Decision guide
SEO agency or in-house?
Both can work. The right choice depends on how central SEO is to your growth, how soon you need pages live, and how much of your own time you can give it.
The short answer
Hire in-house when SEO will be your main channel for years and you can hire someone senior. Outsource when nobody owns it today and you need pages shipping soon. Many SaaS teams combine the two: one lead in-house, production outsourced.
Side by side
| In-house hire | Agency or managed service | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | A salary and benefits, plus the tools they need, whether or not pages ship that month | A monthly fee for an agreed amount of work, usually on a fixed term |
| Time to first pages | Hiring, onboarding and learning your product come first | Work starts after a roadmap is agreed, with a team that already has its process |
| Skills covered | One person rarely covers strategy, writing, technical SEO and AI search equally well | Several specialisms behind one account, though shared with other clients |
| Product knowledge | Deep, and grows every week inside the team | Has to be learned from you, your site and your sales conversations |
| Your management time | Hiring, direction and reviewing their work | Agreeing the roadmap, answering questions and approving pages if you want to |
| If the person leaves | Knowledge and momentum leave with them | The account continues; the roadmap and pages stay with you |
| Flexibility | Hard to scale up or down quickly | Change plan or volume at the end of a term |
Hire in-house when
- SEO is your main growth channel and will be for years
- You can hire someone senior enough to set strategy, not only execute it
- Your product is so technical that most of the work is subject-matter expertise
- You need daily coordination with product, design and engineering
Outsource when
- Nobody owns SEO today and you want pages shipping within weeks, not quarters
- You cannot yet justify a full-time hire for one channel
- You need breadth: content, technical fixes and AI-search coverage together
- You have an SEO lead already, but no production capacity behind them
The hybrid most teams end up with
A marketer or SEO lead in-house decides priorities and knows the product. An outside team does the research, writing, review and publishing at a volume one person cannot. The lead spends their time on judgement instead of editing drafts.
How we work alongside in-house teamsWhat stays with you either way
- Telling us what makes your product different and who it is for
- Answering product questions, so pages are accurate
- Access to your CMS and Search Console
- Approving pages before they go live, if you want that step
- Following up the leads the pages bring in
Questions
If nobody owns SEO and you cannot yet justify a full-time hire for one channel, an agency or managed service gets pages shipping sooner. If SEO will be your main channel for years and you can hire someone senior, building in-house usually wins in the long run. Many teams do both: a lead in-house with production outsourced.
It depends on the agency and the hire. Compare the full cost of each: salary, benefits and tools for a hire against the monthly fee for an agency, and then what each produces in a month. A managed service like Comppound prices finished pages, which makes that comparison easier.
Share what makes the product different, answer product questions, give access to the CMS and Search Console, and approve pages if you want that step. A good agency keeps this to a few hours a month.
Yes. The roadmap, the pages and the Search Console history stay with you, so a future hire starts from a working programme instead of a blank page.
A consultant usually advises and leaves the work to your team. An agency, or a managed service, does the work. If you have people with time to carry out recommendations, a consultant can be enough.
Not sure which fits?
Tell us where SEO sits in your plans. We'll say honestly whether to hire, outsource or wait.
