The question that’s on the minds of many is should I outsource my SEO or be doing it myself?
The answer isn’t always straightforward, as it depends heavily on budget, time and skill level.
There are benefits to hiring an SEO Link Building agency to do the work for you but it doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from what they’re doing yourself.
So in this article, I’m gonna be going through the pros and cons of outsourcing your SEO link building service versus just doing it all in-house.
So let’s get right into it.
What does link building mean for SEO?
Before we start the main course of this article let’s get everyone up to speed with what link building is and how it works first.
The main objective of SEO link building is to connect your website to another related website (link), which will then have a positive effect on your search rankings.
In the earlier years, Google would judge links as positive or negative depending on if they were relevant or not.
Basically, any outbound link that wasn’t relevant was seen as spammy and would lower their search results for certain keywords or phrases within pages in their ranking algorithm.
But since around 2011 Google has refined its algorithms and now uses ‘PageRank‘, or PR as a ranking factor in their algorithm alongside the quality of websites linking to yours.
Therefore, if you have a high PR link from another website, this is seen as a positive ranking factor.
But if the link is not relevant (low quality) then this can also negatively impact your rankings.
This means it’s crucial to know what you’re doing when trying to obtain links for SEO purposes.
You don’t want to jeopardize your ranking by building poor quality links.
So with that out of the way, let’s go through the pros and cons of outsourcing SEO link building service vs doing it yourself.
Pros and cons of outsourcing link building to an agency
Pros of outsourcing your SEO Link Building service:
1) They know what they’re doing: The main benefit of hiring a professional SEO agency is that they have years of experience under their belt, and are far more knowledgeable about link building than most people.
Not only do they know the best practices for obtaining high PR links, but also how to avoid low-quality ones which could negatively impact your search
Whereas if you were to do it yourself and lack any industry experience then you could run the risk of:
- Not being able to build links from relevant websites
- Building bad quality links which could hurt your search results
- Being penalized by Google for trying to manipulate the system (which is what Google call backlinking schemes).
2) They do the research for you: If you’re not familiar with link building, then it can take a good amount of time to research all the different websites that you could potentially build links from.
Depending on how many backlinks you want to obtain, this could take a lot of time and effort. Whereas an SEO expert agency specializing in link building has already done this research for you.
They will know every possible website that’s worth targeting for your industry niche, and they will also how to get their contact information on the relevant contacts.
3) It will save you time and effort: Link building can be very time consuming to do yourself, especially if you’re on a strict deadline. Hiring an SEO Link Building service means it will take your link building off your plate so you won’t have to worry about doing this at all.
Cons of outsourcing your SEO Link Building service:
If the agency is not reputable, they could scam you out of a lot of money without actually helping you achieve any results (very uncommon but still possible).
Another thing to consider is if the agency’s service costs are significantly less than the market rate.
Then you can expect that their quality will suffer or they’ll have limited experience in what they do, which could end up negatively impact your rankings.
When it comes to outsourcing link building, you get what you pay for.
If you do decide to go down this route and hire an SEO link building agency, make sure they are reputable within the industry and have good reviews from previous clients.
This will help minimize the risk of hiring an inexperienced SEO agency that could end up costing you thousands without helping you achieve any results for your business.
Pros and cons of doing link building in-house
Pros of doing link building yourself:
1) You’ll have full control over what you’re doing: You’re able to better control where your links are coming from and vet the links yourself.
2) It allows you to keep costs down as much as possible which is great when going through tough financial periods in your startup business.
Having to pay around $1000+ per month can end up exhausting a lot of startup funding for any business.
3) You’ll get instant gratification by being able to see direct results from your SEO link building.
4) If you’re an agency, you probably need a white label link building service because you don’t have the time to recruit, manage, hire and train a team internally.
Cons of doing link building yourself:
1) There’s no shortcut to getting high-quality links. It takes up a significant amount of time to build links from websites that Google deems relevant to your niche.
Time is money, especially when you’re a business owner having to juggle between tasks and responsibilities.
If you were to hire an agency to do link building for you, it would give you more time to focus on other things that are more important for your business.
2) Link building takes knowledge on how to do it properly. If you make one mistake it could potentially negatively impact your search positioning and hurt traffic to your site which is the last thing you want when running a startup or small business.
3) If you start getting a lot of bad links it could cost your business incredibly in terms of penalties which would be the worst scenario for any startup.
When (and when not) to outsource link building
There are specific times where it’s better to outsource SEO Link building instead of doing it yourself.
Useful: How To Outsource Link Building: Everything You Need To Know
When should you outsource SEO link building?
1) You lack the specific knowledge and experience to do it yourself but you still want to increase SEO traffic to your site.
2) You don’t have the time to do it yourself and you want to focus your energy on other aspects of your business. (link building takes a lot of time).
3) You can’t afford to hire an SEO specialist in-house to get the job done and you’re better off outsourcing it and saving those funds for other things that are important to your business.
4) You need a third party expert who will be constantly monitoring and updating your backlinks for you on a regular basis and keeping track of all of your outreach work.
When you should do it yourself?
1) You’ve done SEO link building in the past for other websites and you were able to achieve high-quality results.
2) You have a very limited budget for SEO and you want to minimize costs by doing as much of the work yourself.
3) You want to know exactly what you’re doing in terms of link building so that you can better control your own rankings and increase traffic from sources that are relevant to your website.
4) You don’t mind spending a lot of time doing SEO link building for your business.
Conclusion
I hope this article helps you decide between outsourcing your link building or doing it in-house.
The idea is to find what works best for your business and then go with it, as opposed to doing nothing because you’re scared of making mistakes or wasting hundreds/thousands of dollars on the wrong SEO strategy/service.
It can be scary signing onto a new SEO agency/provider if you’ve never done link building before, but don’t let that be the reason why you fail at link building.
The bottom line is that you can’t be afraid of trying new things, especially if it could potentially boost your business.
