How to Outsource SEO: Steps to Outsource, Tips, Benefits, & More

How to Outsource SEO

To outsource SEO, decide which search engine optimization (SEO) work you want handed off, set measurable goals, vet providers on how they report results, and agree on a strategy and reporting schedule before work starts. Good reporting now covers visibility in AI answers like Google AI Overviews alongside rankings, traffic, and leads.

Once you’ve decided your team needs help with SEO, the next step is handing off the work without losing sight of results. The process below covers how to choose what to outsource, find the right provider, and keep your campaigns accountable from day one.

How to outsource SEO in 5 steps

Here are the most important steps to outsourcing your SEO:

1. Determine all the marketing services you want to outsource
2. Outline the goals you want to reach
3. Research top marketing agencies that offer the services you’re looking for
4. Confirm your strategy with the agency you choose
5. Track progress and keep up to date with your campaign

Download Now: Free Guide to Outsourcing SEO

1. Determine the marketing services you want to outsource

As a company that’s looking to outsource SEO services, you’ve likely dabbled in other marketing strategies as well. For example, you may also have a paid advertising campaign and an email marketing campaign on the back burner.

Before proceeding with SEO outsourcing, you should determine if there are any other marketing strategies that you want to outsource. If you want to outsource all your marketing, it’s best to search for an agency that offers all the services you need.

Choosing what you want to outsource will help you determine if you should hire a full-service agency for your SEO outsourcing, or if it would be more beneficial to opt for freelance SEO.

2. Outline the goals you want to reach

You should consider the specific goals you hope to reach with your SEO campaigns — including the metrics you want to increase, like leads, revenue, and visibility in AI answers, and the site updates you’d like to make. This will help you find the perfect outsourcing option.

If your company can afford to hire a reputable agency, we recommend doing so, since it will likely be worth every penny.

3. Research top agencies that offer the services you’re looking for

Whether you’ve decided on outsourcing all your marketing or just SEO, you should look for an option that offers the services you’re looking for. If you need local SEO and not much else, look at the best local SEO agencies you can hire.

As you’re reaching agencies, focus on ones that have industry expertise and proven results. You can look at their portfolio to see what they’ve done for other businesses, too. This is a good initial step to help you narrow down your list to viable options you can hire.

Once you have your list narrowed down, start asking for proposals.

4. Confirm your strategy with the agency you choose

After signing on with an agency or freelancer of your choice, you’ll want to confirm your strategy. This step will ensure that you can tell your strategist your goals and expectations.

5. Track progress and keep up to date with your campaign

Be sure that you are aware of a reporting schedule so that you can always have a transparent view of the results your provider drives in organic search and AI answers. Ask questions about the results your campaign drives, and be sure to address any concerns with your SEO company.

Ask your provider to connect SEO results to leads and revenue, not only traffic. RevenueCloudFX, WebFX’s marketing platform, integrates with your CRM to connect marketing activity to revenue, so you can see which channels and pages bring in customers.

Tips for choosing the best SEO provider for outsourcing

Finding the best company for professional SEO services is essential to getting the best results.

Here are a few factors to look for when choosing an SEO company:

• In-house tools: Does the company have tools they can use for implementing, tracking, and updating your SEO? Do their tools integrate with your current company software, or will you need to pay for other options?
• How they track progress: SEO is an ongoing process — how does each company aim to track your campaign? Do they report on visibility in AI answers alongside rankings, traffic, and leads, and do they share that data with you?
• How they communicate: Does this company get back to you quickly? Are they easy to talk to over the phone or during video calls? Do they answer your questions and give you enough detail?
• Prior experience: How many years has this company worked on SEO? Are they a relatively new company or a larger corporation?
• Reviews and testimonials: What do others have to say about this SEO company? Is the general impression positive, neutral, or negative?

Understanding what to look for in an SEO company will save you from choosing the wrong addition to your team and needing to switch in the future.

Benefits of outsourcing SEO services

Whether you’re just getting into SEO or want to revamp your strategy, outsourcing can be a great option. Businesses save around 15–20 hours per week by offloading SEO tasks to a third-party. That means marketers can reclaim those hours for larger, more pressing tasks!

Time-savings isn’t the only benefit of outsourcing SEO. Here are a few more benefits to letting someone else handle your search strategy:

1. You see a better ROI on your SEO strategy

The goal with any investment in a digital marketing strategy is to drive a better ROI. By outsourcing to your strategy to an agency, you can see improvements in the ROI of your SEO.

In fact, 64% of businesses reported seeing measurable improvements within 3–6 months of outsourcing their SEO to an agency. On top of that, outsourced campaigns achieve 3X higher ROI on average compared to campaigns managed in-house.

Since agencies have dedicated, experienced SEO experts available to work on your campaigns, they can spend the time developing and tweaking your strategy to maximize your investment.

2. You outperform your competition

Having a dedicated, outsourced team of SEO experts helps you get a leg up on the competition. In fact, 67% of businesses said they surpassed their competition after enlisting the help of an outsourced SEO agency.

When you have a dedicated agency helping you optimize your SEO campaign, more time is spent developing and tweaking your campaign to maximize results.

While other companies are relying on their internal team, that has a full schedule already, you’ll surpass them by enlisting the help of professionals who have the time to develop your campaigns.

3. Your campaign stays up-to-date

If there’s one thing to know about SEO, it’s that the search engine algorithms are always changing. Google continually refines its algorithm and AI features like AI Overviews and AI Mode to better serve users. While these updates are good, it means you need to keep tabs on the changes to ensure your SEO strategy is up to par.

Those changes now include where AI answers appear. In WebFX’s study of 2.37 million U.S. keywords, 25.8% of queries showed a Google AI Overview (about 1 in 4 searches). That means your strategy has to account for the AI answer above the results, not only the rankings below it.

Outsourcing your SEO to a skilled agency makes it more likely that your strategy will be on par with Google’s latest updates. That means your SEO strategy will continue to remain effective and maximize results for your business.

4. It’s cost-effective

Above all, outsourcing SEO saves you money when you work with one of the best SEO service providers for your business. Just make sure you’re paying for value, not only a lower price.

Seventy percent of respondents to Forrester’s 2025 B2B Brand And Communications Survey prioritize value over cost, but just 53% feel they’re getting it from agencies.

Here’s a breakdown of in-house vs. outsourcing costs:

Of course, getting the full benefits of outsourcing your SEO requires choosing your business’s best partner. If you hire a cheap SEO agency, for instance, you may see none of the above benefits. That’s why it’s essential to research your options and follow best practices for hiring an SEO expert.

Learn what you get by outsourcing your SEO

You know how much SEO costs, but what does paying for SEO get you? Find out below!

What to ask an SEO provider about AI search

An SEO provider should be able to show where your brand appears in AI answers, not only where your pages rank. Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity answer many questions before a searcher clicks, so a report built only on rankings and traffic leaves out part of how buyers find you.

Ask these questions before you sign:

• How do you track visibility in AI answers? Ask for a sample report that shows citations and mentions for your target queries. Our team uses OmniSEO®, WebFX’s AI search visibility platform, to track citations and mentions for a brand and up to five competitors, which shows you where competitors get cited in your place.
• How do AI visibility and traffic show up together? More AI mentions don’t help if organic traffic and leads fall at the same time. The report should put AI visibility, organic clicks, and conversions side by side.
• Who writes and reviews the content? Fully AI-written articles published at scale can run against Google’s spam policies and hurt your organic visibility. Look for a provider whose experts review and edit every piece.
• What can you guarantee? Google says it doesn’t evaluate third-party SEO services, and third-party tools don’t have access to its internal ranking data. A provider that guarantees rankings or AI citations is promising something it can’t control.

The answers show whether a provider measures visibility across both search results and AI answers, and whether it ties that work to leads and revenue.

Mistakes to avoid with outsourcing SEO

Download Now: List of SEO Outsourcing Mistakes to Avoid

Below are a few common mistakes companies make when outsourcing their SEO services:

Going too cheap

Cheap SEO doesn’t mean good SEO. If you see a company advertising SEO services for lower-than-average costs, you’ll end up paying more down the line to repair the lackluster results.

Good SEO costs more upfront, but the return on investment (ROI) will pay for the initial investment over time. Plus, when you work with a credible company, you make sure that every penny goes toward business results.

Learn More: Why Cheap SEO Services Aren’t Your Company’s Friend

Inexperienced companies

SEO takes time to learn. The more experience a company has, the better. While newer companies can still provide quality work, they might have a harder time being flexible or thinking through challenges they haven’t seen before.

A more experienced SEO company will know how to work through challenges they’ve seen before, giving you the best chance at impactful SEO.

Companies tracking vanity metrics

Vanity metrics are numbers that look impressive but don’t speak to your website’s health. They don’t tell you how well your SEO strategy is doing in search results and AI answers, and if you focus on them too much, you could be pouring money into failing SEO.

Watch for companies who focus too much on:

• Website visitors
• Session duration
• Social media likes
• AI citations or mentions reported without traffic, leads, or revenue
• Other empty metrics

Misaligned goals and values

Above all, your SEO agency needs to be the right fit. You’re going to work closely with your agency, so they should respect your goals and be there to help you along the way.

What if you want to focus on your customer relationships along with SEO and your agency doesn’t offer options to meet that goal? Or, they promise to account for customer service, but they don’t factor that into your SEO plan? Misalignment like these could impact your own values and relationships.

Companies that promise fast results

SEO results don’t happen overnight — you could wait months to see a return on the changes you make. However, SEO is worth the wait, so you want to work with someone who is going to be with you for the long haul.

Churning out quick vanity metrics quickly might look good on paper, but it will end up wasting your time (and money!).

Businesses that fail to communicate

You need to communicate with your agency if you want to be involved in the process. A neglectful company will make the entire process much more difficult.

Reviews can be a resource for finding this information. You can also get a feel for their communication style during the pitch process.

FAQs on outsourcing SEO

What is SEO outsourcing?

SEO outsourcing involves hiring an outside person or agency to handle your SEO strategy. They take care of tasks like keyword research, link building, technical SEO fixes, content, and visibility in AI search features like AI Overviews.

Should I hire a freelance SEO expert?

Great question! Another option for outsourcing SEO is hiring a freelancer. Sure, they have their upsides, like one-on-one connections, specializations in specific areas of SEO (technical SEO, for example), and more time to dedicate to your company.

But while those are all great, in the grand scheme of things, you’re better off outsourcing SEO to an agency because they’re:

• More established
• Have a team behind them
• Have an extensive network
• Can afford to have multiple different SEO tools on hand
• Have established practices and strategies
• Constantly staying up-to-date on the latest SEO trends and best practices

While there are some excellent freelancers out there that could help you improve your SEO, most won’t have the resources need to maximize your ROI.

Do I have to fully outsource my SEO or can I take a hybrid approach?

You don’t have to fully outsource your SEO to an agency — you can take a hybrid approach!

Taking a hybrid approach to outsourcing SEO means that, whether you have a marketing team or you’re doing the marketing yourself, you handle some of the tasks while the agency you hire handles the rest. Basically, your SEO agency acts as an extension of your team and helps you handle the tasks you don’t have time for or experience with.

For example, maybe you feel confident about creating content for your website because you know your brand and market, but technical SEO makes you feel overwhelmed. You could have your agency handle the technical SEO for you, so you reap the benefit of their expertise but still maintain some control over your impact on your SEO strategy.

Basically, this approach is a great option if you’re nervous about giving an agency full control and still want help with your SEO.

What types of SEO tasks can I outsource?

When choosing to outsource SEO to an agency, you’ve also got another thing to consider — what kind of SEO do you want to outsource? There are four key areas companies outsource:

On-page SEO outsourcing

On-page SEO involves making optimizations to elements directly on your site, like:

On-Page SEO

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Multimedia content (images, videos, etc.)
• Page content (blog posts, product descriptions, “About” pages, etc.)
• Keyword usage

By outsourcing on-page SEO, you’re giving your site a better chance at ranking for target keywords and attracting relevant web traffic.

Off-page SEO outsourcing

Off-page SEO refers to optimizing off-site elements related to your online presence, like:

Off-Page SEO

• Link building
• Social sharing
• Guest blogging/mentions

Off-page SEO is a bit trickier to optimize for, considering you’re not optimizing anything directly on your website. That’s why outsourcing off-page SEO is a great options for those who aren’t wholly familiar or comfortable with doing SEO on their own.

Technical SEO outsourcing

Switching gears, technical SEO is all about the website elements you don’t display for site visitors, like backend and server elements. Outsourcing technical SEO can help you improve your site so it’s easier for search engine crawlers to index and rank. With technical SEO outsourcing, you can improve site elements like:

Technical SEO

• Page speed
• Site maps
• Structured data
• Internal linking
• Robots.txt files

Local SEO outsourcing

Local SEO is all about optimizing your website for localized search results. Think phrases like “takeout near me,” or “construction business in [location].” It’s important to optimize for local SEO, especially when you have a physical storefront, because it helps you attract local customers and web traffic.

When outsourcing local SEO, you’ll partner with an agency that can help you optimize things like:

Local SEO

• Google Business profile
• Locational and long-tail keywords
• Quality links
• User experience
• Mobile-friendliness and responsiveness

How do I ensure transparency when I outsource my SEO?

When you outsource your SEO, you want to ensure that you know what your agency does with your campaigns. It’s important to see that they’re driving results and creating effective campaigns for your business.

But, how do you ensure that transparency?

The easiest way to ensure transparency is to ask the agencies you’re considering for outsourcing how they report results. Ask them if they use any tools and whether you’ll have access to those tools. If they use tools that they give you access to, you’ll be able to see your results whenever.

Additionally, ask about their communication style. How do they connect with their clients about their campaign performance? Generally, you want to stick with companies that offer multiple communication options, like in-person, phone, video chat, and email. Typically, multiple communication options means an SEO agency understands the importance of communication and wants to give you options for how you like to communicate best.

Outsource your SEO to the agency behind 81% higher SEO revenue growth vs. industry average

If you want to get started on your SEO, WebFX is ready to help. Our SEO services help you earn visibility in search results and AI answers, then tie that visibility to the leads and revenue it brings in.

We’ve driven more than $10 billion in revenue for clients in the last 5 years. With over 750 digital marketing experts, you get an extended team ready to help you get more revenue from your SEO efforts.

Ready to learn more? Request a free quote today to get started!