When is the right time to hire an SEO agency?
With rare exceptions, small resource-constrained startups can and should do their own SEO work.
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Most of my active consulting is with companies that have already found product market fit, and I see substantial growth opportunities in SEO. Still, while finding those companies, I speak to many earlier-stage companies and startups.
Most early-stage companies seem motivated to invest in SEO because they think they have to since SEO is “free.” I have discussed the free part of this before in other newsletters, but I want to focus on how to do SEO.
The cost of SEO
With rare exceptions, small resource-constrained startups can and should do their own SEO work. SEO work done with an agency will usually cost around $10k per month, with outliers on that continuum's less and more expensive end. While even a well-capitalized startup can afford $120k per year, should they spend that amount on a single channel that might not pay off soon?
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While many in the SEO industry don't advise this, a lot of basic SEO can be done by someone with minimal experience because there is a low risk of breaking anything. For example, the most essential aspect of early SEO is choosing the keywords to integrate into the crucial parts of a page. If the wrong keywords are chosen, the page won’t appear, and they can be adjusted later.
Keywords in the URL might be slightly more critical, but again, this might not be a big enough issue to justify the tens of thousands of dollars an SEO agency would charge to make this decision.
Complexity requires expertise
Complex technical decisions should be undertaken under the advice of someone with more advanced SEO knowledge. Choosing a CMS or the architecture of an entire website is an entirely different decision that should probably benefit from expert advice. Still, those instances are probably more rare than thought.
Redirects, mass content expansion, and page template layouts that affect tens of thousands of pages are also complex decisions, but these are not usually issues for very early-stage startups. At that stage, even if a company were to have tens of thousands of pages, it might not matter to make significant changes because the traffic is unlikely to be meaningful.
It’s like hiring HR
A good analogy to this might be thinking of this as the decision to bring on HR or a CFO. At the beginning of most companies’ journeys, having a full-time HR person is uncommon. Could the company benefit from having HR? Certainly, but in most cases, the founder-led decisions will not permanently affect the company’s future. There will be many notable exceptions to both realities, but their rare disaster should not be the motivation to have an extra executive head count.
I hate to tie the decision to bring on SEO help to when you might hire HR, but the thought process is similar. When investing time in someone doing something outside their expertise is more expensive than the alternative, you bring on help.
Do your own SEO
Instead of bringing on SEO early on, here are the SEO decisions that founders can make comfortably without concerns about long-term harm.
Domain name
Basic CMS
Folder structure
Content strategy
Keywords
Analytics
In short, if the decisions are two-way and can be reversed without painful repercussions, you skip the SEO agency. Choosing WordPress as a CMS vs. Wix might be an annoying decision to reverse, but it is reversible. Signing a five-year contract for a custom CMS is, for all intents and purposes, irreversible for a startup that thinks in months, not years.
When should you hire external help?
Instead of using the company analogy as I did for why you don’t need help, I will shift this to a personal one. Most people can probably file their taxes, especially if they only have a W-2 job and have limited complex deductions. Hiring someone to do what they could probably do themselves becomes a luxury they can afford because their time is better spent doing something else.
(To reiterate the same point I have made multiple times above, the focus here is when the complexity is limited and there’s little room for error that will land you in hot water with the IRS).
The same could apply to SEO. The founders or early employees could continue doing Google or Reddit searches or asking their friends for advice as they make their simple SEO decisions, but should they continue doing so?
When their time is better spent doing things they have more expertise and are higher leverage for the business, they should explore having an outsider help. Yes, relying on the outsider will be more expensive, but saving money is not a business KPI but an investment in business growth. It’s not just a financial calculation, either. If you will have more enjoyment from paying someone else to do your work for you and can afford it without a second thought, do so. When that investment decision is at the expense of another resource, you can’t necessarily afford it.
SEO isn’t always worth it
To underscore and clarify, SEO is a specialized marketing effort that, in many cases, should have expert guidance. However, the expense is sometimes not worth it when budgets are constrained. Much basic information is available on Google, Reddit, or YouTube, but as I highlighted above, this only applies to basic scenarios.
Complexity requires help
I once had an instance where, in a complex scenario, an engineer I was working with used a post I had written on Moz to disagree with me. (No, he had not seen that I had written it.) He misunderstood the point, and were I not there to set it straight, there could have been a disastrous mistake.
In complex scenarios, ALWAYS seek help because the cost of it going wrong is not worth the savings. On multiple occasions, I have seen startups think they saved money upfront, only to spend a lot more to fix their mistakes.
The more complex scenarios are just like filing complex taxes based on information learned from Google. That would not be a great idea unless you are a fan of costly mistakes.
Much information is free, but interpreting that information for a complex scenario takes experience and a domain expert. The real challenge is knowing when to ask for help and when it’s overkill.
As always, reply to this email if I can help!
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Great stuff, as always, Eli!