How To Outsource SEO: The Definitive Guide

Are you ready to save money, make money, and make your business more visible on the internet all at once?

Outsourcing your SEO is the solution you’ve been looking for. By outsourcing, you can take your SEO strategy to a new level and help your business become more visible on the internet.

If you’re ready to learn how to outsource SEO in a way that sets you and your business up for success, you’ve come to the right place.

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know.

Signs It’s Time To Outsource Your SEO

Knowing when it’s time to outsource something can be difficult. If you make the leap too early, you risk wasting time, money, and resources on a problem that doesn’t even exist.

On the flip side, if you wait too long, you can burn out your employees and miss opportunities.

If you think you’re ready to outsource your SEO but aren’t sure yet, here are a few ways to tell that you’re ready:

You Haven’t Seen Any Results

If you’re not seeing any results from your in-house SEO strategy, there’s a good chance you need to outsource. Working with a freelancer or agency means that you’ll be working with an expert who has the specific SEO skills needed to help your business succeed.

You Need To Diversify Your Strategy

SEO is a multifaceted concept and it can be hard to achieve success across the board. If you’ve been focusing all of your SEO efforts in one area, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities.

Outsourcing your SEO will allow a third party to come in and evaluate your SEO strategy and get an idea of what you could be missing out on.

By diversifying your strategy, you allow yourself to better your chances of improving your rankings.

Your In-House Team Can No Longer Handle The Workload

Many businesses who choose to keep SEO in-house often have an employee do SEO tasks on top of other responsibilities.

While this may be a good short term solution, it’s not sustainable if you really want to develop a strong and dynamic SEO strategy.

If you’ve reached a point where your in-house team can no longer handle your SEO needs, it’s definitely time to outsource. This will ensure that your SEO strategy is handled by someone who can focus specifically on that.

The Benefits Of Outsourcing SEO

Save Time And Money

On the surface, outsourcing SEO may seem like just another thing you need to spend money on, but if done properly, outsourcing SEO can help your business bring in even more money.

In general, working with freelancers or agencies can be more cost-effective than hiring full-time employees.

Additionally, outsourcing can help free up your employees’ time so they can focus on bigger picture things.

Work With Industry Experts

One of the best things about outsourcing is that it opens up the hiring pool. Instead of focusing on people who are specifically in your area, outsourcing can give you access to SEO experts across the country and even in other parts of the world. Working with experts can also save you the time and money of having to train someone to do the job.

Improve Scalability

Outsourcing is one of the most important elements to scaling your business. As your business grows, your SEO needs likely will too. Outsourcing gives you the flexibility to be able to make adjustments more quickly.

Get An Outside Perspective

Having a fresh pair of eyes look over an existing project or idea is always a good idea, and your SEO strategy is no exception. Outsourcing your SEO will give you the chance to get an outside perspective that can open your eyes to things you may have overlooked.

The Process of Outsourcing SEO

Understanding when to outsource is only half the battle. The next thing you need to address is knowing how to outsource your SEO needs.

Know Which SEO Tasks to Outsource

Whether or not you have content marketing, web development, and other skills on your team, you can benefit from outsourcing the following to an SEO expert:

• SEO Strategy/Audit – An expert can go through your existing web presence and recommend the best approach for getting SEO results and meeting your goals.
• Keyword Research – Understanding the right keywords to optimize for and in what order is a great project for an SEO expert to tackle.
• On-page SEO – Optimizing a website for SEO—one of the most important SEO activities—requires a mix of technical development expertise as well as SEO copywriting skills, so outsourcing on-page SEO cleanup to a freelancer or agency can have big benefits.
• Link Building – Building backlinks to your site and content is a time-consuming, ongoing, and very valuable activity that’s perfect for a freelancer to take charge of.
• Guest Article Outreach and Partnerships – Having someone foster relationships for guest articles and other content partnerships helps the overall backlinking and ranking strategy.
• Directory Optimization – Managing directory listings can be tedious and time-consuming but is a simple task to outsource.
• Forum and Social Media Posting – Social media sites and forums have high domain authority, so links from these sites—by your profile and others—helps in the search engine algorithm.

Once you know what type of work you need completed, you can find the freelancer that fits the bill.

Come Up With A Budget

Before you determine the amount of money you can expect to spend on SEO services, you first need to understand your company’s needs. Determine whether you want a project-based effort or an ongoing commitment to continually build momentum.

Project Based SEO

An SEO project is just a small part of the overall SEO need. It may consist of a tune-up, a few technical aspects on your website, or an analysis of the keywords used and which you should be targeting.

Ongoing SEO Retainers

Online competition is tough, and many companies compete with each other to outrank them on the search engines.

It is this competition, and the ever-changing requirements of the search engines, especially Google, that require consistent SEO work.

This is why most businesses prefer to establish ongoing retainers when they outsource SEO services.

If a business needs to have a constant influx of customers, especially if that first contact is through organic search, there needs to be a consistent SEO effort to keep online traffic coming in.

Like any other product or service, SEO costs will vary. Even so, here are some guidelines for what SEO costs may look like.

When referring to consistent monthly work, most SEO professionals charge a monthly retainer. Pricing varies depending on the freelancer or agency you choose, and many SEO specialists offer several pricing options.

Price packages can range from a $250 to $500 per month tier, to a monthly retainer of $2,000 or more. It all depends on the experience level of the provider, the expected outcome, and the work to be completed.

If the project is task-based and billed hourly, you can expect to see $30+ per hour for the strategic SEO work. For some of the more basic tactical work, you could expect in the $10 – $20 per hour range, but you’ll likely have to lay out documented processes and procedures for the most success.

Understand What to Look For In An SEO Professional

Hiring the right person to handle your SEO needs will be an important factor in your success. Here are a few things to consider:

Previous Experience

The whole point of outsourcing your SEO is to find someone who is capable of doing the job, right? Right! As you’re looking for the right freelancer or agency, be sure to inquire about their previous experience. How long have they been in the SEO industry? Do they have experience working in your industry? Have they worked on any strategies similar to yours? All of these things are important to keep in mind. We’d also recommend asking for examples of their previous work so you can ensure it meets your standards.

Based on the tasks you’re outsourcing, you can look for the right person or people to hire. In general, you’ll want to know the following criteria:

• Agency or individual freelancer – Do you want to work with an individual freelancer, or would you prefer to outsource to an SEO agency? Learn the pros and cons of each.
• Level of experience – Do you want someone who can walk in on day one and take ownership of SEO? Or are you willing to be patient with someone less experience who may need more of your time?
• Location – Do you want to outsource to someone in the US, UK, or Canada? Or are you looking for someone outside the US, for example in the Philippines?

Knowledge Of SEO Tools

The SEO industry is full of tools to help make things easier, but these tools are useless to people who don’t know how to use them. Be sure the person you’re outsourcing your SEO to has a good understanding of the most up to date tools in the business. Some of the most common SEO tools are provided by companies like Moz, SEMRush, and AHRefs. If you don’t hear any of those names, that could be a red flag.

Things To Avoid When Outsourcing SEO

So far we’ve talked about all the pros of outsourcing your SEO, but there are also a few things you should avoid to ensure you have the best experience.

Promises of Instant Rankings

Many people claim to be SEO experts but are not willing to put in the work and instead make false claims. Their advertising is simple: Get ranked fast! When you see this type of claim, you could be dealing with a scammer SEO service provider.

On average, it can take about 3 to 6 months to start seeing positive results from your SEO. This may seem like a long time, but the rewards of good SEO are definitely worth it.

Promises Of Guaranteed Rankings

Your SEO provider should be confident, but not enough to absolutely guarantee your ranking. Guaranteed rankings are generally offered by black-hat SEO providers who use methods Google prohibits. A legitimate SEO provider does not use guarantees to advertise their services.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

Black Hat SEO is essentially the dark side. These techniques violate search engines’ terms of service in the process of trying to help your website improve its ranking. While these techniques may seem useful in the short term, they can result in penalties for your website down the line.

Some black hat techniques to be on the lookout for include:

• Keyword stuffing
• Creating websites or web pages with duplicate content
• Hidden text/links
• Devious redirects
• Content automation

If you want to learn more about black hat SEO and how to avoid it, check out this helpful resource from Wordstream.

We’re not trying to scare you; it’s just a reality of the SEO landscape. But when you outsource SEO through FreeUp, you can rest assured the agencies and freelancers you’re connected with are vetted and reliable.

What Deliverables to Expect

When you find an SEO company to work with, you’ll eventually need to evaluate whether the company you have chosen is working effectively for you.

There are certain things you need to look out for to determine the effectiveness of SEO for your company.

These are the things you should be on the lookout for:

• Specific keyword rankings – Your site should start to rank for specific keywords decided upon by both you and the freelancer. It is probably not realistic to expect your site to rank for all the chosen keywords, however it should rank for a few.
• Growth in organic traffic – You should start to see more traffic on your site. You can measure this through Google Analytics or other similar website tracking software.
• Increased revenue – More sales, especially for e-commerce businesses, is probably the most determining factor of effective SEO.

When outsourcing your SEO, you can expect regular reports demonstrating the effort in content creation and backlink production.

The amount of progress depends on the agreement you made with the freelancer or agency.

In general, you should expect:

• Monthly reports, usually a dashboard or graph report.
• Quality content built for your website and other sites (guest posts).
• The research and earning of quality links from other websites.
• Clear details on any technical changes made to your website.

In Conclusion

SEO is a high-value business activity that makes a lot of sense to outsource. It’s time-consuming and requires in-depth knowledge of continually changing tactics, making it a great project to bring in a freelancer or agency to complete.

As with all outsourcing, make sure you know what you’re looking for, use a trusted marketplace to find and hire, set clear expectations, and continually monitor progress.

Ready to get started improving your SEO and organic traffic? Sign up for an account today and put in a request. We’ll connect you with a qualified freelancer to get started on your project.