Hire a full time SEO specialist or buy SEO services through a digital company?

Hire a full time SEO specialist or buy SEO services through a digital company?

I get asked very often the following question: Should I hire a full-time SEO specialist to work as an in-house employee or should we sign a contract with an SEO or digital company? 

I personally worked on each side of the fence and each one has its pros and cons but which one should YOU as a business owner choose? Which solution would bring you a more profitable business at the end of the day, this is what we need to figure out! 

Let's start with the full-time in house SEO. 

There comes a point in any businesses life when the task of managing everything SEO becomes too much for the entrepreneur, blog posting, search engine positions, on-page SEO, backlinks building, social media posting and everything in between. It is simply too much and you will eventually need some specialist help and you may fix that by hiring someone that knows SEO to work as a full-time specialist in your company. 

Pros:

• The SEO specialist you will hire will work only for you. Having just one client as an SEO is great, it means you get to focus on only one "problem" and eventually once things start moving up you will get a lot of satisfaction from your work.
  
• You can get the SEO specialist to handle other digital business like social media, maybe some PPC or even content building. Depending on how skilled your SEO specialist will be you can have him/her do other jobs outside the narrow SEO world if SEO is just too little to complete a full-time working day. 
• Your SEO specialist will probably have a fixed salary. This means you don't have to deal with contracts and extra costs digital agencies may ask for. 
• You can monitor the results closely.
• Communication and direct interaction are easy. Having an in-house SEO specialist can be great. He/She can participate in all your meetings making sure everything you are planning for the future is SEO friendly. 

Cons:

• You SEO  specialist will probably get lazy and stop developing on a professional level. Without proper interaction with other SEO specialists or at least with other digital marketing experts, your employee will probably lose a lot of new developments and become stale over time. This happened to me when I was freelancing by myself, I stopped evolving on a professional level. You can avoid this by constantly sending your SEO specialists to digital and SEO conferences and courses, but all of this essentially means extra costs. 
  
• You need to make sure you hire the right person. At the interview, you will probably need another SEO specialists to make sure whomever you want to hire knows the ropes and understands what you need. 

Why in my opinion the SEO digital agency is better. 

As I said I worked both as an in-house SEO working for one client but also as an SEO in a digital company (as I am at the moment). And by far I think the best results a client can get is hiring the agency over the lone wolf as an in-house specialist.
Why? Because managing another employee is difficult, especially one that you know little about what he/her needs to be done. 

Pros:

• Great for small companies. Why hire a full-time SEO that will probably ask you for a pretty decent salary when you can hire a digital agency working just a few hours every month for you doing very strategic implementations. 
  
• Digital agencies have experience. With multiple clients on multiple problems, agencies are capable of resolving and implementing SEO because they have the skills as well as the manpower to make everything happen, faster and better than your in-house SEO couldn't. 
• Digital agencies are teams of multiple people with specific roles. Not only SEO but also social media specialists, programmers, designers, sys admins and everything in between. The point is you will probably need multiple things done online, I think is for the best to sign a contract with a full digital agency capable of delivering everything and having the specialist to deliver it at the highest level. 
• If you negotiate correctly and ask for the right services I bet most contracts signed with digital agencies are cheaper than hiring a full-time SEO. 

Cons:

• The only major problem would be hiring the wrong digital companies. And believe me, there are a lot of them out there! Companies that promise a lot but only want to suck you dry, month after month, offering very weak results in return that won't cover your investments. So make sure you double check on their track record as well as understanding exactly what they are offering and how much good can be done for you.