Agency vs. In-House SEO Battle

Planning and execution of campaigns were also quite flexible (well depending on how many steps up the ladder you need to climb for approvals) when you’re in-house because you’re directly connected with the stakeholders of the project. In terms of reporting, it is quite straightforward. Once you’ve established your KPI’s (and enhance them over the period of time), then building a monthly template would be fluid enough. This is where you can see the fruits of your effort (and mistakes) come to life. Being able to monitor KPI’s on a regular basis for a single client gives you that confidence in generating projections and action plans for the next proceeding months.If there’s one word that I can attribute to being an in-house SEO, it would be FOCUS. It’s that focus that gives an in-house SEO his core strength vs. an SEO agency. I was fortunate enough that my bosses were patient and generous enough to let me experiment, innovate, and develop my processes for their websites for their success. Yes, I made a lot of mistakes but I always made a point to correct them for twice the gain. An inevitable weakness which is inherited by in-house SEO jedi’s is the disease of being “nearsightedness”. They will become so immersed with the company and industry that sometimes he loses touch of what’s happening in the industry as a whole specially if they stick to process which works and never have the courage or the time to experiment and think out of the corporate box. One last thing to note that another benefit of being in-house is that you can bring extra skills to the table. When I started enhancing my skills in conversion optimization, I was able to increase conversion funnel performance by 20% which of course the company gained a good ROI from it’s organic optimization.

SEO Agency Ninja

The first 2 years of my career started with one of the largest SEO agencies in the Philippines (I’m not sure if it’s still true now because back in 2004 there were only a handful of companies and SEO was still beginning to become popular).

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Although it was an agency experience, I was assigned to work with one US and one Canadian client. So it still felt more like being an in-house consultant to both of them. But one thing I didn’t realize was I was wearing a number of hats while working with these clients – media planner / buyer, web content writer, and being an SEO specialist.

The real agency experience for me began 3 months ago when I joined one of the leading SEO specialist agencies here in Dubai. Despite being in the early stages, I can surely tell the big difference.

While the in-house SEO has the strength in focus, the agency ninja has his muscle on diversity and experience. Since September, I was able to deliver on-page / marketing strategy recommendations, delivered link building campaigns and established SEO reports for at least 6 different clients. It was a bit of a struggle for me considering I was so used to optimizing 1 client at a time. But as with everything else, it gets better with experience.

Being an agency ninja teaches you to be more organized and speedy. When working on deliverables, you have to learn to “compartmentalize”. Chances are you’ll be working on a couple of clients within the same industry, targeting the same keywords and aiming for the same market. Knowing for which client this deliverable is for is always essential.

Getting approvals for your strategy recommendations always take time to materialize especially if you’re client is a multinational corporation where the levels approvals are endless. This gives the agency ninja to come up with productive actions in the interim period – may it be initial link building for the brand or analyzing the current traffic performance.

Agency ninjas don’t have the luxury of focus and time. Therefore they have to adopt to choose wisely which keywords to aim first, pages to optimize, and goals to prioritize. This gives them that immediate boost in experience knowing what works for certain types of clients and websites.

In terms of search trends, agency ninjas often times have the advantage. They can see immediately the effects of an algorithm update with their different clients and across multiple industries and markets. Specially with SEO agencies who are optimizing international clients, they see the broader effects of updates compared to that of in-house jedi’s.

On Which Side Should I Be?

If you’re a client, it really depends on a lot of factors. What are your short-term and long-term goals? How big is your budget? How capable are your resources in planning and executing your campaigns?

Both in-house and agency SEO’s will cost you – agencies are known to charge costs for their services. Bringing the team in house will also cost you in searching for the right talent, developing / training the personnel.

Both will bring you benefits granting you choose the right team or agency.

If you are a young SEO still deciding on which career path to choose, I’d say have both if you have the chance. In-house optimization will teach you the patience and focus while agency experience will teach to act quickly and absorb as much knowledge in a short period of time. A well-balanced career path will always be a gem in your resume wherever you may go.

I wanna know how other in-house SEO gurus and big shot agency SEO’s are doing? Please share your experience in the comments section.