Christian Sculthorp is the marketing director at Agency Analytics, an all-in-one marketing dashboard for agencies with SEO tools, social media and more. In a previous life he was an SEO consultant and can’t shake his devotion to organic rankings. When people think about outsourcing SEO, many immediately cover their ears and say it can’t be done. What these people fail to realize is that there are many moving parts to any good SEO campaign: content creation, graphic design, technical fixes, link building… The list goes on. Yes, your agency shouldn’t be automating link building like it’s 2001, but there are tasks which you can outsource to increase efficiency, deliver better results and keep more clients. Through my experience as an SEO consultant there were a number of tasks that I’ve successfully outsourced to scale my efforts:
If your clients serve a worldwide audience, there’s a good chance that translating content can give them a big boost in business. Neil Patel saw an increase of 47% when he translated the content on his blog to multiple languages. Only ~340 million out of 7 billion people in the world speak English, which means there’s a lot of opportunity out there.Your agency can offer translation services and make a healthy profit by doing so. Find low cost translation services to translate client websites, landing pages, Adwords campaigns, and more. Translation works especially well with international ecommerce businesses.
Content marketing is a huge topic these days and is an integral part of SEO. Your agency is most likely pumping out tens of thousands of words a month to target those important keywords. The thing is, proper grammar and error-free writing is very important. People are hesitant to trust websites that have spelling errors and publications won’t accept guest posts that are riddled with issues. Having a proofreading system in place before putting content live is important. This part of the content marketing process should be outsourced, as it rarely makes sense (unless you’re a massive agency) to have an editor in-house. Send each piece through a proofreading expert before it goes live.
Twice as many people share posts on Facebook and Twitter with at least one image. Although social shares aren’t necessarily a ranking signal for SEO, the more eyes on your content the better. It’s also proven that people process images much, much faster than text, which can make them a very useful asset. You don’t need to have a graphic designer on staff in order to have blog post images made. There are services like Pablo, where you can make stunning images yourself, or you can find a low cost freelancer designer to work on a case-by-case basis.
Although you may work in SEO, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have the technical skills for every fix. Or your web designer may have a lot on their plate. Luckily, there are a number of options to outsource small jobs related to SEO and website fixes. For example, I’ve used this gig to make customizations to Wordpress themes for clients. Many times it makes financial sense to outsource small website fixes and customizations.
Citations are one of the key parts of any local SEO campaign. Thing is, they’re very monotonous to build and generally not worth your time to do manually. If your agency sells local SEO services there’s a good chance you already user a service to have them done. If you don’t offer them yet, you can outsource citation building quite easily. Repetitive tasks are the best to outsource and these fit the bill perfectly. You have a few options if you’re looking to outsource citation building. Whitespark offers citation has a citation building service which has received high praise. Problem is, it’s a little bit pricey. By doing a search in Fiverr you can find a number of affordable providers for citation building, such as youngceaser. You can find country specific citations as well: Canada, USA, Australia, UK, etc. for international clients to see those local rankings skyrocket.
Search engines can’t understand the content within videos at this point. In order to help them grasp what’s happening in your clients videos you can add transcriptions. There are benefits to adding transcriptions within Youtube and also alongside blog posts to improve SEO and user experience. You can also add these transcriptions for closed captioned videos which works wonders in Facebook. Build this in to your video creation process.
Although it’s considered a “grey hat practice” that some SEOs are quick to shy away from, private blog networks are still a big link building tactic for many agencies. They may be frowned upon but if done properly they work well (very well) and scale easily. One big part of building out a PBN is finding the right expired domains for your network. There has been a surge in demand for good expired domains and they’ve become quite hard to find. It can be very time consuming to find the right expired domains for your PBN, which means it should probably be outsourced. I’ve used Pbn_seo_expert’s "high metrics” expired domain service to find some gems. Expired domains of this quality can cost hundreds of dollars through other means (auctions, forums).
Similar to creating blog posts – if you don’t have a good in-house designer – logo design is a task that can easily be outsourced. Many small businesses just need something quick and simple.If you are building out a private blog network for your agency, Fiverr is also the perfect place to get logos designed for them. It’s important that they appear legitimate and having a real logo designed adds authenticity. That being said, you don’t need to spend hundreds on professional logos. I’ve used Gigblast’s service to design logos for my PBN websites at a very reasonable price.
Backlink monitoring tools can be expensive. Tools like Ahrefs, Majestic and SEM Rush start at around $99/month and go up from there. If your agency just needs a few competitive backlink reports a month, consider checking out a gig like Alekscupid’s who will run 10 full Ahrefs backlinks reports for $5. These reports not only save you money, but can save you time by not having to run them yourself. Outsourcing these kinds of reports can be a very smart move for agencies that are just starting out.
Like backlink monitoring tools, SEO reporting tools can be expensive to pay month over month. It’s not necessary to pay a monthly auditing fee for every client if they don’t need it. Instead, you can outsource small SEO audits. There are many providers on Fiverr who will do thorough audits for you. These may even be manual 50+ point audits which are superior to automated tools.
%20Large.jpeg)
