From Click Consult's Benchmark Search Conference 2016, Bridgewater Hall, 12th July. Presented by Alan Reeves, Click Consult - Agency vs. In-House - How To Strike The Perfect Balance. #benchmarkconf2016
4. Assumptions
- No half measures
- Agencies have greater scale
- Success is equally possible in-house or agency
- So you can find the right people
- Limited to SEO
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8. Objectives
- What does success look like?
- Try to be SMART
- Use KPIs like Sessions, Revenue, ROI, Gross Profit
- Can be led from client or agency side
- Who will be accountable?
- Agencies can use additional resource
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9. Cost
- Time is money
- Agency fee or finding, paying, training and keeping
staff
- How many specialists?
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12. Cost
- Time is money
- Agency fee or finding, paying, training and keeping
staff
- How many specialists?
- Time taken to find and manage an agency
- Agility and scalability
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15. Expertise
- Are they an expert?
- Ongoing training and development
- Search, Digital or Marketing experience
- Meet the whole agency team
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18. Tools
- What tools are needed?
- Increase efficiency
- Provide data and insights
- Multiple tools needed for best results
- Cost and knowledge to utilise tools
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21. Efficiency
- Strategically prioritise work
- Transparency and trust is needed
- Reporting must add value
- Agencies focus on efficiency
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24. Detail
- Efficient doesn’t mean less detail
- Most agencies use templates
- Peer review all work?
- Review strategy ‘often’
- In-house you have just the 1 ‘client’
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25. Creativity
- Needs to be part of culture
- More ideas the better
- Provide an example
- Review previous work
- Agencies draw on what has worked for other clients
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27. Strategy
- In-house integrated with wider business strategy
- Agency focus on specific tactics and workflow
- Collaboration is best in line with expertise
- Comes back to accountability
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28. Technical
- Access permitting
- Security and version control
- Most agencies want to audit
- Regular health checks
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29. Content
- Complex subject or complicated product?
- Know your audience
- Specific tone of voice and brand guidelines
- Need Content plan based on keywords and themes
- Agency train and review
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30. Outreach
- Agencies leverage existing relationships
- Content created for third-party audience
- Not guaranteed to work
- Must be organic
- Best to be strategic
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33. Expectations
- Objectives and targets need to be SMART
- Priorities have to be aligned
- Specify workflow, timescales and deliverables
- Ensure cover for leave, sickness and growth
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34. Communication
- Build trust and understanding
- Be open, honest and transparent
- Micro-management rarely most efficient
- Agree involvement of key people
- Set communication plan
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Talk about outsourcing to an agency versus hiring an in-house team
As you may have noticed I work at agency, but haven’t always
Promise tried my best to be non-bias
Spoken to current and former clients, friend in-house, staff that worked in-house when I hired them
Show of hands – how many agency, then in-house
In-house – keep hand up if use an agency for search
Scorecard – 13 questions
7 areas
To find your priorities and success factors
Your scores multiplied by these numbers
Multipliers are based on relative strengths of agency vs in-house
Now its important to note that while none of the 7 area have same multiplier total are equal
Even playing field no favouritism
Going to do it – do it right
Not necessarily enterprise level large in-house teams
Ability to find the people to do the job
All starts with your objectives
I don’t mean being position 1 for everything
This one is for you James
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound
Not ranking – rank in what location or device
The one responsible should lead objectives
Don’t force objectives onto someone with limited resource or budget
If below objectives agencies have flexibility to add resource to campaign.
So very important with high multipliers but slightly in favour of agency
At the end of the day time is money
Both at agencies or client side you pay their staff to work for certain hours
More hours and resources = higher the cost
Consider not just home many people but home many need to be a specialist in a particular field
This represents the structure within our company
Other large agencies will have same or similar with dedicated specialists in each area
In-house won’t need an AM
Although may need someone to project manage
May not need orange depending on type of campaign and maturity
Still leaves 6 specialism's that an in-house team will need to have for SEO alone
On flip side it takes time to manage an agency – communication will be key
Consider how agile and flexible you want to be
Taking advantage in short term opportunity maybe easier with agency
If you don’t over resource or spend too much on tools it should be cheaper to do in-house
Otherwise the agency will making no money
In-house has a considerably higher multiplier for cost
First things first are they an expert?
March sent out a survey to over 300,0000 people within marketing roles
Asked to rate their level of knowledge
41% said Thorough or Expert in Organic Search
Only 31% in data analysis
Bare in mind only 21% of respondents described their role as entry level, the rest were management or senior management
How do they stay an expert in their field, or how much will that cost you
Different types of experience can all help
Only chose an agency if their teams combined expertise would outweigh any you could afford in-house
So Agency edges this one
What tools are needed for a successful SEO campaign?
A selection of tools we use for SEO
All would add value to an in-house team
There is no tools that truly does SEO for you.
It’s not as easy as getting 1 tool that does each job, multiple tools are needed for the best decisions
e.g. when doing a link analysis we pull data from Open Site Explorer, Majestic, ahrefs and Google Search Console
Agencies invest a lot into having the best tools and technology, an amount that couldn’t be cost effective for a small in-house team
As such Agency takes this one
Need to prioritise work into an order that is going to have the greatest benefit
So not what we fondly refer to as ... HIPPO
Not HIPPO
e.g. when MD is annoyed the site is slow getting 100/100 on Google PageSpeed insights isn’t the priority when you have no content and a load of toxic links
Takes transparency and trust
Keep communication open between teams and agencies
You can’t expect any team to maximise your profit if you are unwilling to share margins
On the flip side a team cannot expect trust if they don’t show you what they are working on
But please don’t over report, must add valu
These things are equally challenging in-house and with an agency
Will have tasks they are only required once, Every blue moon in-house but agencies do for every client – they will be faster at this
As such agency has slightly higher multiplier
Being efficient does not mean going into less detail or cutting corners
As they say the devil is in the detail
So can anyone spot the devil
Most agencies will use templates, good ensuring no area is missed
But you don’t want the same generic audit their last 5 clients got
Think what work will need peer reviewed – build into your capacity
Often = full analysis at least every 3-4 months
However never get around the fact that in-house have 1 clients where an agency will have many
As such in-house edges this area
Final area is creativity
More ideas the better, although not bad ideas
When hiring agency or in-house you ideal want to see an example bespoke to you and their previous work
Find agencies tend to draw on what has proven to be successful for other clients and not want to go too outrageous – play it safe a little
In-house teams less likely to do this so they edge creativity
Great based on how you score those 7 areas the scorecard will recommend you to outsource or build in-house
However you could split SEO into these 4 specialisms and it be better to outsource any combination of them.
Typically in-house responsibility to ensure integration or at least all the information is provided for an agency to do it
If an agency is involved they will typically want to focus on the specific tactics and quantities
Basically take recommendation from where the expertise lies to make decisions
Comes back to accountability,
Can’t force an agency to follow your strategy and then hold them accountable if it doesn’t work
Technical SEO this is one of the most common completed in-house
Often full access is not provided to avoid security issues and conflicting changes
However most agencies will want to performance technical audits even if they can’t make changes, need to be sure nothing is going to hinder success and check that nothing has changed
We work with several clients that complete content in-house particularly web copy
Often preferred with complex subjects or products
But you need to know your audience and understand how to communicate with them
May be better written in laymen terms than the technical jargon used by the business
Outreach is the specialism that has the greatest economies of scale
Leveraging relationships built across multiple clients and campaign is much more cost-effective than building new ones
Often find that clients will struggle to understand outreach content is not PR or advertisement of their business
It is content that needs to appeal to audiences of bloggers, influencers and online publications
Agency can guarantee deliverable (min number of links)
Remember its an area that has the most severe consequences for doing wrong – must be organic
Proven it is also best to be strategic in what type, quality and quantity of links you target
Based on those considerations the scorecard will take your answers and times them by slightly differently multipliers for each area
Then recommend what is best to do in each
As promised it isn’t bias to always pick agency
So there you have the right balance.
Download it and have a go
If you are going to work with an agency though I just want to reiterate 2 things that I believe are most important to get right
Make sure all parties understand and agree with what is expected of them
No excuses and no scapegoats
Ensure your priorities are aligned, don’t expect the priority treatment for a low fee, or to see huge volumes of outreach if the priority is content
Don’t leave yourself short on resource when you need it most
You have to build trust and understanding.
How often have you asked yourself – does this agency really understand our business?
But have you made every effort to help them, invited them in, shown them your operation and shared your values
Do your due diligence but if you hire an expert to perform, let them do it
If you buy into certain key people in a pitch agree their ongoing involvement if they won’t be the ones doing the ongoing work
Set a communication plan to meet and speak including how often, who attends, what is discussed
Do these 2 things and you’ll give yourself the best chance of success.