The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Mixing Outsourced SEO with In-House SEO Teams

When you are combining the resources of an external team with those of your in-house SEO team, there is a need to determine who does what, who decides what is to be done, and so on. It is best to have this all clearly defined up front, or else there will be conflicts and confusion, which will slow down the process of increasing your organic search traffic. Be sure to talk to the website program or project manager, not only upper management. In the end, it will be up to the program or project manager(s) to fit the changes into the schedule. Get their buy-in from the beginning. You may want to even involve them in the vendor selection process, because they will have to work with the vendor as well.

If we look first at the process of defining who does what, there are a few considerations, such as the following:

1. What areas of expertise does your in-house team have? How does the outsourced resource complement or reinforce that?

2. Is the outsourced resource bringing a unique new area of expertise to your organization, or is it a supplemental resource to an existing area of expertise?

3. Is the outsourced resource going to be working on an area where you consider it essential to build expertise in-house?

4. Can you leverage the outsourced resource with your internal resources? Perhaps you can use this to keep the outside help working on higher-value tasks that provide you a bigger return on your consulting dollar.

All of these considerations factor into ...