When browsing SEO services, you are likely to come across a dilemma – should you hire a freelance SEO expert or a whole SEO agency?
This article will tell you about the most important criteria you should consider when hiring an SEO company vs. finding a freelance SEO. That will help you decide which one works best for you at this point, so make sure to read the article until the end.
Criteria #1: Price
Like with any other purchase you make, your budget will determine what you can and can’t afford. The same goes for search engine optimization.
There’s no denying that hiring a freelancer is cheaper than hiring a whole SEO services company. Freelancer marketplaces are filled with talent, and if you are willing to outsource your SEO to a country with a lower living standard, you can save a lot.
On the other hand, any local SEO company will have rent, employees, maintenance staff, hardware, taxes, all of which will affect their prices, meaning you will need to pay much more, at least when compared to a freelancer.
However, when it comes to SEO, picking only based on price is not a good idea. If you make the wrong choice, not only that your site won’t rank high in the search results, you will risk getting a Google SEO penalty if the person doesn’t know what they are doing.
Therefore, don’t only choose based on the price. SEO is more important than it might seem, and finding the best price to quality ratio should be your priority, which is much harder to do if you are browsing the cheapest freelancers.
Criteria #2: Campaign Size And Length
If you only need someone to perform some basic one-time keyword research, hiring a freelancer can do the trick most of the time. If they have proper tools and enough knowledge, they are likely to do a decent job.
However, if you plan to run a large-scale SEO campaign and you intend to outrank your competitors, an SEO services company is your only option. SEO is more than just doing keyword research. If you want to reach the first page of Google search results and stay there, you will need an entire team of dedicated SEO experts who will work on your campaign as a whole, including on-page and off-page SEO. That’s just too much work for an individual freelance SEO specialist.
Criteria #3: Reporting And Availability
An individual freelance SEO consultant will usually work with fewer clients due to limited time. That means you can expect them to be dedicated to your site and also expect good availability. You can ask them about the state of your site whenever you want, and they are likely to respond.
Working with a professional SEO agency is a different story. Even though agencies have more clients, they also have more people involved and spread across different parts of the project. Some team members will deal only with on-page, others will work on link building, while some will work on technical optimizations.
In other words, by working with an SEO agency, you will have more experts within their niche at hand. That will mean you will get detailed reports about the progress and site ranking. You will know exactly where your money is spent and what you can expect to get from your SEO campaign.
Criteria #4: Tools
Search engine optimization is quite complicated, as many factors influence Google rankings. SEO experts use several industry-standard tools to gain an advantage over the competition and help Google recognize the value of the site they are working on. These tools are used to find keyword and link-building opportunities, analyze competition, and figure out the best strategy to get in front.
The issue with these tools is their price – they are very expensive. Paying for several monthly subscriptions that can cost as much as several hundred dollars is usually too much for freelance SEO consultants.
Because they work alone, their working hours are limited, and the only way to make the whole business work is to keep their expenses low. That’s why individual SEO consultants usually use cheaper tools or buy subscriptions that lack the most powerful functions.
On the other hand, SEO agencies can afford the most premium tools that can give you an edge over the competition. SEO agencies know how necessary quality tools are. That is why we are constantly on the lookout to find the newest and the best tools to help your site rank.
Criteria #5: Experience And Professionalism
You know the old saying “Jack of all trades, master of none” – it turns out to be very accurate in the world of SEO, too.
Individual freelance consultants need to work on the entire SEO campaign alone. Considering how complex SEO is and how much time each part requires, it’s next to impossible for a single freelancer to do the whole campaign alone, even if they work only for you. Something has to give, and the results you get will be subpar compared to an SEO agency. You might make some initial savings, but over the longer period, your rankings will suffer.
SEO agencies have experts for each area of SEO. That means their knowledge and their experience are at a high level. Plus, individual team members constantly communicate and make each other better, which means you can expect much better results than you would get if you worked with each of them alone.
In short, the level of professionalism and experience you get when you choose the right SEO agency is incomparably higher than you would get even when working with the best freelancer.
Conclusion
When comparing SEO agencies with individual SEO consultants, it is obvious who wins when it comes to SEO quality – agencies. Working with a freelancer only has one benefit, which is the price.
But, if you take your business seriously and you want to get to the #1 SERP, making decisions solely based on price will backfire sooner rather than later. Therefore, don’t gamble and make the right decision by hiring your own team of dedicated SEO experts today.
