One of the questions that frequently comes up for companies that have internet properties is whether they should do more to increase their visibility by helping with SEO in-house.

SEOIt is actually a pretty interesting discussion because like using cloud providers to store your website in the first place, many firms have just focused on doing the same thing with SEO, finding the best possible offsite partner and then trusting them to create results for their sites and campaigns.

Here are some tips on making a decision about how much in-house support you should apply to an SEO campaign:

Make sure you have a decent partner:

SEO companies can be like ad agencies- they have periods of time where they are excellent and then periods of time where they could stand some improvement. If you have a good relationship with the people that run your account, one of the more important things to square away is a sense that they won’t try and manage services that you could easily do in-house.

Partners like Blue Hat Marketing are quite adept at this. Their viewpoint is that search engines like Google reward people who have taken the time to prepare their ‘on page’ SEO. Because ‘on page’ SEO encompasses things that are easily created in-house, they typically merely just point out where the tweaks need to be made. They could do them for you and charge a lot of money. Instead, you can fine tune your SEO rise ‘on page’ while they focus on the heavy lifting.

A keyword strategy is nice:

Marketing firms may think they are going to take the world over. They usually end up somewhere in between, providing a lot of help for their clients. One of the things that you should notice as being a big help is a keyword strategy that you can validate over time with results. If the keywords are working, you are on your way.

Of course, because there are regular changes to SEO rules by companies like Google, keyword strategies will tend to change. The corollary, therefore is that your partner should be able to change their strategy to continue to provide you with consistent results.

Full service content can help you look good:

After you get used to working with a search engine marketing vendor that handles your keyword strategy, you may find yourself in situations where their recommendation is to go out and create a better looking set of videos or multimedia in order to help promote your page. It sounds simple, but if you don’t have an in-house video capability, creating a quality video that has the potential to go viral or create a buzz may seem kind of daunting.

It is for this reason that you find a lot of SEO firms being called by managers that want to know if they have production capabilities themselves. In most cases, they do and are able to handle your video and multimedia production with the same efficiency as they do keyword strategy. Another nice thing about using a SEO firm as an ad agency is that the strategies and devices that they use with websites are normally validated to work to achieve a certain response. If you create a video or a piece of content by yourself, they may have a hard time predicting just how successful it will be. The more that you know about the work that you submit, the better understanding you will have about what is working on a project and what is not working.

Another area that is strong in SEO full service agencies is actual ad campaigns that are tied to the marketing message that you want to put forward. You can look at it in two different ways when you are the buyer actually. You could get an ad agency that is competent in SEO to help you or you could get an SEO agency that has a relationship with an advertisement firm or group of professionals that works seamlessly with them on your account. If you have a lot of creative control, you should soon be able to tell which combination works out better.

Taking most of your SEO strategy outside your firm to a partner can make sense. Adding the other pieces of your campaign so that the partner is managing services for you is an exercise that can pay off when done correctly.