Building Internal SEO Team or The Outsourcing?

What is the company's budget to create an internal SEO team? Is outsourcing an SEO agency more efficient?

Limitations of the discussion

I have to limit this discussion to the following variables

1. Mid-sized companies and/or startups have a team of 50-100 people
2. The business sector being simulated is F&B
3. The company's goal is to organically increase traffic to the website and achieve a 9x ranking (or Google's first-page equivalent) on the topic of keyword performance
4. The company's target for KPI or OKR is 12-16 months of work
5. The company is located in Jakarta (or surrounding areas) and operates in the Jabodetabek market.

Why should this discussion be limited? The SEO work varies, for example, SEO for personal sites that are managed for the purpose of revenue from advertising, SEO for small businesses so that potential customers in a certain region or business area can find the product services offered, SEO for small and medium-sized companies aims to reach potential consumers to get rankings. certain of a few targeted keywords and their competition, then for larger-scale SEO goals even more (a) to get traffic organically, (b) to maintain rankings on hundreds to thousands of targeted keywords, (c) to reach potential consumers broader scope, (d) to maintain its position as a market leader in certain business sectors, and more.

Content

So I must mention the 5 things above so that the comparison of the internal vs outsourced SEO team budget can be answered more accurately.

Here, we will start with the simplest calculation

Table 1: SEO budget simulation for Internal team at junior level.

Then, the total budget of the SEO team is IDR 16 million. Potentially more or less,  depends on the company's negotiations with prospective employees.

But let's evaluate the relationship with the specifications and qualifications.

1. Would you be risking the time and money even on a team that is adapting to the topic of SEO?
2. Do you hope that the company's expectations of the SEO goals that have been set can be understood correctly?
3. So what is the SEO budget at this level outsourced, at least in the cmlabs team? With the specifications mentioned, the SEO budget is not more than IDR 10 million per month. Ranged between Rp5-10 million. Why is that? That's because detailed specifications, SEO issues, and expectations can be very different when we do a website audit.

Let's move to the next level, which is the intermediate level. We will assume that the intermediate level has a good understanding of the company's needs and is capable of being responsible for certain SEO work.

Table 2: SEO budget simulation for Internal teams at mid-level.

The total investment of the SEO team is IDR 23 million per month. The questions related to table 2 are:

1. What if my SEO goals are expanded? Generally, you will need to add a junior-level Content Writer. With this scale, Developers and SEO Specialists are still enough. Then, the budget will increase to IDR 28 million per month.
2. What is the sustainability of employees in the company? Companies must pay attention to employee rights, including insurance, bonuses, salary increases for performance, to the total money that must be given to employees when there are problems with the company's financial condition.
3. What if at 60% SEO execution time or 40% towards the SEO results deadline suddenly the employee decides to resign? Then the company must be willing to increase the time limit for the results of the SEO work
4. What if the SEO work is no longer progressing, or there are no significant SEO issues for the team? So the company must continue to invest in the SEO team even though the SEO problems they are facing are not significant.
5. Then what is the SEO budget at the middle level when using outsourcing, at least in the cmlabs team? The budget is not more than IDR 15 million per month. Please note that things in detail specifications, SEO problems, to expectations can be very different when we do a website audit and that can set the price of SEO services offered by the cmlabs marketing team.

At least those are the stages and topics that small and medium-sized companies must know when deciding whether to have an internal SEO team or find an SEO partner from an external team.

In certain scenarios, the internal team will be more profitable for the company. For example, when the company has a plan to make a product or launch a certain service on a regular basis in a certain period of time. In this scenario, outsourcing costs will be more expensive.

You can discuss with the cmlabs business and marketing team if you are still wondering to invest in SEO internally or outsourced. Tell our team what kind of business you have and so on, as we demonstrated above.

In general, outsourcing an SEO team will be more efficient and effective for more business sectors, even across all business levels. So that you and other internal teams can focus on developing the company's business and managing other things for a bigger purpose. Assign your company's SEO work to the experts, and give your valuable time so that the business can develop. 

Content keywords

SEO, SEO budget, SEO agency outsourcing, SEO marketing, SEO for startups, internal SEO team

Purpose

Explain and compare whether having an internal SEO team is more efficient and effective than outsourcing an SEO agency. We have limited this topic at the beginning of the paragraph. Creating a comprehensive goal requires several issues to be addressed at once.

Disclaimer

Some processes in the writing are based on the author's knowledge (from books, scientific and non-scientific online writings, and work experience). At this writing, we do not claim that the content is flawless, free from inconsistent information, and does not drive questions or skepticism. If the author finds an error, then the author will update the writing. If the author gets a correction to his previous understanding, then the author will also update it.

Promotion

It is true that one of the goals of this article is to make cmlabs more exposed in search engine search results in relation to the targeted keywords (such as internal SEO team, SEO agency, outsourced SEO team, price of SEO services, etc.), and capture readers who want to understand this topic further on the social media platforms that we use (one day maybe we will publish this article to one or more official cmlabs social media accounts). If you could not find answers to problems related to the topic of this article, then please consult our marketing team.