In-house SEO vs agency vs consultant: Which operating model fits your marketing team?

Training

If you want to invest more seriously in organic search, one of the first decisions you’ll need to make is who is actually going to do the work.

Do you hire someone? Outsource SEO to an agency? Bring in an SEO consultant? Develop the skills of your internal team? 

Each solution has its pros and cons, and there isn’t one model that works for every business.

In fact, when we’re talking to clients about SEO in-house vs outsourcing, we often find that the best answer isn’t one or the other. Different parts of SEO require very different skills, and you don’t necessarily need to outsource all of them.

For an established marketing team, a hybrid model can often make a lot of sense: build the repeatable SEO and GEO skills internally, then use specialist support for the areas that genuinely need specialist expertise.

Let’s look at the different options.

The short answer: should SEO be in-house or outsourced?

It’s our belief that if you already have a capable marketing team, you may be able to manage a significant proportion of SEO internally once the right knowledge, processes and responsibilities are in place.

With the right training, activities such as keyword research, content planning, on-page optimisation, internal linking and content updates often fit naturally within an existing marketing function.

However, more specialist or occasional work, including complex technical SEO, migrations, advanced audits and difficult strategic problems, may still be better handled by an SEO agency or consultant.

So the decision isn’t always simply in-house SEO vs agency. We believe that there are four broad approaches:

1. Hire a dedicated in-house SEO specialist.
2. Outsource SEO to an agency.
3. Use an SEO consultant.
4. Develop SEO capability within your existing marketing team, supported by specialists where necessary.

The right model depends on your team, budget, website, growth plans, and the type of SEO work you actually need.

What does managing SEO in-house actually mean?

“In-house SEO” can mean several different things.

At one end of the spectrum, you might hire a dedicated SEO manager or build an entire SEO team. At the other, SEO might simply become one of the responsibilities shared between your existing content, digital and marketing people.

That’s an important distinction.

When businesses compare hiring in-house SEO vs an agency, they often assume bringing SEO in-house means recruiting an SEO specialist. It doesn’t necessarily have to.

If you already employ people who:

• Research audiences.
• Manage your website.
• Write content.
• Create campaigns.
• Interview internal experts.
• Analyse marketing performance.
• Manage digital channels.

…you already have many of the underlying capabilities involved in SEO.

What may be missing is the specialist knowledge needed to apply an SEO lens to those activities. For example, your content manager probably already knows how to write a good article. They may simply need to understand how to research search intent, map keywords to pages and structure articles for search.

That’s a very different challenge from building a new SEO department. Let’s have a look at the different options and discuss the pros and cons of each. 

Option 1: Hiring an in-house SEO specialist

Hiring an SEO specialist gives one person clear responsibility for organic search. That can be especially valuable when SEO is a major acquisition channel, and there is enough ongoing work to justify a dedicated role.

Advantages of hiring SEO in-house

There are loads of advantages to this approach. An internal specialist can develop a deep understanding of your products and services, your prospective clients, competitors and commercial priorities. They’re also part of the business every day.

That can make it easier to get SEO involved earlier in website projects, campaigns and content planning rather than bringing someone in after decisions have already been made.

Potential drawbacks

But a single SEO hire still has finite expertise. SEO covers a surprisingly wide range of disciplines, including:

• Technical SEO
• Content strategy
• Analytics
• Digital PR
• Website architecture
• Conversion
• Local SEO
• AI search and GEO

Finding one person who is equally strong in every area is difficult.

You also need enough SEO activity to justify the cost of a permanent specialist. For some SMEs and mid-sized organisations, there may be plenty of SEO work but not necessarily enough to warrant another full-time salary. 

Option 2: Outsourcing SEO to an agency

The traditional alternative is outsourcing your SEO campaign to an agency.

An agency normally provides access to a broader pool of skills than an individual hire. Depending on the agency and retainer, that might include everything from strategy to digital PR. For businesses with very little internal marketing resource, this can make sense.

Where an SEO agency is particularly useful

An agency may be appropriate when:

• There is little internal capacity to deliver SEO work.
• You need access to several different specialist skills.
• Your website has significant technical problems.
• Organic search is a major growth priority.
• You want substantial execution handled externally.

The important thing is understanding exactly what the agency will be responsible for.

Where the fully outsourced model can become inefficient

Problems can arise when businesses outsource work that their existing team could reasonably manage themselves.

Imagine your marketing team already writes all of your articles. If your SEO agency performs keyword research, sends your team a brief, reviews the article afterwards and requests edits, you have two teams involved in producing one piece of content.

Sometimes that is absolutely justified, but often the more sustainable solution is to teach the internal team how to do more of that process themselves.

The same can apply to:

• Metadata
• Page optimisation
• Basic keyword research
• Internal links
• Content refreshes
• Content briefs
• Search Console reviews

That doesn’t make the agency redundant; it simply means you’re using external expertise more selectively.

Option 3: Working with an SEO consultant

The SEO agency vs in-house SEO vs SEO consultant decision becomes particularly interesting when you already have people internally who can execute the work.

An SEO consultant generally provides expertise and direction without necessarily delivering every activity for you. For example, a consultant might:

• Identify your priority opportunities.
• Carry out keyword research.
• Build an SEO roadmap.
• Investigate ranking problems.
• Review your website architecture.
• Audit technical SEO.
• Review content plans.
• Analyse competitors.
• Advise on GEO and AI search.
• Monitor performance.
• Help prioritise what happens next.

Your internal team can then implement the recommendations.

When SEO consultancy works particularly well

Consultancy tends to suit organisations where the challenge isn’t that they don’t have anyone who can do this work, but that they need specialist knowledge to make sure they’re doing the right work.

If you have designers, developers, content writers and marketing managers internally, paying an agency to duplicate those skills may not make much sense; a consultant can fill the SEO knowledge gap while your existing team handles delivery.

Explore our SEO consultancy service

Option 4: Build SEO capability within your existing marketing team

There’s another option that often gets overlooked when businesses compare in-house vs outsourced SEO: you can train the team you already have.

That doesn’t mean turning your marketing manager into a technical SEO consultant!

Instead, it means identifying the SEO activities that naturally belong inside your marketing function and giving your team the skills and processes needed to manage them properly.

For example:

Activity	Could an existing marketing team own it?	Specialist input still useful?
Keyword research around known services	Often, yes	For larger opportunity/competitor research
Search intent analysis	Yes	For ambiguous or complex SERPs
Content briefs	Yes	For strategic content planning
On-page optimisation	Yes	For complex or large-scale issues
Internal linking	Yes	For major architecture work
Content refreshes	Yes	For identifying opportunities
Google Search Console reviews	Yes	For diagnosis of unusual changes
Technical SEO	Usually limited	Often
Website migrations	Rarely alone	Definitely
Advanced site architecture	Sometimes	Often
SEO strategy	With training	Periodic specialist input can help
GEO content practices	Increasingly	Strategy and visibility analysis can help

This is the model our in-house SEO and GEO training for marketing teams is designed around.

Instead of outsourcing every repeatable SEO task indefinitely (a costly enterprise), we help teams embed mature search practices into the way they already work. Your business retains ownership of your SEO/GEO campaign.

Explore our In-House SEO & GEO Training for Marketing Teams

In-house SEO vs agency: how do the models compare?

There are several practical factors worth considering when trying to decide what model you go for. 

1. Level of internal business knowledge

There’s no denying that in-house SEO teams will understand the business, industry and processes better, and anticipate what a good enquiry is. 

For example, I know some commercial cleaning companies that are limited not only to a specific geographical region (which an agency may uncover and know to aim for), but also to job size (which an agency wouldn’t necessarily consider). An SEO agency may understand that a commercial cleaning company needs to rank for “commercial cleaning Birmingham”; they might not realise that the business does not have the capacity to cover a large account like the NEC, for example. Although an agency brings SEO expertise, it doesn’t always understand how the company works. 

However, a good agency can extract subject matter expertise from your business’s specialists; this information can form the foundation of a very targeted and effective SEO campaign. 

So, if you’re just assuming that an agency can never understand the nuances of your industry, you may be doing them a disservice. 

In a situation like this, trained in-house teams or collaborative models often work well: internal subject knowledge plus external specialist knowledge can improve the chances of generating good enquiries – ones that suit the business. 

2. Breadth of SEO expertise

It’s true that an agency will normally have broader SEO capability than an individual in-house marketer. An agency will be able to draw on technical, content and development expertise depending on the problem. That is definitely difficult to replicate with one internal hire. Even an experienced SEO specialist would find it difficult to replicate the range of skills that agencies can provide. 

But again, a hybrid approach can work very well, as your marketing team doesn’t need to become capable of handling every technical SEO problem. Instead, it just needs enough knowledge to own the work that sensibly belongs with marketing and to recognise when specialist help is required. 

3. Speed of communication

In this, the answer is probably more clear-cut. If fast communication is especially important to your industry (for example, trends change incredibly fast and you need to respond almost on a weekly basis), hiring an in-house team can really give you a competitive edge. 

Employees can often act quickly; there are fewer handovers, fewer briefing stages and less waiting for external account-management processes. As an example, if someone spots an internal-link opportunity while editing an article, they can simply add it. Or if there’s an emerging trend, the copywriter can jump on it and be the first to promote an article about it to your audience. 

If every small SEO change has to pass back and forth between client and agency, simple tasks can become surprisingly inefficient. There’s no denying that working with an agency is a much slower process than having someone in-house full-time. 

4. Cost

This is an interesting factor! A lot of people presume that outsourcing to an agency is inherently more expensive. But cost comparisons between in-house SEO vs outsourcing SEO aren’t as simple as comparing an agency retainer with a salary.

If you hire someone, there’s a whole range of expenses you need to consider on top of their salary:

• Recruitment costs.
• Employment costs.
• SEO software.
• Management time.
• Training.
• Holiday/maternity leave.
• The cost of providing additional benefits or perks. 

Hiring people is expensive!

But paying specialist agency rates for routine content optimisation that your internal marketing team could perform if trained properly could well be bad stewardship of resources. Training someone to handle the easier, routine SEO work and bringing in specialists occasionally could work out cheaper in the long run. 

5. Worries about losing control

I have seen this play out quite strongly in some industries. There’s no denying that keeping more SEO internally gives you greater control over priorities and implementation, as your marketing team doesn’t need to wait for another company to make every change.

But control only becomes useful when the team knows what it is doing.

Poor SEO performed internally isn’t automatically better than good SEO delivered externally.

You need to be really confident that your internal team have the skill set that they need. Additional training or an external consultant could be a helpful approach if you want to make sure you don’t become dependent on external support. 

6. Concerns about accountability

With a fully outsourced campaign, responsibility may appear simple: the agency handles SEO.

In reality, SEO usually relies on cooperation between multiple people. There have been plenty of examples in my professional life where we have done our best to implement campaigns only to be hindered by client employees who are slow to approve content or who block particular strategies that we believe would really benefit the website. 

Even if you outsource to an agency, it is unlikely that the agency has full accountability for the success of your campaign (sorry about that!). Hybrid models simply acknowledge that responsibility lies on both sides. 

When should you outsource SEO?

Outsourcing makes most sense when you lack either capacity or specialist capability.

For example, external support may be valuable if:

• There is nobody internally who can take ownership.
• You need a significant technical audit.
• You’re planning a website migration.
• SEO performance has fallen, and you don’t know why.
• You need large-scale competitor or keyword research.
• You have limited content resources (e.g. you need to create more assets that your internal team has the time to do so).
• You need expertise across several SEO disciplines.
• SEO is strategically important, but your team is still very small.

In those situations, trying to force everything in-house could actually slow you down.

When should you bring more SEO in-house?

You should consider developing more internal capability when:

• You already have an established marketing team.
• Your team creates most website content.
• Marketers regularly update service pages.
• You produce webinars, reports or thought leadership.
• You’re paying an agency for relatively repeatable SEO tasks.
• SEO recommendations regularly need internal implementation anyway.
• You want search considerations embedded earlier in campaigns.
• Internal staff want greater ownership of organic performance.

This doesn’t necessarily mean hiring an in-house SEO instead of using an agency at all; it may simply mean changing where the line sits between internal and external responsibilities.

What does a hybrid SEO model look like?

At Twogether Digital, we are actually huge supporters of a hybrid approach to SEO. For many businesses, we would recommend asking, “Which SEO capabilities should exist inside our organisation, and where does outside expertise add the most value?”

A successful hybrid model might look like this:

Your marketing team owns:

• Routine keyword research.
• Content planning.
• Article optimisation.
• Service-page optimisation.
• Internal linking.
• Content briefs.
• Expert-led content.
• Content refreshes.
• Basic SEO performance monitoring.

Your SEO consultant or agency supports:

• Technical audits.
• Major keyword/competitor research.
• Website architecture.
• Migrations.
• Complex performance issues.
• Advanced analytics.
• Strategic prioritisation.
• Periodic roadmap reviews.

This way, the internal team becomes more capable without pretending it can do everything, and external specialists spend less time on routine execution and more time on the work where their expertise has the greatest impact.

Where does SEO training fit?

It’s as part of a hybrid model that SEO training is particularly useful.  If your capability exists in your organisation, but the SEO knowledge doesn’t yet, training can be a cost-effective investment for your marketing team. 

Take a content marketer. They already know how to interview experts, understand customers, structure an argument, and write clearly. They don’t need an SEO agency to teach them how to become a writer! 

But they may need someone to show them how to integrate keyword research, internal linking and on-page optimisation into the work they’re already doing.

That’s very different from outsourcing the whole process.

Our SEO and GEO training programme is designed specifically for existing marketing teams, rather than SEO specialists looking for professional training.

We work through your actual website, services and content so your team can start applying the principles during the workshops themselves.

Explore our in-house SEO & GEO training programme

Training vs consultancy: what’s the difference?

There’s no denying that there is some overlap between training and a consultancy service, but it’s good to be reminded that they are inherently solving different problems.

SEO training builds capability. It gives your marketing team repeatable skills they can continue applying themselves.

SEO consultancy provides expertise and direction. You may already have the people required to execute the work, but need specialist analysis or help deciding what to do.

For many businesses, the two work well together. At Twogether Digital, we are often asked to provide both. 

Training helps reduce unnecessary reliance on external delivery, whereas consultancy means specialist support is still there when the team reaches the edge of its expertise.

Questions to ask before choosing your SEO operating model

Let’s start considering how to determine which operating model you need. If you’re currently deciding between an SEO agency vs an in-house team, don’t start by asking which model is “best”. Start with what you actually need. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What SEO work are we currently doing? List it; not just the tasks being completed by your agency, but everything SEO touches internally.
2. Which activities are repeatable? If the same task happens every month, could someone internally learn to manage it?
3. Which activities genuinely require specialist expertise? Don’t underestimate technical SEO or major strategic work simply to save money.
4. What skills already exist in the team? You may have more SEO capability than you realise once existing marketing skills are taken into account.
5. Where are the knowledge gaps? This is where training or consultancy can help.
6. Do we have capacity? Being capable of doing something doesn’t mean your team has time to do it.
7. How important is SEO to the business? A company heavily dependent on organic search will probably need a different level of investment from one where SEO is one of several smaller acquisition channels.

Remember: you don’t have to choose between fully in-house and fully outsourced SEO

It’s worth repeating this. The biggest problem with the in-house SEO vs agency debate is that it presents two extremes. Either build everything internally, or hand everything to an agency.

We believe that most organisations have more options than that.

If you’ve already invested in a capable marketing team, there is a good chance that some of the SEO work you’re outsourcing could eventually become part of that team’s normal workflow.

Don’t just remove specialist support. Instead, become more deliberate about what you need specialists for.

Build the skills that should live inside your organisation, bring in consultancy when you need strategic direction and use specialist SEO support for genuinely specialist work.

And avoid paying someone externally to perform repeatable marketing activities purely because SEO knowledge hasn’t yet been embedded internally!

Want to bring more SEO in-house?

Our In-House SEO & GEO Training for Marketing Teams is designed to help established marketing teams develop practical search skills using their own website, content and commercial priorities.

We can help you identify:

• Which SEO activities your team could realistically own.
• Where your current knowledge gaps sit.
• Which workshops would help close those gaps.
• Where external specialist support should remain.

Explore In-House SEO & GEO Training for Marketing Teams

Or, if your team already has the capability but needs ongoing strategic direction rather than training:

Explore SEO Consultancy