Should I hire an SEO company, or keep it in house?

Agencies with a verified published price

How to decide, then how to shortlist

1. Check that the demand exists before you buy the service. Search only pays where people describe your service in words they type. Some categories are bought by referral, tender or relationship and barely appear in search at all. Ask any candidate to show the queries they would aim at, with volumes, before they quote a monthly fee. A firm that cannot name the queries is proposing effort, not a target.
2. Establish who can actually change the site. The most common reason a retainer wastes money is that the agency has no route to publish. Settle before signing whether they get a login, whether changes go through your developer, and what the turnaround is. If publishing a page takes a month, buy a smaller engagement or fix the bottleneck first, because the recommendations will otherwise queue up unspent.
3. Compare published pricing and disclosed minimums. Firms that publish a floor price and a scope can be compared before you speak to anyone, which saves several weeks. Firms that quote only after discovery may still be good, but you are paying in time to find out. Line the candidates up on monthly fee, hours included, seniority of the person doing the work, and the smallest engagement they accept.
4. Agree the definition of a result in writing. Decide upfront whether success is enquiries, booked revenue, or visibility for a named set of queries, and who reports it from which account. Getting this into the contract prevents the familiar month six argument where the agency reports rankings and you were expecting the phone to ring more than it did.

The cases where hiring out clearly wins

Three situations make outsourcing the obvious call. The first is a competitive local or national category where the leaders have been investing for years, because catching up requires a volume of page work and technical fixes that an owner doing this on evenings will not sustain. The second is a site rebuild or migration, where the cost of getting redirects, canonicals and indexing wrong is measured in lost revenue for months. Google's guidance on consolidating duplicate URLs sets out how canonicalisation is meant to work, and that is exactly the sort of detail an in house generalist meets once and a specialist meets weekly.

The third is simple capacity. If someone competent inside the business already knows what needs doing but never gets to it, an agency is buying execution rather than expertise, and that engagement should be priced and scoped very differently from a strategic one. Say which of the three you are buying when you brief, because the right firm for a migration is not automatically the right firm for a steady content programme.

The cases where you should not hire yet

Do not hire while the fundamentals are broken in ways that money will not fix. If the site cannot be edited, if the business has no clear service pages because the services themselves are still changing, or if nobody will answer the phone when enquiries arrive, an SEO retainer converts into a monthly report. Fix the leak first. Equally, if you are testing whether a service line has demand at all, a short paid search experiment answers that in weeks where organic work answers it in quarters.

Be wary too of the very cheap retainer. Below a certain fee there are not enough hours in the month for anyone senior to think about your business, and the work reverts to a template: a blog post, a directory submission, a report. That is not a bargain version of the service, it is a different product, and it is usually worse than doing nothing while you save for a real engagement.

What a fair contract looks like

A defensible agreement names the person doing the work, states monthly hours or a deliverable count, sets a term of three to six months with a notice period, and puts ownership of the website, analytics, search console and any tracking assets in your name with the agency added as a user. It says what happens to the content if you leave. It avoids guaranteed positions entirely, because no supplier controls the ranking system, and a guarantee is either meaningless or is quietly attached to queries nobody searches.

On claims made in your marketing, remember the responsibility does not transfer with the invoice. The FTC advertising guidance for small businesses is clear that the advertiser must be able to substantiate the claims it makes, so if an agency writes copy asserting results, awards or credentials on your behalf, you are the one who has to stand behind them.

Questions people actually ask

Is an agency better than hiring one in house specialist?

For most businesses under a certain size, an agency buys a wider set of skills than one salary can. A single in house hire is stronger where the work is continuous, deeply product specific, or requires sitting with engineers daily. Many mature companies end up with one in house lead who directs an outside team, which is usually the best of both.

How much should I expect to pay?

Published floors vary enormously by scope and seniority, which is why comparing disclosed minimums matters more than comparing headline monthly fees. Work out the effective hourly rate implied by each proposal, then judge whether the seniority attached to those hours matches the difficulty of your category.

How long should I commit for?

Long enough for published work to be indexed and settle, short enough that a bad fit is survivable. Three to six months with notice is the common landing point. Refuse open ended terms with automatic annual renewal, and ask what the exit process looks like on the day you give notice.

What is the clearest warning sign in a pitch?

A guarantee of specific positions, a refusal to name the queries being targeted, or reporting that leads with rankings while avoiding enquiries. Add to that any reluctance to put your accounts in your own name, which is the one term that is expensive to undo later.

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