Agency vs. In-House SEO: Differences, Advantages, and tips to succeed

Hello and welcome to a new edition of Crawling Mondays. Today is a new, very special edition about in-house SEO versus agency SEO. So which is the best or what is the best mix or what are the differences or how you can make the most out of every opportunity as an SEO? And today I'm going to speak with 2 SEOs who have been on the 2 sides of things, as I have been too. So I'm very excited to also share my own views and verify if this is the same experience that other people have had about it. So I'm very, very excited today to have Areej Abu Ali from Supla. She's SEO manager at Supla and previously she was working at an SEO agency too. And then on the other hand, we have Jerry in the other side of the ring. No, no, no, there's not a fight. We have Jerry who's now on the agency side at Rise at 7. He's SEO director. And before he was in-house, right? So thank you very much for joining me today, Areej.

Yeah, thanks for having us. Really excited to be here. This is actually my first recorded webinar. So thanks for having me.

Always a good time. Nice to be the one. And hello, Jerry. How are you?

Hey, good. Yeah, yeah, enjoying the lockdown fever, growing beards, and generally not doing enough exercise. So having a good time being locked down.

Don't worry, the time will come soon. Also, like, in the UK you can go and run an hour per day or so, something like that, isn't it?

Now it's unlimited exercise. Yeah.

No excuses, Jerry.

I feel like it's pressure, actually.

To start a little bit with the topic today, I want to ask you in general, what are the main differences that you have found when moving in-house to the agency side and vice versa?

So I was agency side for about 5 years and I only moved in-house last summer. I think the first difference that I noticed straight away was just the pace of things. So agency is super, super quick. Like every week something new is happening. You get an email from a client, you have to jump on it right away, deadlines. In-house felt much more slow. There's a lot of time for onboarding. There's a lot of time to get familiar with the data. There's a lot of meetings. So it definitely— the pace itself was the first difference that I personally noticed.

Yeah, I would say exactly the same thing. Since I've joined Rise at 7, I've had to keep sort of juggling about 20 different client bits and pieces. They're bringing in new clients. There's amazing stuff going on, and it's just crazy. Plus the fact I'm now working with a very different younger team who want to Rather than working with like 1 or 2 SEO people across a big organisation, now I'm working with 20 SEO people who've all got fantastic ideas and a lot of my time is actually spent sort of saying, well, that's brilliant, can we do it? Is it practical? Have we got time? And at the moment it's just time is always the enemy in an agency, but absolutely.

Excellent. And which would you say are the advantages and disadvantages from each side?

So the advantage of being on the agency side is the fact that I'm kind of very much stuck with the people who are passionate about about SEO. That means that everything I say, everything I do, it kind of comes back and it's like, oh, that's brilliant, that's fantastic for SEO. Whereas when you're agents, when you're sort of client side, the big problem of course is the fact that your needs and desires are balanced with hundreds of other people who are also trying to deliver things. A lot of the time you're kind of working with them rather than around them, but it is critical that, you know, you kind of make your voice heard. And the other thing is you've got to make sure you're the person that's gatekeeping, almost stopping things going onto the website, which will damage or be detrimental for SEO. And I think that's the one thing that you have to be, either client-side or agency-side. You have to be the gatekeeper to the website to a certain extent. But when you're agency-side, often they turn around and say, oh, we did this 2 weeks ago, and you are shocked by what they've just done, whereas client-side, you're often in the loop a lot more in advance. You're still soft— start again. You're still often shocked by what they've just done, but you're usually able to stop things going ahead too quickly.

I would say also diversity of projects agency side is something that I definitely miss. Like you get to work on a lot of different industries and websites and it just gives you tons of experience. Something I always say is if you're kicking off your SEO career, I tend to advise people to kick it off in an agency because they're going to get tons and tons of exposure. On the other hand though, The advantage with in-house is that you get a lot of depth of detail and data that you simply do not have access to on your agency side. When I was agency side, I never managed to get access to log files, for example. But now that I'm in-house, it's something that I have access to all the time. I know this differs from one client to the other, but the wealth of data that you tend to have access to when you're in-house is definitely much better.

100%, I agree. And I have to say that actually that is the big advantage that I found when I was working in-house, right? Level of in-depth that I was able to go and focus completely on a single project or a set of projects from the same entity or organization, right? And then I was able to actually see who were the decision makers, all the product managers, to push them more, to be able to make things happen and having much more access to them and to all of these resources than when I was in the agency side of things. But I have to say though, it took, I mean, of course, Aleyda, a slow learner here. It took me a while because realistically when my first exposure to SEO was in an agency where I worked for 4 years and I thought that I indeed, I completely agree, like when you're starting it's amazing because you see a little bit of everything and you're then able also to sort out not only to learn but sort out if you want to specialise in a specific area, to be more of a generalist, etc. But then at some point I actually wanted to go much more in depth. But then I realised that in my case, right, I had all the eggs in a single bag and it was bad luck, I have to say, that that project that I started to work in-house at all of a sudden was chopped down, right? So all of these resources that were supposed to be available to me at some point were not. And then I realized, oh my God, now what do I do? Because all the eggs are in a single bag. So then on my second in-house position, what I did to avoid that When I was doing the interview, I actually said like, yeah, condition to hire me, I need a couple of developers only focused on SEO and I got them. And then at that company, what I had was a huge challenge to change the business model because if we didn't change the business model, we wouldn't be able to grow in organic. During some time I didn't have much luck with my house projects, right? There was something always up and that a scenario where all of the eggs were in a single bag, and that is why I ended up being a consultant, having— trying to have a little bit the best of the two worlds. Which are the ones that you have particularly enjoyed the most? Your favorite position so far or side of things so far?

Oh, I have to be honest, I loved when I first started working with Just Eat. Just Eat was a growing company, it was international, there were so many things on fire constantly. It was a— they had amazing amount of data, amazing amount of traffic, and everything we did, we could kind of deliver and execute on very, very quickly. I mean, it changed a little bit when they became a FTSE 100 company and they kind of grow and more teams got involved. But initially, it was very much a case of I was allowed to just fix things and run around. I sat with the developers, I knew who I could talk to to get things done. And I mean, I had to kind of create small business cases, but very much a case of I think we should do this, and they would just let me do it as long as As long as I could prove that it would be a viable thing to do. Whereas nowadays, I'm often sat talking to one person who will then translate what I'm saying to another agency or another developer. And I think that the Chinese whispers effect of being agency-side is one of the most dangerous things. But yeah, I do love it when you're client-side and you can literally sit with the developer and kind of go, oh, actually, that didn't work. That was a bad suggestion from me. Let's try something else. Because a lot of the times you read things on the internet, you kind of go, I want to try that. And you just can't do it unless you've got real access.

Yeah, I feel exactly the same. I mean, in a way, I feel like my agency side experience is probably the reason that I'm a really strong tech SEO because I managed to get experience across lots of different industries. But having said that, I only really started understanding the implementation side of things when I moved in-house. It was so frustrating to be communicating your recommendations to like the head of marketing, for example, who would then have to go on your behalf and speak to the developers. Whereas here, if there's something that you know is a super quick fix and you can literally Slack the developer or even at normal times go at their desk and have a conversation with them, it makes such a massive difference. And I think this involvement of wider business decisions as well and then getting a better understanding behind how SEO fits. When we're agency side, we get to hear about that from our, you know, the person who's passing on the message. We're not in these conversations where we know the importance of SEO or what kind of budget it has or how it fits. But when you're in-house, you get to be part of those decisions as well. So yeah, it's almost been a year, but so far I would say in-house is my preference.

Amazing. And in which scenarios or situations? Because of course there are cases where it is worthy to have an agency. There are cases that it is a must to have an in-house SEO, right? Which would you say are the obvious scenarios when you You will advise based on your experience that definitely go and hire an in-house SEO or it's better that you instead of going for an in-house SEO, go for an agency?

Well, the best thing I would say on that one is that it really depends. I know that's the classic SEO answer but—

Jerry, really? I didn't bring you here to give another SEO the SEO answer. Come on.

But it's surprising how often, like you mentioned log file analysis, a lot of agencies can do log file analysis and they've been looking at hundreds of different websites. So suddenly you've got insight as to what it really means. Whereas if I'm looking at one website and I'm only looking at one set of logs, sometimes it's challenging for me to really understand and know what a solution would be to fix it up. So another example is App Store optimization. App Store optimization is becoming a really hot topic at the moment.

Yeah.

When I was client side, I was looking at ours and I was like, if I fix this, if I do this, well, our rankings will improve. But when I'm agency side, I can kind of look at 10 different apps and say, oh, we tried this over here, it worked. We tried it over there, it didn't work. We can put some video in. I mean, no one single rule works for all clients, but experience is the greatest thing agency gives you. And I think that's one of the reasons that Aleyda, you were sort of talking about the fact that, you know, you learn a lot more being agency side and then going in-house. It's that just depth of experience that an agency should have.

Yeah.

I mean, the other side of it is that we've got access to tools and we've got more kind of access to kind of different devices and tools and ideas and projects and things like that, that, you know, in-house might not have access to. For instance, we'll set all our clients up on like 6 or 7 different tools, whereas when I was in-house, trying to get the budget signed off for one tool often took 6 to 12 months. I remember trying to get one tool through the legal department, and for some reason they were kind of complaining about the fact that it had to crawl the website. And that moment when you think to yourself, But we— yes, I don't even know how to argue that one, but yes.

How will it— anyway.

I know, but it's the arguments you sometimes get in-house, whereas an agency, you're signed off almost. You've kind of got signed off a budget. Sometimes these things are strangely a lot easier when you're agency side than when you're in-house. In fact, we often picked on our agency Taipei Media's toolkit to kind of help us out when we were struggling with delivering some bits and pieces in-house at Just Eat?

Yeah, I think from my end, it's this question of skill set and resources. So the current team that we have, what are they particularly strong with? So what are skills that we don't really need to fill? And what are resources that we're down with? Like something I noticed right away from our end is our outreach and digital PR capabilities, for example. In-house, we had a very strong technical SEO background and skill set and experience, but we just didn't have enough resources to be able to build out a fully functioning outreach department. And that's something that we considered looking for in agencies. Thinking of developers, designers, content writers, researchers, campaign managers, and a full team of outreach that you tend to have in agencies such as Raise at Seven as an example.

Yeah.

It's massive. And it's so difficult to, even when you try to think of bringing all that in-house, the costs at the end of the day, but also the level of experience that some of these agencies have, Compared to having to grow that in-house and provide that training is really, really difficult.

I think that you have covered a really good point, that is the mix, right? Ideally, you will really want the mix that you have someone in-house who's able to push, especially someone who's really good at communicating, pushing things out, empathic, and putting cases and showing the value of SEO on one hand and digging deeper. And then on the other hand, to have the wealth of experience and diversity of experience and contacts also that many agencies have that will make things happen, that also will give you an additional layer of validation sometimes that you need or to support what you're also saying. So I think that of course like the best of the two worlds is to have that nice mix going on. But yes, I can definitely see how for example when a company is starting with SEO they sometimes cannot justify to have any in-house SEO, so they need to go to an agency to build a case, to start bringing value with SEO and then start growing from there. So I think that there's actually a point for the two sides of things and having a good mix, a healthy mix to maximise the value and opportunity for sure.

I think that's one of the biggest risks of using agencies actually. If you've not got somebody in-house who's got enough knowledge about SEO, I think the The delivery that I've seen from a lot of agencies, and of course not Rise at Seven but other agencies, it can be quite poor. You can get quite poor advice from agencies, and without somebody gatekeeping, it often goes through and somebody says, "Oh, this is what the agency says; they know best," and they go and do it. And I've seen terrible, terrible recommendations, badly written robots.txt files. Trying to think of other examples, but you know stuff where you kind of go: If you were doing this, this would take you two weeks of development time to do, and there is actual no ROI on doing it. So I think it's critical. I think it's critical that even if you are using an agency, you have somebody in-house who's got enough knowledge to kind of gatekeep, filter, and be able to keep them on their toes. I'd hate to be kind of agency— sorry, client side without that guy basically saying, no, this isn't actually a good recommendation.

100%. I have to say, in my case now as an independent consultant, like 99% of the clients that I work with, they have in-house SEOs and I wouldn't be able to actually make things happen without one because a lot of the in-house SEO is, especially with bigger companies, is about alignment. And to have that alignment happening internally at the organisation, you need someone, as you mentioned, like supervising, fighting for it, gatekeeping for the SEO needs.

For me, when I was agency side, the best relationships I had with my clients were when my client was a head of SEO or an SEO manager. Or so on. So someone who really understood the value of what we were doing, because then the agency kind of just feels like an extension to their in-house team. Whereas when you're reporting directly into the CEO or into like some chief marketing who does not have much experience with SEO, the relationship just feels very, very different and it feels much more of a sales relationship rather than an extension and a partnership.

What's your advice your agency self now that you are in-house and vice versa, right? What would you advise to your in-house self when you were in the agency side in SEO?

I think for me, like within the first 2 or 3 months of in-house, I realised right away how unfair and impatient I was being on my clients when I thought that, oh, why are you taking so long to implement that? Or why does it take so long to put that through? I didn't realise the amount of additional or other work that they're working on. The only thing they're focusing on is not simply— this is just part of their job, which is their agency relationship. It's not all of their job. There's a lot of other projects and things that they're already working on. And the second thing, and I think this is something that I tend to mention a lot, it's this idea of, if I knew now how in-house operates, I would have never sent those 100-page tech audit documents. I just do not see in any way— the way I work now is with my developers directly. Is literally a Google Sheet. Issue, fix, SEO impact, tech effort, priority. That's it. Simple. And then that gets translated into a Jira ticket and it's done. The pages and pages and pages of documents are fully understandable because agencies need to show like the level of work they're doing and the depth of detail. And it's okay to have that. But what's more important is to have that And here's exactly what needs to be done and here's how it should be done.

Amazing.

Yeah, actually, strangely enough, Rise has taken the approach of having that single spreadsheet for all our clients and doing that approach exactly as you've said, because Stephen, myself, and other people have worked client-side enough times that we know that this is kind of the way to do it. The amount of times that I've been client-side and somebody's given me a huge 200-page document and I kind of go through it with a red pen going, Actually, this isn't relevant to us, this isn't relevant to us, this isn't relevant to us, then finding that it's almost just a page of not great recommendations at the end of it is frustrating. It's just boilerplate text. It's very frustrating.

And then not necessarily even actionable. It's just like hundreds of slides saying this is not important, not important. Why is it there in the first place? Sure.

And I think that's one thing I realised as well is as an agency, we tend to send our reporting, you know, the way it looks at the and so on. And something that clicked with me when I moved in-house was I should have always asked, show me your reports, show me what you share with your stakeholders, show me exactly what you present. Because then if as their agency we make their life easier and we try to give them the data exactly in the way that they're gonna wind up presenting it, then everyone's winning that way.

To finish a little bit, I wanted to ask you, do you think that there are any specific tips that you additionally from what we have already spoken, you wanted to share For those, whether in-house SEOs or agency SEOs?

For an in-house SEO, the one thing you need to be is the most confident, almost like a doctor, like a surgeon. You have to be able to walk around the place saying, if we do it like this, it'll happen like that. Every time you say it depends or I think maybe possibly, you have to be really decisive. And it doesn't really sit well with a lot of tech SEOs. Tech SEOs tend to be, oh, that might work if we try it like this. And that doesn't kind of go down very well with senior people who just want a decision to be made. If you want to get things done, you have to be really confident. It doesn't always have to work out. Often, you know, you say this will happen like this and it happens slightly differently, but 9 times out of 10, you're right. So that's, that's good enough almost. So yeah, basically my one piece of advice, be super confident in-house.

Yeah. Oh, I love this advice. I replace the word think with know in every single email and every single conversation that I have with someone. I say, I know that. instead of I think that. So yeah, that's really, really good advice. I think from an agency perspective, then I can take that one on, is just prioritization. And it just touches again to what we said, which is even if you know that your client has 50 things that are wrong, give them the one thing that is a problem, that will really make an impact, because you want to win and you want a quick win. And once they actually implement that one thing, and you can continue to follow up, hammer it, you know, do everything you can to make sure they implement it, then you can start going on the other things that have less impact. So really, with every audit you do, or every set of recommendations you give, make sure that you identify this is the one thing that has a huge impact for you and will make a massive difference for you when you actually implement it.

Amazing. I love the actionability and key of prioritisation and make it digestible too. Thank you very much. I think that, well, you have shared a ton. There's a ton of value. Hopefully people watching this, they will get a much better idea if they are in the agency side, how to better connect with the in-house side. Also, if people are looking to switch and more opportunities, professional opportunities, now they have a much better idea of what to expect. if they haven't been on the other side, right? So hopefully this is useful for so many different scenarios. So thank you very much for your advice and if you have any questions too, please leave them in the comments. And of course if you want to learn more about SEO, follow Areej, follow Jerry also over Twitter. You will see the handles here. And if you like this video, there will be many more like this. This is me being a good YouTuber. Like the video and subscribe to the channel and you will have all the awesomeness. Thank you very much and have a good day.

Bye-bye.