Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Search Marketing

Deciding whether to take your search engine optimization or paid search campaigns on in-house or whether to out source them is a tough decision for any size business. Like any other business decision, you'll need to decide if the ROI supports outsourcing and if giving up some control over your web site and marketing message are worth it to you. Jon Morris offers up some input on the pros and cons of outsourcing in an article at Success Magazine.

Jon offers up benefits of outsourcing like:

Tools/Reporting: The greatest benefit of search marketing is that everything is quantifiable. Every click, dollar spent, online order and revenue earned can be recorded in a daily, weekly, or monthly report. Outsourced marketers generally have enterprise-level tools to organize and keep track of this data.

He also offers disadvantages of outsourcing like:

Loss of Control & Intellectual Capital: Once a company hires an outside agency to conduct their search marketing they relinquish a substantial amount of control over the campaign. While the company still holds the ultimate authority they do not run its day-to-day operation. Accordingly, if the partnership between the company and the agency were to end, all expertise would be lost. The new agency would be forced to start from square one and the old agency could potentially bring the classified campaign knowledge to a competitor.

As I see it, the two biggest incentives for outsourcing are the learning curve and the time saved in not having to implement these techniques. The biggest downfall of outsourcing your search marketing is the lack of incentive to learn about building (and maintaining) a search friendly site.

Companies that decide to take search marketing on in-house often have experience a slow build up in traffic as their employees learn new skills and see better results, but they tend to be able to sustain those results for a longer period of time with less associated expenses. Of course the down side of this is that your in-house search engine marketer might gain enough skills to attract lucrative job offers from other firms.

As with any decision, it's a simple matter of weighing the pros and cons for your own business and making your choice based on what you find.