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SEO Agency vs In-House: Which Is Right for You?
You're choosing between hiring an SEO agency or building an in-house team. Every agency will tell you they're the answer. Every recruiter will tell you to hire. Nobody's giving you the honest breakdown.
Here it is: both models can work. Both models can fail spectacularly. The decision isn't about which is "better" — it's about which aligns with your constraints, your timeline, and your ability to evaluate SEO work.
This isn't a sales pitch. If in-house is the right call for you, you'll know by the end of this page. If you can't afford what in-house actually requires, we'll tell you that too.
The Real Cost Comparison
An SEO manager in the US costs $70,000 to $120,000 per year, depending on experience and location. Senior SEO leads or directors push $130,000 to $180,000. That's before benefits, equipment, training, or management overhead.
You'll also need tools. Ahrefs or SEMrush run $200-$500/month. Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Analytics, Tag Manager, heatmaps, rank trackers, schema validators, page speed tools — figure another $200-$500/month in subscriptions. Call it $600-$1,000/month in software.
Then there's training. SEO changes quarterly. If your hire isn't staying current on Core Updates, AI Overviews, E-E-A-T evolution, and ranking factor shifts, they're coasting. Conferences, courses, and research time cost money and bandwidth.
Agencies range from $3,000 to $10,000/month for most mid-market retainers. Enterprise deals go higher. You're paying for a team: strategist, content writer, technical auditor, link builder, analyst. You're also paying for tools they already have, processes they've refined, and mistakes they've already made on someone else's dime.
Break-even math: a $5,000/month agency ($60,000/year) is cheaper than a $90,000 salary once you factor in taxes, benefits, tools, and training. But if you're paying $8,000/month ($96,000/year), you're in the same range as a solid mid-level hire.
The cost question isn't just dollars. It's opportunity cost. A bad agency wastes 6-12 months before you realize they're not moving the needle. A bad hire wastes 6-12 months and burns recruiting budget, onboarding time, and team morale.
When In-House Wins
In-house wins when you have enough budget to hire senior talent, enough SEO work to justify a full-time role, and enough internal buy-in to let them do their job.
If you can afford a senior SEO manager or director ($100K+), someone who's actually run successful programs before, in-house makes sense. Junior hires are a gamble unless you have someone senior to mentor them. If you're hiring your first SEO and going mid-level or junior, you're flying blind.
You need someone embedded in your product if SEO is core to your growth model. SaaS companies, marketplaces, content platforms, e-commerce with deep catalogs — these businesses benefit from someone who understands the product deeply, works directly with engineering, and can prioritize SEO in the roadmap. An external agency will never have that level of integration.
In-house also wins when you have sustained, high-volume SEO work. If you're publishing 20+ articles per month, managing tens of thousands of product pages, or running continuous technical optimization across a large site, a full-time hire can focus entirely on your domain. Agencies split attention across multiple clients.
Finally, in-house works when you have the infrastructure to support them. They need access to dev resources, designer support, content collaboration, and stakeholder buy-in. If your in-house SEO is fighting for scraps of engineering time or getting overruled by the CMO who "doesn't believe in SEO," they'll fail. That's not a model problem — that's an org problem.
When Agency Wins
Agencies win when you can't afford a senior hire, need diverse expertise, or need to move faster than hiring allows.
If your budget caps out at $60,000-$80,000 for a role, you're hiring someone mid-level at best. That person will have gaps. They might be strong on content but weak on technical SEO. They might know local SEO but struggle with programmatic pages. A good agency gives you access to senior-level strategy and specialist execution without the senior-level salary.
Agencies bring pattern recognition from other clients. They've seen your SEO problem before — maybe in a different industry, but the underlying dynamics are the same. They know what works, what's a waste of time, and what's trendy bullshit. That breadth matters when you're trying to avoid expensive mistakes.
Speed is another factor. Hiring takes 2-4 months if you're lucky. Onboarding takes another month. An agency starts in a week. If you're bleeding traffic from an algorithm update or launching a new product line, waiting 3-6 months for a hire isn't viable.
Agencies also make sense when SEO is important but not your core competency. If you're a local business, a B2B service company, or a brand that needs SEO handled but doesn't want to manage it day-to-day, outsourcing is cleaner. You get results, reports, and recommendations without managing headcount.
The catch: most agencies are bad at this. They assign you an account manager who has never done SEO. They run templated audits. They don't understand your industry. They move slow because you're one of 30 clients. If you go the agency route, you need to vet them like you'd vet a senior hire — because you're trusting them with the same outcomes.
The Hybrid Model
The hybrid model is underrated: hire someone in-house to own SEO strategy and execution, then bring in an agency or consultant for specialized work.
Your in-house person handles content strategy, internal coordination, roadmap prioritization, and ongoing optimization. They know the product, the team, and the business. When you need a technical migration, a backlink audit, or programmatic SEO buildout, you bring in specialists who've done it 50 times.
This works especially well for companies in the $5M-$50M revenue range. You're too big to wing it with a junior hire, but you're not big enough to justify a full SEO team. One senior in-house hire ($100K-$130K) plus $2K-$5K/month in agency or consultant support gives you the best of both models.
The in-house hire provides continuity. The agency or consultant provides spikes of expertise. You're not paying agency rates for routine work, and you're not asking your in-house person to be an expert in everything.
This also de-risks the hire. If your in-house SEO leaves, the agency or consultant can keep things moving while you recruit. If the agency sucks, your in-house person can course-correct or bring in a replacement.
Hybrid requires clear role definition. The in-house person owns outcomes. The agency delivers on scoped projects. If those lines blur, you get finger-pointing and stalled work.
Red Flags for Both Options
Bad agencies show predictable patterns. They put an account manager between you and the people doing the work. That account manager doesn't understand SEO — they're a coordinator who rephrases your questions and the team's answers until both sides are frustrated.
They sell you a custom strategy, then deliver a templated audit you could've gotten from a $500 Fiverr gig. The recommendations are generic: "improve site speed," "build more backlinks," "optimize title tags." No prioritization, no context, no trade-offs.
They don't ask hard questions about your business. They don't challenge your assumptions. They don't tell you when your expectations are unrealistic. They just nod and bill hours.
They're slow. Two-week turnarounds for simple answers. Month-long backlogs for content. No urgency because you're one of many clients and none of you are squeaky enough wheels.
Bad in-house hires have different red flags. They talk about SEO in vague, theoretical terms. They can't explain why they prioritized one project over another. They blame algorithms, competitors, or "Google being weird" when traffic drops.
They're defensive when questioned. They don't track outcomes, or they track vanity metrics like keyword rankings instead of revenue impact. They spend more time in meetings than in Search Console.
They don't collaborate. They treat SEO as a silo, get territorial about "their" pages, and complain that nobody listens to them — without realizing they haven't built credibility or learned to communicate in business terms.
Whether agency or in-house, the red flag is the same: no accountability for outcomes. If they're not tying their work to traffic, conversions, or revenue, they're decorating.
What Matters More Than the Model
The model matters less than the person or team you're working with. A great in-house hire beats a mediocre agency. A great agency beats a mediocre hire. The question is: how do you evaluate "great"?
Great SEOs ask about your business model, your customers, your unit economics, and your competitive position before they talk about keywords. They want to understand what moves the needle for you, not what moves rankings.
They show you their work. If it's an agency, you see the actual audits, content briefs, and analysis — not slideware. If it's a candidate, they walk you through a real project: what the problem was, what they did, what happened, and what they'd do differently next time.
They have opinions. They'll tell you what's overrated (most link building), what's underrated (information architecture), and what's worth testing in your specific context. They don't just execute your ideas — they make your ideas better or tell you why they won't work.
They focus on systems, not tactics. They're not chasing the latest TikTok SEO hack. They're building repeatable processes: how you identify opportunities, how you prioritize them, how you execute, how you measure, how you iterate. Our system is built on this principle — it's not about what we do once, it's about what you can keep doing.
Finally, great SEOs have a body of work. Agencies should show you case studies with real numbers and context. Candidates should have a portfolio, a blog, or a track record you can verify. If they can't show results, assume they don't have them.
The Verdict
Here's the honest answer: if you can hire a senior in-house SEO ($100K+) and give them the resources to succeed, do that. If you can't, don't hire junior and hope for the best. Work with an agency or consultant until you have the budget and the organizational maturity to support a senior hire.
Most companies end up in the hybrid model: one strong in-house owner, plus outside expertise for specialized work. That's the pragmatic path for the $5M-$50M revenue range. Below that, agency. Above that, team.
If you're evaluating agencies, here's what makes Underdog different: no account managers, no templates, no long-term contracts. You work directly with the person doing the work. We run free teardowns so you can see how we think before you spend a dollar. We're not for everyone — if you want a big agency with a shiny deck, we're not that. If you want someone who's done this 200 times and can make you faster, we might be.
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