At some point, every business that takes search seriously runs into the same question.
Do we bring SEO in-house? Or do we hire an agency or consultant to run it for us?
On the surface it looks like a simple cost comparison. In reality, it’s a choice about control, speed, risk, and how your team actually works day to day.
Hire the wrong agency and you burn money on reports that don’t match what’s happening on the ground. Hire the wrong in-house SEO and you end up managing someone who’s overwhelmed, isolated, and trying to fix everything with blog posts.
This article isn’t going to tell you that one option is always better. It isn’t.
Instead, we’ll walk through what each setup really looks like, where each one shines, where it breaks, and how to decide what makes sense for your business right now — not in theory.
Why this decision matters more than the tools you use
Most SEO conversations start with tools.
Which rank tracker. Which keyword tool. Which audit suite.
Those choices are secondary.
The bigger question is: who is actually responsible for thinking, prioritising, and saying “no” to the wrong SEO work?
That “who” changes everything.
Because SEO isn’t just a channel. It’s a way of making decisions about:
- what you publish
- how your product or service is positioned on your site
- which pages you improve first
- how you connect content to revenue
Get the “who” wrong and you end up with content nobody needs, keywords that don’t match your buyers, and a lot of busywork that doesn’t move anything.
So let’s look at what in-house actually means — not on a job spec, but in daily reality.
What in-house SEO really looks like
When people imagine in-house SEO, they think of one person in a corner office plugging keywords into a tool and sending the occasional report.
In reality, good in-house SEO looks a lot more like a bridge.
A bridge between:
- marketing and sales
- content and product
- what the team wants to promote and what buyers are actually searching for
The upside of in-house SEO
Deep context. Someone inside your business sees the patterns over time — the deals that close, the objections sales keep hearing, the products that drive profit, the services you actually want to grow.
Faster feedback loops. An in-house SEO can tap your sales team, support inbox, and product owner in the same afternoon. They don’t need to book a discovery call to learn why customers churn. They sit in on those conversations.
More control over priorities. Internal people feel the impact of SEO decisions. They know when the team is stretched, when dev resources aren’t available, and when marketing is already slammed. That makes it easier to prioritise work that can realistically get done.
Better integration with other channels. Good SEO ties into your email, paid campaigns, landing pages, and product launches. When the person running SEO is in the room, those links are easier to make.
The downside of in-house SEO
Budget concentration. One or two salaries is a big commitment. You’re not just paying for execution — you’re paying for holidays, sick leave, onboarding, learning curves, and the risk that they might leave after a year.
Skill gaps. SEO isn’t one skill. It’s several. Technical audits. Content strategy. Analytics. Strategy. Stakeholder management. Very few people are genuinely strong at all of that on their own.
Risk of tunnel vision. If your SEO only knows your company, your product, and your market, they can lose perspective on what’s working elsewhere. They see fewer patterns outside your walls.
Dependency on one person. If everything lives in one brain, you’re vulnerable. A departure, burnout, or a mis-hire can set you back months.
In-house SEO works best when your company:
- already gets a decent amount of organic traffic
- plans to invest in SEO for years, not months
- has enough work to keep someone busy full-time
- is willing to let SEO influence product, content, and messaging decisions
If that isn’t you yet, an outside partner might make more sense — at least for now.
What outsourced SEO really looks like
Outsourcing SEO usually means hiring an agency, a consultant, or a small specialist team.
Sometimes you get a good one. Sometimes you get templated reports, vague updates, and backlinks you don’t want to look too closely at.
The model itself isn’t the problem. The expectations are.
The upside of outsourced SEO
Access to a wider skill set. A decent agency brings people who specialise in different things — technical audits, content planning, digital PR, analytics, CRO. That’s hard to replicate with a single hire.
External perspective. Someone who works across different industries sees patterns you won’t see from the inside. They know what’s working elsewhere. They can challenge assumptions you’ve stopped noticing.
Flexibility in scope. You can scale up and down more easily than with a full-time hire. Need a heavy quarter of content and links, then a quieter period? Easier with a service agreement than with payroll.
Quicker start. A good agency already has processes, templates, and workflows. They know how to run audits, spin up strategies, and start shipping work faster than someone who’s still learning your stack.
The downside of outsourced SEO
Less internal context. No matter how good they are, they’re not in your sales meetings every week. They’re not overhearing customer calls. If you don’t feed them context, they’re guessing.
Risk of misaligned incentives.
Some agencies are rewarded for “activity” — number of pages published, number of links built, length of reports — rather than meaningful outcomes like leads, deals, or revenue.
Communication overhead. Every idea, change, and priority shift has to travel through calls, emails, and project management tools. If nobody owns that relationship on your side, things get lost.
Templated strategies. At the cheaper end of the market, a lot of SEO work is copy-paste. Same keyword process. Same content outlines. Same link tactics. Different logo on the front of the deck.
Outsourced SEO works best when:
- you have someone internal who can own the relationship
- you can give clear input and get out of the way
- you need a range of skills but can’t justify a full in-house team
- you’re willing to judge work on outcomes, not just how “busy” it looks
If you want to hand SEO off completely with no context, no access, and no internal owner, it rarely ends well.
How to decide what’s right for your business
Instead of asking “which is better?” ask a different set of questions.
Questions tied to your situation, not generic advice.
1. What stage is your business at?
If you’re early-stage, still proving product–market fit, and cash is tight, you probably don’t need a full-time SEO yet.
You might be better off with:
- a one-off strategy engagement
- a consultant who sets direction while your team executes
- a small retainer to cover technical fixes and content planning
If you’re later-stage, already generating leads from organic search, and want to scale it, that’s when in-house starts to make sense — because small improvements compound.
2. How complex is your product or service?
The more niche or technical your offering, the more valuable deep internal context becomes.
If you sell something complex with long sales cycles, an in-house SEO who lives close to product, sales, and customer success will make better decisions than an agency working from a 20-page onboarding doc.
3. Do you have someone internal who can own SEO?
Even if you outsource, you still need someone inside your business who can:
- give the agency context
- approve or push back on priorities
- coordinate with dev, content, and design
- hold the external team accountable to outcomes
Without that person, even the best agency will drift.
If you don’t have that owner today, in-house might be the wrong hire — not because you don’t need SEO, but because you don’t yet have the structure to support it.
4. What’s your appetite for control vs. leverage?
In-house gives you control. Outsourcing gives you leverage.
Control means:
- you can pull someone into internal discussions easily
- you can shift their focus week to week
- you see how they think, not just what they deliver
Leverage means:
- you get access to more skills than one person can hold
- you don’t carry the full-time risk if SEO needs change
- you can scale up or down more easily
Neither is “right.” It’s about which trade-offs you’re more comfortable living with for the next 12–24 months.
Red flags to watch for (both in-house and outsourced)
Whatever route you choose, you’re not just hiring for skills. You’re hiring for how someone thinks, communicates, and makes decisions under pressure.
There are patterns worth avoiding.
Red flags when hiring in-house
- Over-promising on timelines. “We’ll double traffic in three months” is a bad sign.
- Obsessed with tools, light on strategy. They talk about software more than they talk about your buyers and your offer.
- No questions about sales or margins. They don’t ask which services or products actually matter to the business.
- Only experience: content or only technical. Either extreme without curiosity about the other side can be limiting.
Red flags when picking an agency or consultant
- No interest in speaking with sales or leadership. They just want access to your CMS and a keyword tool.
- They sell a fixed package before understanding your situation.
- Reporting focuses on traffic and rankings only. No mention of leads, pipeline, or real outcomes.
- Vague about what they actually do each month.
- Heavy emphasis on quantity of links or posts. Light detail on quality.
If a partner can’t explain their approach in plain language, that’s an answer in itself.
The middle ground: hybrid setups that actually work
It doesn’t have to be binary.
Some of the strongest setups mix both models.
In-house lead, external support
This looks like:
- one in-house SEO or marketing generalist who sets direction
- an agency or consultant who handles execution in specific areas
For example:
- agency runs large technical audits and link-building campaigns
- internal person works on strategy, priorities, briefs, and reporting
This keeps knowledge inside your business while still giving you access to specialist skills.
External strategist, internal executors
Another option is to bring in someone senior externally to build the strategy and train your team — then let your writers, devs, and marketers run with it.
That could look like:
- a 90-day engagement to build out your SEO roadmap
- training sessions for your team on how to write and structure content
- quarterly check-ins to review performance and adjust direction
This is often a good bridge when you’re not ready for a full-time SEO but don’t want to outsource everything blindly.
Agency now, in-house later
You can also treat outsourcing as a stepping stone.
Use an agency to:
- clean up your technical foundations
- identify the highest-value pages and keywords
- build an initial bank of content that actually ranks
Then, once SEO is driving meaningful leads, hire in-house to deepen and expand what’s already working.
That way, your first internal SEO doesn’t start from zero. They inherit something with traction.
So… in-house or outsourced?
There isn’t a single right answer.
But there is a right answer for where you are now.
If you’re early-stage, not getting many leads from organic yet, and don’t have anyone who can guide an SEO hire, outsourcing — carefully — is usually safer.
Either way, the core questions stay the same:
- Who is thinking about SEO like a system, not a set of hacks?
- Who understands your buyers well enough to make smart trade-offs?
- Who is close enough to the business to know what actually needs to grow?
Answer those honestly and the in-house vs. outsourced debate gets a lot less abstract.
Because in the end, it’s not really about where your SEO sits. It’s about whether someone — inside or outside — is doing the kind of work that leads to more of the right people finding you, and more of them deciding to work with you.