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10 Must-Have AI SEO Tools to Boost Your SEO Rankings in 2025
December 6, 2024
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The importance of a strong SEO strategy is no secret to B2B success. It attracts qualified traffic, converts it into leads, and ultimately fuels revenue growth. However, many businesses are at a crossroads, unsure of which path to take.
Businesses face a crucial decision: build an in-house SEO team or outsource to a SaaS SEO agency. Both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages, and the choice ultimately depends on the business's specific needs and resources.
In this blog, we'll explore the key differences between hiring an in-house team and an SEO agency and provide insights to help you make the better choice for your business.
Choosing between an in-house team and a B2B SEO agency is a crucial decision that impacts your B2B company's online presence and lead generation. Understanding the key differences will equip you to make the best choice for your specific needs.
Here are the core differences between having an entire team in-house or an agency for SEO:
An in-house SEO professionals is immersed in your business, culture, and products, enabling them to develop a better understanding of your organization's unique goals, target audience, and industry dynamics.
They can also easily access customer data without any approvals, which helps them create a strategy tailored to the target customers. In-house SEO specialists are always a better choice when displaying your brand identity to your target audience because they live and breathe your brand.
With an in-house SEO manager, you have direct access to your internal SEO professional, who can quickly adapt to changing business goals and priorities, market trends, and algorithm updates. This ensures a proactive and agile approach to your SEO strategy in-house. Since you have the sole focus, the turnaround time for any changes is reduced significantly.
By having an in-house SEO professional, you maintain complete control and transparency over the strategy, execution, and decision-making processes. This enables greater visibility into the in-house work and their marketing efforts.
This facilitates seamless collaboration with other departments, such as in-house marketing, product, and web development, and lets you keep your data confidential. You can customize your SEO campaigns to fit your company’s goals and requirements.
Building an in-house SEO squad requires significant upfront investment in salaries, benefits, training, resources, and ongoing costs for professional development and tools.
According to Indeed, the salary range for an SEO specialists is $60k - $90k per year. You’ll also have to provide benefits like health insurance, allowances, monthly rewards, etc., which would cost around 30% of the salary. You must also constantly train your employees on SEO changes. So, skill development would cost around $ 3,000 per year, minimum.
Not just this, but you also need an infra of SEO tools for an in-house SEO expert. The most essential tools are Keyword.com, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Hunter.io, which would again cost around $500-$2000 per month.
The other costs include the posting of jobs, office assets, and space in-house itself. All this adds up to $150,000 per year to hire an in-house SEO specialist.
Depending on your marketing budget and resources, it may be challenging to assemble a well-rounded in-house SEO crew with expertise in all aspects of SEO, including technical SEO, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and analytics. A small in-house SEO team would struggle to keep up with this, and hiring more would cost a lot of pennies.
While deep domain knowledge is advantageous, an in-house SEO team may develop tunnel vision or become too close to the product, potentially missing out on innovative ideas and fresh perspectives.
Doing SEO in-house means SEO specialist would struggle to prioritize tasks because of additional responsibilities. A heavy workload with limited SEO tools and resources reduces the quality of the strategy and SEO campaign. Eventually, this slows down the work and, hence, the growth.
Building a comprehensive SEO strategy requires extensive expertise in various areas. Established SEO company employ teams of experts with diverse skill sets and extensive experience across multiple industries, enabling them to bring a wealth of knowledge and best practices to your strategy.
With many years of experience, many SEO agencies know the ins and outs of SEO. Reliable SEO agencies pay close attention to detail, and spotting issues in SEO is easy. These skills help improve your website's rankings on search engines and attract quality leads.
Hiring an SEO agency that is reliable can be more cost-effective than an in-house SEO team, particularly for small to medium-sized businesses. Agencies offer scalable resources to accommodate fluctuating workloads and project demands. Here, you pay just for the service and nothing else.
In contrast to the costs discussed for an in-house SEO team, an established SEO agency monthly retainer would cost around $2500 to $5000 per month.
Agency SEO is perfect for a small business since all the other tools have already been purchased. This also covers any training or skill development costs. Agencies give a high return on investment without you having to spend more in the first place.
Search engines constantly change their algorithms, and agencies keep up with the newly updated ones. This helps agencies tailor their strategy better to attract traffic to the website according to the requirements.
Agencies also build a stack of tools required to serve their clients better. Hence, agencies are a better choice for SEO work as they are economical and time-efficient.
Since an agency has a pool of experienced and efficient talent, this helps them deliver the work quickly within the decided turnaround time.
Now, we know that a typical SEO agency has sufficient resources. These factors help businesses have the flexibility to scale up and down their SEO strategy as and when they need to change.
External SEO agencies bring an unbiased and fresh perspective to your business, often identifying opportunities and areas for improvement that an internal team may have overlooked.
Since SEO agencies are external to your organization, you relinquish some control over the strategy, SEO operations, and its execution when working with an agency. There will be cases where SEO agencies don't allow you to access your website data.
Although some SEO agencies provide timely updates and answers to all the concerns, some agencies say, ‘trust the process.’ This uncertainty can also make some business owners uncomfortable.
Clear communication is the key here because it helps in building trust. Businesses need to provide detailed information about their needs and goals to the agencies so that they stay on track. Also, before signing a contract with any agency, research it thoroughly.
The agency can promise all it wants, but reaching the top results within a few months is impossible if any agency promises that to you, run!
Always review past clients' results and case studies and read online reviews. This will help you better understand their tricks and techniques, and building trust is easy.
A major fear of outsourcing to an external SEO agency is black hat SEO practices, which are unethical. These practices also negatively affect your business, such as a decline in rankings, reduced quality traffic, and lost brand credibility, which leads to low domain ratings. There is a high chance that you won't even realize these practices until the damage is done and is noticeable.
Always run quality research through reputable agency and online reviews on reputable websites like G2, clutch, and social media.
While SEO agencies have broad expertise in digital marketing, they may lack a deep understanding of your specific business, products, and industry nuances, which could impact the effectiveness of their strategies.
Some SEO agencies may work with multiple clients and provide SEO services within the same industry, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest and the confidentiality of your business information.
Evaluate your marketing budget and available resources to determine whether hiring an SEO in-house team or partnering with an agency is more feasible and economical for your business. An in-house team is an investment, but the ROI comes much later, whereas, in an agency, you just have to pay for the services provided.
Assess the level of expertise and skills required for your SEO efforts. An agency has a diverse skill set and experience as they hire professionals from different industries with various SEO experiences. This may benefit complex projects more.
Consider your long-term SEO strategy and whether you require a dedicated internal team with deep business knowledge or an agency's more flexible, scalable approach. Agencies usually offer package upgrades for seamless shifts.
Evaluate your internal team's capacity for effective collaboration and communication with an external agency and your ability to manage and oversee the agency's work. Undoubtedly, an SEO in-house team is dedicated to working on your business and is responsive, while an agency has to handle multiple clients. In the end, it all comes down to the agency you choose.
Staying updated with the latest developments in SEO algorithms is essential for building effective strategies. Hence, your SEO in-house team must be trained on the new updates. If you can provide training opportunities, that's great; if not, go with agencies.
At TripleDart, we understand the unique challenges and opportunities of SEO for SaaS startups and enterprise SaaS SEO. Our seasoned SEO experts specialize in B2B SEO, ensuring your business stays ahead with cutting-edge B2B SEO trends, keyword research tools, and B2B SEO statistics.
We have worked with 100+ SaaS businesses to help them increase their organic traffic through SEO services. One such company is Rezolve.ai, and we helped them to increase clicks from organic search by 105%.
With our data-driven approach to search engine optimization and digital marketing, we tailor our search engine optimization strategies to your specific business goals, delivering measurable results and driving sustainable growth. We provide SEO services and bring SEO in-house.
Contact us today to learn how TripleDart’s SEO services can elevate your online presence and unlock your business's full potential. Feel free to reach out today to take the next step in your SEO journey.
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