If you work in the SEO industry I think it is safe to assume that you will of received at least 1 or 2 offers to outsource your work to other SEO companies. Most of the time these companies are offshore based work claiming they can reduce your costs due to the lower wages/cost of living in these countries. A lot of the companies will also be UK (or US) based and they then outsource the work themselves to these cheaper countries.
I actually have an old work mate that works for one of these UK based companies that white labels the SEO services and he is constantly offering me his services when he finds out how busy I am and that I am turning away work. Now the problems I have with outsourcing my work are:
- When outsourcing things like web design or programming you will likely pay a deposit or use escrow services. When the work is complete you will receive the code/design one final payment. If you don’t like it you complain and try and get it fixed or whatever, worst case scenario you drop that person/company lose a bit of money and find another person to do the work for you. With SEO this is not so easy, the SEO needs to work directly on the site straight away it is not really possible to do the SEO else where then transfer it over to the site (though I guess you could do a 301). You most likely will pay monthly and if after 6 months you don’t have the results you wanted well tough shit really. Some companies will even offer guaranteed rankings but this is just bullshit, you will either get obscure rankings that provide no return on investment or they just won’t get them. Then there is the worst case scenario, the company actually gets your clients site banned from Google. Now this is bad news for anyone but if you are an SEO company the methods you practice get client sites banned from Google it can be a fatal blow. The client is not going to stick around and you are running the risk of some serious reputation issues.
- Can I really trust an SEO company that can seemingly take on infinite amounts of work, and not just from me but all the other companies that must deal with? The SEO industry is booming, as far as I can tell a lot if not most good SEOs are turning away work because the demand is outstripping the supply. There was a 29.8% growth in SEM during 2007 in the US with spending reaching $12.2 Billion. So it makes me wonder how these white label/outsourcing companies can take on so much work? Surely if they were so good they would have to much work on? I don’t know about everyone else but getting a member of staff that really knows how to do SEO well is quite difficult therefore it leads me to believe these outsourcing companies churn out very low quality SEO work that requires little skill to do.
- More a follow on tot he above point but why do they need to take on other SEOs work? If they can do the SEO themselves surely it would be more profitable to have their own web site and develop their own brand rather than let other companies take the glory for their SEO work?
The only areas of SEO that I would say are worth outsourcing are the low skill time consuming things such as directory submissions or anything coding related. However directory submissions are typically crap so there is little point even doing that.
