The short answer to this question is, is it depends on the kind of online business you have, the kind of budget you have, and the kind of objective you have. You also have to understand what is SEO and how it works, and whether it is right for your website
What is SEO and How Does it Work?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. If anyone is looking to get their web pages ranked in Google (or other search engines), they will have to optimize it for search engine.
When someone is looking for something in Google or any other search engine, they type few words in the search bar. The search engine finds out the most relevant articles and ranks them for the user.
The words the user types in a search are known as keywords. And the job of Search Engine Optimization is to optimize web pages for particular keywords so that your website appears when someone is searching for a particular keyword.
Because someone who is searching for something may be looking for something to purchase, or someone to hire, or maybe they are looking for a simple solution to a problem they are facing.
Sites that can afford in-house SEO
If your website talks about products or service, you are likely to have good margins compared to the website that offers a solution to a problem and is monetized by ads.
So, if your website is in a business of a product or service, where there is a lot of competition, SEO can be quite expensive since everyone would be ready to spend a good amount of money to rank. And it also makes sense because there would be a nice ROI (return of investment).
The second most profitable type of website is affiliate websites that talk about products or services from other businesses they are affiliated with and earn a commission every time a sale is made.
It is slightly less profitable than selling your product or service. Still, since the cost of manufacturing or providing services is pretty much negligible, the whole of the commission is profit.
Whether you outsource SEO for an in-house SEO, you will have to pay a premium to get better results.
Like every other industry, you will have to spend extra money if you have to get quality work done. If you already have a workforce for your online business, even if they are working remotely, it would be a good idea to have someone on your team take care of the SEO.
The reason being, you will only have to train them one, and everything will be taken care of by them. Whereas, if you outsource SEO, you might have to find the right one to understand what you are looking for. And you cannot say whether the person is working for your competition as well. Maybe they will be approached by your computer at a later date, and all your rankings can be jeopardized.
Type of websites you shouldn’t have an inhouse SEO
The third category of the website would be the websites that monetize their content using contextual and banner ads. A large volume of visitors is required to earn a good amount of money. The cost of operation should be as minimized as possible, which does not leave the possibility of having your inhouse SEO.
Surely, this does not apply when you have a big online Publication with millions of visitors and make a lot of money using different methods. But since you are reading my blog, chances are you are an independent publisher, and in that case, an in-house SEO wouldn’t make sense.
Also, that revenue from ads is seasonal, and it fluctuates a lot. For example, in the holiday Seasons, you can make 150% to 200% more revenue than other days, so having someone on payroll wouldn’t be a good idea since you will have to pay them the same throughout the calendar.
Evan Outsourcing shouldn’t be e your primary strategy to get traffic on your website because a good SEO would require you to spend a good amount of money.
Surely there are services like fiver.com that have to give this starting from $5 onwards for a sore, but pretty much every gig is worthless because it is accessible to everyone, even the smallest of bloggers. So there is no competitive edge.
Conclusion
So, to sum it up, I would suggest hiring an in-house SEO only if you have got a product or a service of your own to promote, as you can be lucrative since you won’t actively have to work on it.
For another type of website, even for those monetized by affiliate products, Outsourcing is a better option since you can do it whenever you have a budget for it.
