Outsourcing SEO for Fun and Profit
Outsourcing SEO is an integral component of building scale in your processes. Of course, I know what you’re thinking – won’t SEO’s from India, Russia, [Insert Country Here] harm my overall SEO campaign or create more inefficiencies than I currently have?
The answer could be YES or NO, entirely depending on the decisions you make regarding the following questions:
- Will I expect the outsourced party to create, strategize, execute, and measure my seo campaign because I’m paying them to?
- Do I expect the oursourced agency to proactively search for ways to improve your seo campaign?
- Can I hold the SEO agency really accountable for targeting mistakes in their approach?
If you answered YES to any of the questions above, you’re bound to have an outsourcing experience that will more than likely leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.
That said, outsourcing can be useful, heck, even enjoyable if you plan your deliverables right. The key point here to remember is:
The reason you are outsourcing is not JUST to save money. You should be outsourcing to increase efficiencies for your own staff by offloading repetitive and mind-numbing tasks to 3rd parties/drones/mechnical turks.
Capice? Now that we’ve got that established, the following are simply a list of what you might choose to outsource in an seo campaign, if you choose to exercise such tactics at all of course. Every SEO practioner has different views on each of these tactics, and I leave it to you to figure out the value in each tactic, and whether its worth it to pursue them. Additionally, outsourcing does not necessarily have to be to a country where english is not the 1st language, as you can find perfectly good freelancers to do work in the US, Canada, UK, NZ, and Australia. Use your good judgement in picking folks who speak english as their first language, versus those that don’t for the following tasks.
What to Outsource in an SEO Campaign
- Free Directory Submissions
- Base Level One Way Link Building (Forums, Blog Comments, Etc.) It’s best to use folks that speak english as their first language.
- Base Level Link Requests (en masse). If you’re going this approach, then make sure you have a good template with variations for your outsourced party to follow.
- Social Media Account Creation – Alternatively use spam bots (hat tip: SEOROI)
- Social Media Bookmarking Services
- Mass Gmail/Freemail ID Creation
- Simple SEO copywriting
- Simple PHP Scripts and Programming Work
What NOT to Outsource in an SEO Campaign
- SEO Site Audits
- Social Media: Submissions (User, Sub. Texts, Promotion)
- Anything Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit related
- Any communication with a link target
- Approaching high level link targets (including sending link request emails)
- Code level changes to a client site. Don’t provide FTP details for your client’s site for example.
- Complex coding or scripting work is best done in-house or with folks you trust.
How Not to Regret Your Outsourcing Decision
- Check the outsourcing party’s work everytime before including it in a client report.
- Create a template for your outsourcing party to work from for every single activity you expect them to perform. While this can be painstaking, you’re paying them to ‘do’ and not ‘think’.
- Give them lists – directory lists, email lists, website target lists. This is part and parcel of providing a template.
- When your outsourcing party claims to have 100 different c-class block and different ip ranges, make sure that their claims are valid.
- Bad english isn’t necessarily a sign of incompetence. Read in between the lines and repeat yourself loads of times to ensure the communication is clear. Just remember to appoint the right tasks to parties that speak english as their 2nd language, meaning that copywriting, commenting, link requests may be off-bounds.
- Make sure you let your outsourcing party know what is ‘off-bounds’ in your project. This may include spamming, blackhat and greyhat activities, 302 redirects, and a gamut of other SEO no-no’s.
Every suggestion above comes from personal experience in learning how to efficiently manage outsourcing for seo campaigns. Hopefully, you found this post useful and know how to save yourself some pain the next time you choose to outsource your seo. Roger Montti has an awesome post on how outsourcing to India can be good for you, that you should give a read too.
In my next post, I’ll cover the Best Places to Find Cheap Yet Reliable Outsourcing, so I urge you to subscribe to my rss feed to keep updated.
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Dunno how I missed this, but it’s a keeper. Bookmarked!
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