspectives about it!
Posted: 03.08.11
Zach:
Well said! I am coming from the other side of things, working at bigger SEO firm (200+ clients) to now Director of Online Marketing for a home services marketing company. Each side definitely has their pros and cons, but my vote goes to in-house all the way. No clients, less organizational hurdles, and more flexibility. When I want to try out an extremely tin-foil tactic, I do. To your ‘toy website’ example, I couldn’t agree more. I spend all day every day beating my head against the wall looking at the same SERPS, same competitors, and same keywords. Can really get old, but allows you to dial in on specifics and details you generally don’t have time for on the agency side. Although, I will say I miss my laid back, no shortage of search geek agency office!
Mark mitchell:
Finally a truly insightful, no agenda, not emotive, nicely written article on this debate
Apart from the ones I have wrote about as well :-)
Great great post
Mark – head of search OMD
David Karalis:
@Zach – I agree with your points about the flexibility of In-house, but I actually find the client side of agencies to be favorable. I enjoy working with different types and sizes of companies and really learning about all of the industries and types of businesses out there. The search geek agency atmosphere is definitely appreciated as well :)
@Mark – Thank you for the kind words; I’ll have to read your posts sometime!
Marcos Alonso:
Well done!
I made your inverse job experience. I started at a big agency and than came to an inhouse team, and i agree with a lot of things you said ;)
But, I don´t know in USA, but i see here in Brazil the market is becoming much more inhouse than working with SEO agencies, mainlly for e-commerce, but to have a realy seo experience you have to work in an agencie.
Regards!
David Karalis:
Thank you for the feedback Marcos!
I’m not sure on the US ratio of In-house vs Agency, but I definitely agree with you; to get the full SEO experience, agency is the way to go.
Not to say I didn’t enjoy In-house though!
KIERAN FLANAGAN:
It really depends on the person and how inclined you are to do some self learning.
If you are in the online space, the best experience is to set up your own sites. You learn about all the hurdles in creating a web entity that creates revenue.
I went from a head of search role, agency side to an in house role overseeing the strategy for europe. Both of them are quite different, but I don’t agree the inhouse should just be someone who has an understanding of SEO, they should be able to hold their own with an agency, especially if managing multiple agencies across a range of countries.
But I do agree you get a lot of varied experience agency side !!!
iPullRank:
David-
Seems like you and I are in the same boat. I just hit my 6th month at RF and I also have worked in an in-house role as well. I’ve worked for smaller agencies before too but it’s safe to say that a big agency is the way to go if you’re gonna do this stuff.
To be completely honest working on an in-house team is boring. I worked on an in-house team in the basement waterproofing, basement finishing, and crawlspace repair space before and it had gotten so easy that I had written tools to automate the process.
High-profile agency life is much more fast-paced and you get to touch on so many different industries and you really get to see the affect of your changes. Working with enterprise clients you get to go after some some high profile unbranded terms and see how these algorithm shifts can truly affect high traffic sites. It’s just much more exciting!
Also working at a big agency… lot of people will court you…From Google on down to the API providers. So it has a lot of great perks for really getting mastery of the graft.
Granted you can see a lot of that on an in-house team for an enterprise client, but working on one client year after year…it’s just entirely too mundane.
In any event, I agree with everything you’re saying here.
Great post!
-MK
Chotrul SEO:
It might be worth adding that in fact it’s potentially a three way split:
In house vs Agency vs freelancer
The latter is not to be forgotten, especially as it can often be the cheapest option by far.
George Murphy:
Great post! I guess the major challenge when deciding to go in-house is to find a product or service that you believe in, and that can compensate you as much as an agency can.
David Karalis:
Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences and opinions! I definitely think that this can sometimes vary on a case by case situation.
@Chotrul SEO – I agree, I believe freelance SEO is a good and cost effective option for some sites. However I feel that having an entire agency continuously working on SEO, or an In-house on top of the website every day is often a good route. Again, it’s case by case!
Mike Calabrese:
Awesome post! You make some really good points here…I think my biggest beef with working in-house is that I thought I would get bored really easily. I never actually worked in-house, only at an agency, and now I work for myself. Now that I get to interact with more in-house staff that are clients, I see (from what I can tell) that they’re not so “bored” after all. I actually think one of the benefits of of working in-house is that you do get to try a lot of different things and can have your hands in all different departments within that company.
Within an agency or small business/individual SEO company, you are mostly involved with SEO and internet marketing efforts and don’t always have the opportunity to tie them together with other types of marketing campaigns (unless perhaps you’re working with the client on a larger scale). Yes, we can work on other projects while we’re waiting for clients to get certain deliverables back to us, but the person that works in-house has more direct control over those pieces and can motivate/push their co-workers to make it happen easier than an outside SEO can.