It’s a crucial decision to choose between these two SEO services you may be planning to acquire. Your website is your bread and butter for the success of your online business. Your success depends on how you select and wisely manage your resources. Choose which side you’re in favour of based on your budget. It can either result in immense suffering or a benefit towards your website traffic and keyword rankings. There are two things you should bear in mind; website traffic leads to sales and sales results to profit.

Using SEO Tools

Image grabbed from localseoexpress.com

SEO tools can be handy, but it could be pricey as well. Nowadays, useful and more accurate SEO tools are not easy to maintain they have monthly subscription bills. To be honest, there are only a few freelancers who can afford to maintain a bunch of useful SEO software and tools for their clients. Let’s put this as an example, an SEO freelancer working 8 hours a day on one full-time customer getting at least $5 per hour (a cheap SEO freelancer) having a rough estimated total profit of $840 a month. Surely, he would not want to spend for 3 of these SEO tools like Majestic SEO ($53.81 / Month), MOZ ($99 / Month), and Semrush Pro ($99.95 / Month) that we use. Having them would take almost half of his total monthly profit not to mention his costs for internet, rental, and daily needs to survive. May be good for those professional freelance SEO’s out there that are earning a high rate and can provide high quality work that includes SEO consulting and etc.

SEO companies could easily purchase those SEO tools needed to meet the client’s expectation and quickly set traffic goals. They can handle a bunch of customers with a full working team, timely managed, and tracked progress to work on different clients. Having said that, you can never call someone an SEO expert if they don’t own or at least know how to use any useful SEO software or tools. Checking clients’ websites thoroughly using software could be a huge advantage for clients to have an edge over their competitors in terms of traffic and keyword rankings in any search engine results page.

Pricing and Rates

Pricing may easily gain customers interest. Freelancers tend to close the deal with a very negotiable price depending on their experience. On the other hand, SEO company’s could have a fixed rate to cater their employee’s salary and other SEO tools for free while using their services. I’ve asked the same question on Quora, check it here Which is best for your website – using an SEO Company, or Freelancers?. A few SEO’s said it is “depending on the budget” and “firm classifications”. Well, in terms of looking into a huge team for your SEO project, you can hire a bunch of freelancers worldwide to work on your desired projects depending on how big the target market is. Managing and monitoring their daily progress could mean a lot of work to the client and it’s time-consuming as well.

Although dealing with an SEO company could lessen your time and focus on the sales and profit of your business, you can communicate through their company project manager on what is the current progress and what’s the next SEO marketing plan. That sounds a bit smoother and easy for the clients, don’t you think?

Pros and Cons

SEO Company

Pros

• Well organized
• Vast experience
• You get the best results
• Full-service helps more than just SEO work
• Does not consume most of your time
• Expect professional and high-quality work
• Builds long term businesses
• Diverse beneficial resources
• Stays and keeps up-to-date with Google Algorithms

Cons

• Could be pricey
• Bound with terms and contracts

SEO Freelancers

Pros

• Less salary cost
• Best fit for short-term projects
• No sick days
• No obligational contracts

Cons

• Bad working habits
• Work takes longer to deliver
• No real-time communication
• No teamwork
• Labour and time delays
• Lots of reasons for absence
• Risk of being website penalised

Prospective Comparison

As you are still figuring out which is the best fit for your website’s online success. It’s better to throw and ask some innovative and critical SEO questions during the interview. Pooling from different applicants and comparing their skills could help you build an idea of which you would trust the success of your online business. Tell us more about your story by commenting below. Let’s start a discussion.