Hiring an SEO

Hiring an SEO is not about finding the person with the most certifications or the agency with the flashiest case study. It is about matching the support model to your operational reality. In-house SEOs embed with your product and engineering teams, which means they can act on a developer's merge request within an hour. Agencies bring a bench of specialists—technical, content, link building, analytics—but they need clear access to your data and stakeholders, and that onboarding takes weeks.

I have sat on both sides. When I worked in-house at an ecommerce company with 2,000 SKUs, we hired an agency at £3,000 per month. They produced a nice audit but could not keep up with the weekly product updates. The site grew 12% in six months, but the friction of explaining the CMS every time a new account manager rotated in cost us two weeks per quarter. I now think the decision rule is simple: if your site changes more than once a month, invest in an in-house owner who knows the codebase and the content workflow. If your site is static and you need a one-time technical clean-up or a content strategy overhaul, an agency or a [freelance SEO consultant](/freelance-seo-consultant/) will deliver faster and cheaper.

The cost difference is real. A full-time [SEO specialist](/seo-specialist/) in the UK costs £35k–£50k plus employer taxes, about £3,000–£4,000 per month. An agency retainer might be £2,000–£5,000. A freelancer might charge £50–£150 per hour. On paper, the freelancer looks cheapest, but you pay for every meeting and every explanation. I have seen businesses blow through a £5,000 freelance budget in two months just getting the freelancer up to speed. Do not underestimate the hidden cost of context transfer.

A counter-argument I respect: agencies can spot patterns across many clients. One agency I worked with identified a breadcrumb schema issue because they had seen it at three other retailers. My in-house team had never noticed. So there is a genuine trade-off between depth of context and breadth of experience. My current preference is hybrid: an internal [SEO manager](/seo-manager/) who owns the roadmap and a retainer agency that provides the specialist execution. That way you get daily collaboration and external pattern recognition.

Hiring the wrong SEO model matters most at three moments: launch, plateau, and scale.

Launch. If you are building a new site or product, SEO needs to be baked into the information architecture from the wireframe stage. Relying on an external team that only sees the site after launch means you will chase structural fixes that should never have been built. I once consulted for a startup that launched a marketplace with 50,000 product pages, none of which had unique meta descriptions. The agency they had hired during development never asked to see the CMS; they just optimised the homepage. That cost six months of ranking potential. For a launch, you need someone who sits with the developers and the product manager daily—that is in-house or a very embedded [SEO consultant](/seo-consultant/).

Plateau. When organic traffic flatlines for three months even though you are publishing content and fixing technical issues, a fresh perspective breaks the logjam. An agency or a specialist freelancer can audit what you are doing and spot the blind spot. I have seen a plateau broken by a one-week audit that revealed a canonicalisation mistake my in-house team had been propagating for a year. For a plateau, bring in external eyes on a fixed-scope project. Do not hire a full-time employee to fix a three-month problem.

Scale. When you move from 1,000 pages to 10,000—or from one country to five—the coordination burden multiplies. An in-house lead with a small team becomes essential. I worked with a SaaS company that grew from £200k MRR to £1m MRR and tried to keep using a single freelancer. That freelancer could not manage the international hreflang implementation alone. They eventually hired an [enterprise SEO consultant](/enterprise-seo-consultant/) to design the structure and a full-time specialist to execute. If you are scaling, commit to an in-house owner and supplement with agency expertise for the heavy lifts.

An edge case: what if you are a bootstrapped solo founder? At that stage, do not hire anyone. Learn enough to do the basics yourself—title tags, meta descriptions, a sitemap—then outsource the rest to a freelancer for a few hours a week. The [career in SEO](/career-in-seo/) path is not for every founder, but understanding the fundamentals protects you from bad hires.

For years I believed that hiring one solid in-house SEO was always the right answer. I thought loyalty to the business and deep knowledge of the product would beat any external team. I was wrong.

You cannot cover every SEO discipline well as a single person. Technical SEO, content strategy, link building, analytics, and project management are genuinely separate skills. I watched a smart in-house specialist burn out trying to do all five. They wrote title tags one day, built redirect maps the next, and pitched guest posts the day after. The quality dropped across the board. Now I advocate for a hybrid model: an internal owner who coordinates and a roster of external specialists for the deep work. That internal owner does not need to be a world-class link builder; they just need to know when to call one.

Another mistake: I underestimated the onboarding time for agencies. I hired a small agency on a £2,500 monthly retainer for a client site and spent the first month granting tool access, explaining the CMS, and walking them through the content workflow. That month was billed at the full retainer but produced zero output. The agency could not have moved faster—I had not prepared the access and documentation. Now I pre-build a handover pack: tool credentials, sitemap, content calendar, stakeholder list, and a one-page site architecture overview. That cuts onboarding from a month to a week.

I also used to think that [SEO freelancers](/seo-freelancers/) were only for tiny budgets. A few years ago I hired an experienced freelancer on a 20-hour-per-week contract for an ecommerce site. The freelancer delivered a technical audit, a content plan, and a link building outreach sequence. The cost was £1,800 per month versus £4,000 for an agency. The results were comparable. The catch? The freelancer had no backup. When they fell ill for two weeks, nothing moved. With a freelancer, you accept a key-person risk. An agency has bench depth. A hybrid model with a retainer agency as backup mitigates that.

I still do not have a universal answer. Every business has a different mix of technical debt, publishing velocity, and stakeholder buy-in. The only thing I am certain about is that the decision should come after a brutally honest audit of what you actually need done, not before.