As a marketer or business owner, you likely understand the tremendous value that SEO can bring to your brand. However, you also know that an effective search engine optimization program requires time and the expertise of skilled professionals to achieve lasting, positive results.
The challenge is that many businesses lack the in-house resources to support a dedicated SEO team. This leaves them with two choices: hire and train an internal team or outsource SEO to specialized experts.
SEO outsourcing involves delegating search engine optimization tasks—such as on-page optimization (including keywords, metadata, and blog content) and off-page optimization (like social media, link building, and guest posts)—to a third-party company, agency, or individual. Companies often choose to outsource SEO to scale their business and offer more comprehensive services to their clients.
We partner with digital marketing agencies of all sizes looking to grow their service offerings and expand their client base. Whether you’re just starting out or serving Fortune 500 clients, SEOReseller can help you scale. By outsourcing SEO, agencies can deliver essential SEO services while marking up costs, leading to increased profit, reduced expenses, and more time to focus on client relationships.
In this guide, we’ll dive into the details of SEO outsourcing: exploring its benefits, the different outsourcing options available, and how to choose the ideal SEO partner for your business.
So, what exactly is SEO outsourcing? Let’s take a closer look.
What Is SEO Outsourcing Service in India?
SEO outsourcing is the practice of hiring an external team of SEO specialists to manage your company’s SEO activities.
An outsourced SEO team can develop and execute a complete SEO strategy designed to boost your search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to your website. Alternatively, they can handle specific parts of your SEO plan, like keyword research, content creation, link building, and technical optimization.
Outsourcing SEO is especially beneficial for businesses that lack the internal resources or expertise to build and maintain strong organic visibility on their own.
What SEO Services Can You Outsource?
Outsourcing SEO allows businesses to enhance their SEO strategy by leveraging expert support, which is essential for achieving high rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Depending on your unique needs and marketing goals, an outsourced SEO team can manage one or more key SEO activities, such as:
Website Audit
Using the latest tools, including proprietary ones, we conduct thorough SEO audits to assess a website’s health, identify any issues, and uncover optimization opportunities.
Keyword Research
Keywords are central to our strategy. Through keyword research, we identify the search terms potential customers use when seeking products or services related to your business. This process aligns your content with your target audience’s search behavior, improving your visibility in search results and driving qualified traffic.
Using advanced keyword research tools and analytics software, an outsourced SEO team can uncover the topics your ideal customers are searching for. These insights inform both the optimization of existing pages and the creation of new, relevant content as part of a comprehensive SEO strategy.
Content Strategy and Creation
Content strategy and creation involve planning and producing materials such as articles, guides, videos, infographics, and webinars to attract potential customers through search engines. High-quality content that aligns with search demand enhances your site’s authority, improving its ability to rank highly in search results.
By outsourcing content development to SEO experts, you gain access to skilled writers who know how to create SEO-friendly, valuable content. Effective content pieces incorporate target keywords, follow SEO best practices, and provide substantial value to readers.
Link Building
Link building involves earning backlinks from reputable websites, which serve as endorsements for your own site in the eyes of search engines. The more high-quality backlinks you receive, the better your site’s ranking potential.
An outsourced SEO team can help secure valuable backlinks through strategies like guest posting, outreach, and broken link-building. Partnering with an SEO outsourcing team provides an efficient solution for managing this complex aspect of SEO.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on optimizing your website’s backend to improve its ranking capabilities. This includes optimizing website structure, enhancing page speed, and ensuring mobile-friendliness.
A well-optimized website offers a better user experience and helps Google easily crawl and index your site. Outsourcing technical SEO can involve regular site audits, managing redirects, and optimizing site navigation, ensuring your website performs optimally.
Local SEO Services
Local SEO aims to boost your visibility for location-based searches, crucial for businesses with a local customer base. Since nearly half of searches have local intent, optimizing for local SEO can significantly impact your business.
An outsourced SEO team can improve your local search visibility by optimizing for local keywords, managing local listings (such as your Google Business Profile), and creating location-specific content.
On-Page Optimization
Using only white-hat practices, we optimize on-page elements to enhance user experience first and search engine performance second. This approach creates an optimized, user-friendly site aligned with SEO best practices.
Analytics Tracking
Tracking is essential to monitor keyword rankings, traffic sources, social signals, and other metrics. These insights allow for continuous refinement of your SEO efforts, ensuring they remain effective and aligned with your goals.
High DA Link Building
We create high-quality content and secure relevant guest posts as part of a high DA (Domain Authority) link-building strategy to drive traffic to your site effectively.
Monitoring and Reporting
Ongoing monitoring and reporting provide critical insights into the performance of your SEO strategy. By tracking metrics like traffic sources, keyword rankings, backlink quality, and conversions, an outsourced SEO team can assess what’s working and where adjustments are needed. This data-driven approach ensures your SEO efforts remain aligned with business objectives and responsive to changes in algorithms and market trends.
What Aspects of SEO Require Your Direct Involvement?
While you can outsource most day-to-day SEO tasks to external professionals or agencies, certain areas of your SEO strategy need direct involvement to ensure alignment with your business’s core goals.
Brand Vision and Strategic Alignment
Your SEO program should seamlessly integrate with your broader brand strategy, reflecting your mission, vision, and values. This alignment is crucial to ensure that all SEO efforts support your business’s goals and convey a consistent brand message to your target audience.
For example, if your company aims to become a leader in sustainable practices, this objective should guide choices around keyword selection, content topics, and link-building strategies. While an outsourced SEO team may be proficient in best practices and technical work, they may lack the in-depth understanding of your unique vision and market positioning that an internal team member can bring.
Content Authenticity and Expertise
Though content creation can be outsourced, maintaining authenticity and sharing specialized insights often require input from within your company.
This is particularly important if your business operates in a specialized field, such as healthcare, finance, or law. Content in these areas must not only be engaging and SEO-friendly but also accurate and compliant with industry guidelines.
SEO Training and Company Culture
Fostering an SEO-conscious culture within your organization is something that can’t be fully outsourced.
Training your staff in SEO basics, encouraging SEO best practices in content creation, and raising SEO awareness across departments are initiatives that support long-term SEO success. Additionally, facilitating collaboration between your SEO partner and other external stakeholders—such as design teams, digital marketing, and web developers—requires internal oversight. It’s up to you to ensure that all parties work together effectively to achieve your SEO goals.
What Are the Benefits of Outsourcing SEO?
Here are some key advantages of outsourcing search engine optimization (SEO) to experienced professionals.
Free Up Time
One of the biggest benefits of outsourcing SEO is the extra time it provides you and your team to focus on other high-priority business activities.
Instead of spending hours on tasks like fixing crawl issues, reclaiming broken backlinks, or analyzing keywords, outsourcing allows your business to concentrate on its core strengths while still gaining the benefits of enhanced search visibility.
Gain Expertise and Experience
By outsourcing SEO to skilled professionals, you gain access to their years of experience in achieving results for a wide variety of clients across different industries.
This extensive knowledge and experience make them well-prepared to handle even the most challenging SEO issues.
Avoid the Time and Cost of Hiring
Building an in-house SEO team is costly, with expenses related to recruitment, training, salaries, software, and equipment.
Additionally, getting a new team fully up to speed can take weeks or even months. By outsourcing SEO, you can bypass these costs and start making progress on your SEO goals right away.
Scale More Rapidly
With an expert team managing your SEO program, you can accelerate your business growth. The cost of outsourcing remains relatively consistent, while your revenue potential from increased organic traffic continues to rise.
Potential Downsides of Outsourcing SEO
While outsourcing SEO offers many advantages, it also comes with potential risks and challenges.
These issues can often be mitigated by carefully choosing the right SEO partner (more on that later).
Lack of Industry-Specific Knowledge
Working with an SEO agency or consultant who serves a broad range of industries can sometimes mean they lack specific insights into your industry’s language, customer behavior, regulations, or competitive landscape.
Without this specialized knowledge, they may develop a generic SEO strategy that doesn’t fully address your unique challenges or leverage key opportunities within your market.
Communication Barriers
Clear communication is crucial when outsourcing any service, especially SEO, where strategies and objectives need to be well-aligned on both sides.
Communication barriers, like time zone differences, can lead to delayed responses and slow decision-making. Additionally, language differences or cultural nuances may cause misunderstandings of goals or strategies.
Risk of Black-Hat Practices
Outsourcing SEO can expose your business to the risk of partnering with agencies that use black-hat SEO tactics, which violate search engine guidelines.
These tactics—such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, or using private link networks—may deliver quick results initially, but they can result in severe penalties from Google, including removal from search results. Such penalties can harm your brand’s reputation and require significant time and resources to recover from.
When Should You Outsource SEO?
Now that we’ve reviewed the advantages and drawbacks of outsourcing SEO, let’s look at situations where this option makes the most sense.
Outsourcing SEO might be the right choice if any of the following applies to you:
You Lack Time, Resources, or Expertise
Successful SEO requires more than just optimizing for a few keywords or publishing occasional blog posts. The organic search landscape is highly competitive, with countless brands vying for limited space on Google’s results pages. Achieving and maintaining a strong position in this environment demands strategic planning, consistent execution, and continual analysis and adaptation.
If your team doesn’t have the time, tools, or expertise for this ongoing work, outsourcing SEO may be your best solution.
You Need Consistent and Reliable Results
Experienced SEO professionals know how to identify quick-win opportunities and build strategies that lead to lasting, sustainable growth. Their expertise ensures that your SEO program is based on proven best practices. On the other hand, an inexperienced approach can lead to costly mistakes and missed growth opportunities.
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.
What Are Your Options for Outsourcing SEO?
Now that you understand how outsourcing SEO can benefit your business, let’s look at the different ways to approach it.
There are three main options for outsourcing your SEO:
1. Hire an Independent SEO Professional
The most budget-friendly option is to entrust the bulk of your SEO tasks to a skilled SEO freelancer or contractor.
This approach works well for smaller businesses with limited SEO needs, as a freelancer can usually handle core tasks effectively. However, because they’re a single individual, the scope of work they can manage is naturally limited. You may also need to oversee their work closely, as finding someone who delivers high-quality, consistent results without being pulled into other client projects can be challenging.
Additionally, this option often requires more hands-on involvement from you and your team. Freelancers may recommend SEO changes, but the implementation often falls to your in-house staff.
2. Hire a Full-Service Agency
The next option is to work with a full-service agency that offers SEO as part of a broader suite of digital marketing services.
This choice is ideal if you’re looking for help across multiple channels, as these agencies can support SEO, social media, content, and paid ads. Partnering with a full-service agency gives you access to a diverse team of marketing experts, which can lead to a creative and integrated approach.
However, since SEO may not be the primary focus of many full-service agencies, you might not get the advanced level of SEO expertise you need. That said, many full-service agencies are highly capable of delivering excellent SEO results.
3. Hire an SEO Specialist Agency
Your third option is to collaborate with an agency that specializes solely in SEO.
These companies are entirely focused on SEO and dedicate their time to staying ahead of the latest trends and best practices in search engine optimization. Working with an SEO-specialized agency often means access to highly effective, up-to-date strategies that can produce significant, long-term results for your business.
This option is ideal for businesses focused on maximizing their organic search performance. However, keep in mind that an SEO-only agency will not handle other marketing needs, so you may need additional vendors for a more comprehensive digital strategy.
How to Outsource SEO Services Effectively?
Whether you choose an independent SEO professional, a full-service agency, or an SEO specialist, here’s a six-step process to help you find the right SEO partner.
1. Define Your Goals and Service Needs
Start by identifying exactly what you need from an outsourced SEO team.
For instance, you may only need keyword research and competitor analysis to guide your in-house content team for the next quarter. Alternatively, you might need comprehensive support across technical SEO, on-page optimization, local SEO, content marketing, and link building.
To determine the level of service you need, clarify your goals and set realistic timelines. Keep in mind that SEO typically takes at least three to four months to yield measurable results.
The clearer your objectives, the easier it will be to define the requirements for your outsourced team. Broad targets like “I want more traffic” or “I want to rank #1 on Google” aren’t specific enough.
When setting your SEO goals, consider questions like:
-What kind of traffic is most valuable to you? – Your SEO goals should align with your business objectives. For example, if your company’s aim is to increase new customer revenue by 20% in six months, your SEO goal might be to double traffic to bottom-of-the-funnel content.
-Are there gaps in the customer journey that SEO and content can fill? – Identify key areas where SEO could improve customer engagement.
-How does organic search compare to other lead generation channels?
-What revenue do you aim to achieve from SEO within a year?
-Are there specific brands you want to emulate or compete with?
-Is your business local or spread across multiple regions? – If local, you may want to focus on improving local SEO.
-Do you have existing content on your website? – Review which topics have performed best to guide future content planning.
Your outsourced SEO team will be better equipped to create a tailored strategy if you have a clear vision of the outcomes you want to achieve.
2. Research and Evaluate SEO Providers
Next, start researching SEO providers who might be a fit for your business.
Begin by exploring their websites. If a provider’s site looks outdated, cluttered, or is difficult to find in search results, that may signal issues with their SEO expertise. However, if their site is professional and ranks well, dive into their reviews, testimonials, and case studies—especially those from businesses in your industry. These resources can provide insights into their reliability, client satisfaction, and the ROI they typically deliver.
3. Draft an SEO RFP (Request for Proposal)
Once you identify promising providers, prepare an SEO RFP to clarify your needs and invite tailored proposals.
Think of this as a detailed brief outlining what you’re seeking in an SEO partner. This document will help potential vendors understand your business and objectives, allowing them to propose how they can best serve you. After receiving responses, you can compare them and select the most suitable partner.
Your RFP should include the following sections:
-Company Overview: Provide a background on your business—your industry, history, primary products or services, and market presence. Mention any relevant milestones or company values that may influence your SEO needs. This helps potential vendors align their approach with your business model and market dynamics.
-SEO Goals and Current Performance**: Clearly state what you aim to accomplish with SEO. This could include improving keyword rankings, boosting organic traffic, or increasing conversions. Share your current SEO metrics as a baseline to help vendors craft a tailored improvement strategy.
-Required SEO Services: List the specific SEO services you need, like keyword research, content creation, link building, technical audits, local SEO, or ongoing SEO management. Being specific allows vendors to propose a detailed strategy that covers all your requirements.
-Budget: Provide a budget range. Knowing your financial constraints allows vendors to propose realistic solutions that won’t compromise on quality.
-Vendor Expectations: Outline qualities and capabilities you expect in a vendor, such as responsiveness, transparency, industry experience, and reliability. Specify if you’d like information about team members and their expertise.
-Selection Criteria: Explain how you’ll evaluate the proposals, such as alignment with your goals, cost-effectiveness, innovative solutions, vendor reputation, and client testimonials or case studies. This lets vendors understand how you’ll judge their proposals.
-Project Cost Estimate: Request a detailed breakdown of costs, including one-time fees, monthly service charges, and any additional expenses. This information will help you assess and compare the financial aspects of each proposal.
-Proposal Submission Deadline: Set a clear deadline for submissions. This keeps the process on track and allows you ample time to review each proposal thoroughly before making a decision.
4. Finalize Your Choice
After evaluating all proposals, it’s time to make your selection.
If one candidate stands out, or if you have a shortlist of top contenders, schedule an in-person or virtual interview with each vendor before finalizing your decision. This conversation will allow you to clarify any ambiguous points, explore their proposed strategies in detail, and understand their communication and workflow processes. You’ll also get a sense of how well they align with your team’s dynamics and business philosophy.
During these interviews, consider asking questions to get a clear picture of how they work. Here are a few questions to guide your discussion:
-Turnaround Times: What are the typical turnaround times for specific deliverables?
-Performance Metrics: How do you measure success for different tasks?
-Audience Understanding: What steps will you take to understand my audience’s needs?
-Campaign Performance: How will you assess campaign performance, and how will you adapt if results aren’t meeting expectations?
-Client Updates: How frequently do you provide updates on campaign progress?
-Project Management: Will a project manager be assigned to our account?
-Client Dashboard: Do you offer a client dashboard or project management portal?
-Tools and Certifications: What tools do you use, and are your team members certified by Google?
-Team Structure: Do you work with subcontractors, or is all work done in-house?
-Industry Knowledge: How do you stay current with SEO best practices and algorithm updates?
-SEO Integration: How will you coordinate SEO efforts with our other digital marketing activities?
-Exit Process: If we decide to part ways, what is the process for contract termination and ensuring a smooth transition?
After completing the interviews and evaluating responses, choose the vendor that best aligns with your goals and is a good fit for your team.
5. Onboard Your New SEO Partner
After finalizing the contract, begin the onboarding process.
This typically involves introducing your new SEO partner to your team, providing access to necessary tools and data, and scheduling initial planning meetings to kick off the project. During these discussions, reiterate your objectives to ensure the SEO strategy aligns with your business vision.
This is also a chance for both parties to agree on key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress and set expectations for communication, including the frequency of updates and reporting.
6. Hold Your Outsourced SEO Team Accountable
While it’s important to allow time for the outsourced SEO team to implement their strategy and see results, consistent oversight is key.
Monitor monthly and quarterly performance reports, and ask for explanations on any significant campaign changes. These discussions will help you understand their decisions and ensure they align with your overall business goals.
Schedule regular review meetings to assess progress against your KPIs, address any challenges, and adjust strategies as needed. This approach ensures transparency, accountability, and effective communication, which are crucial for successful collaboration.
The goal is to foster a strong working relationship where you and your SEO team are in sync and working toward the same objectives.
Ready to Outsource Your SEO?
Outsourcing SEO can be a great option for businesses looking to improve their search visibility but lacking the time, resources, or expertise to handle it in-house.
There are three main outsourcing options: hiring a freelancer or contractor, partnering with a full-service digital agency, or working with a specialized SEO agency. Regardless of your choice, it’s crucial to clearly define your SEO goals and ensure the partner you select is equipped to meet your unique needs.