6 Reasons Companies Say They Intentionally Outsource SEO
…Even if They have a Full In-House Marketing Team
READ TIME: 4 min, 12 sec.
Each day, businesses of every size discover that well-done search engine optimization (SEO) helps increase their brand visibility, connections and sales.
As the value of SEO becomes more popular, so do misconceptions. For example, there is a misconception that you can set up solid SEO up front and then just “set it and forget it.” In fact, SEO is like a great garden, requiring continuous tending, weeding, feeding and seeding. Successful SEO requires ongoing work that is often highly technical.
Why companies tend to outsource their SEO:
1. Marketing Staff Overload
Companies often have their own marketing departments, so the initial thought may be to have the in-house department do everything, including SEO. But marketing departments have many priorities. Often, email and branding campaigns get priority over SEO, especially given the high degree of specialization and technical knowledge well-done SEO requires. This often helps put SEO on the back burner in many in-house marketing teams. It may also be due to a misconception that SEO is less critical than other initiatives, when in fact, it is a critical success ingredient in our digital age.
Even when a business asks our team at TruStar Marketing to help with an initial setup for their SEO, if taken back in house, we notice it gets completely forgotten or put on the back burner due to the stress of other responsibilities. Outsourcing SEO removes staff overload and allows your marketing department to focus on other aspects and become experts in other required channels.
2. Accountability Is Everything
SEO is not a “set it and forget it” initiative. Developing an SEO strategy is less than half of the battle. While other campaigns may be seasonal, successful SEO requires continuous work and accountability.
The marketing department for a large business is constantly busy with branding, trade events, targeted email campaigns and more. This pulls resources from SEO to these campaigns, so it becomes challenging to keep SEO on track. Accountability is everything because, ultimately, successful SEO will be visible in your key performance measures. Regular reporting for website traffic, backlinks, ranking and more are the accountability tools of SEO experts like TruStar Marketing. All of this helps keep your brand, ranking and web traffic driving search initiatives that beat your competition.
3. SEO Can Be Highly Technical
Part of SEO is content creation and implementing keyword research. Another part is highly technical, as you need to work within a content management system (CMS) to fix crawl errors and implement structured data (Schema.org). This requires expansive knowledge of HTML, analytics and algorithms.
While there is a vast number of resources and tools that Google and other search engine marketing companies provide, it can become confusing very quickly. In fact, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google MUM, which are two major changes coming to SEO, add urgency to the confusion.
4. Successful SEO Requires a Team of Experts
Marketing departments within companies are often juggling multiple responsibilities, including social media, lead optimization, publicity and customer service materials. Within those marketing teams, there could be just a single person or no one working on SEO. SEO experts like TruStar Marketing dedicate expert teams to ensure your SEO is moving forward successfully on all 3 parts of SEO.
SEO is split up into 3 parts, which are on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO.
- On-page SEO focuses on site content, title tag and meta tag optimization, image optimization and more.
- Off-page SEO focuses on link building, social media, content marketing, reviews and more.
- Technical SEO, as mentioned earlier, focuses on site speed, structured data, XML sitemaps and more.
At TruStar Marketing, we are a Semrush Agency Partner, and our team has certifications from Google, HubSpot, Semrush and other search engine marketing companies. We’re always up to speed with the latest changes and updates.
5. SEO + Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Multiplies Success
SEM, or paid search marketing, can place your brand at the top of a search through paid advertising. Think Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. This can deliver faster, more reliable visibility.
SEO is designed to pull you higher up in organic listings over time. And, organic rankings are more credible, getting more click-throughs than SEM. Together they enhance your overall brand awareness and clicks. When these two strategies work together, your results improve measurably. At the same time, great SEM campaigns improve targeting by utilizing keyword research findings from SEO.
Expertly running both SEO and SEM further complicates the challenges to the in-house teams. Most marketing departments outsource SEO and SEM due to these complexities. For example, SEO and SEM-savvy teams you want to utilize will have Google Analytics, Google Ads, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other online ad platform experience.
Each platform has its own rules, logins and policies, and you must know them. In most cases, you will want certifications in them. Plus, you need to know how to do in-depth competitive research, set up analytics and analyze website and sales funnel analytics to identify and segment audience campaigns.
Outsourcing allows you to quickly and easily acquire all this talent, certifications and reliable reporting at once.
6. Outsourcing Improves Your Return on Investment (ROI)
When investing in SEO, you aren’t just trying to optimize yourself for search engines – you’re investing in tech, content and, most of all, people. This can get expensive in both time and money. Because of this, you want to make sure you’re getting a return on your investment, which, after all, is what this is all about.
Outsourcing to the RIGHT SEO partner keeps you and your team accountable while providing a level of expertise difficult to train or maintain internally. The right SEO partner will help educate your entire team while building the reporting and ROI story you can grow on – and share with your board.
It’s easy to start with no obligation or cost. Just ask for TruStar Marketing’s free preliminary SEO Audit.