Arguments for and against agencies vs consultants in the search marketing business have been popping up again adding to the confusion of how to find the right vendor. This post lists 5 pros and 5 cons for hiring both search marketing agencies and independent consultants. Where do you stand?
6 Comments
6 Comments
Comments
I see you sphunn the Top 5 or 10 approach :) I agree that it depends "on the type of services needed and the size of the project." Although I lean more towards having a Consultant over the Agency. Agencies have payroll to considered and a lot of times miss the attention that SEO demands.
The size of the agency can make a big difference. Smaller agencies tend to have fewer standard processes, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Larger agencies have to fight against the urge to focus more on perceived value than actual value. Both are clearly important, but if actual value is not being delivered, the client is not being properly served, even if they think that they are. Large agencies also tend to have pockets of quality staff and pockets of not so quality staff. Ensuring high quality top to bottom is a definite challenge.
As I commented on the story itself: for my definition, the agency is what you hire to outsource the actual work, while a consultant is what you hire to bring in the specialist knowledge and empower the in-house people, either to do much/some of that work in-house, or to better manage and supervise the overall strategy, whether outsourced or not.
With an individual consultant there’s little you can do if that person decides to move on without taking the appropriate steps to transfer knowledge. And my experience has been that you often don’t know if the transfer is complete/correct until it’s too late. On the other hand, an agency should step up even if it means taking a hit on profitability to have the campaign transferred to another person or team should there be a departure.
I very much support Ammon’s view. Of course it depends on the quality of the consultant and the quality of the agency. In either case certain relationships develop between the provider of the service and the company. So to pick up on Marios point, those relationships and the ability to handle them well in a transition will always favor the consultant IMHO.
Ammon, excellent point about the use of the agency to find the right consultant. The bottom line is that most companies do not have the required knowledge to even hire a consultant to hire the firm that does the work. To know what services and skills are important you must know a great deal about SEM. The bottom line is that SEM is so new that qualifications and skill set requirements are not very well documented in the HR community and those that you do find look more like the skill set of a webmaster than a SE marketer. IMO, I would choose a head hunter specializing in tech, an Organization like SEMPO, SeoConsultants or SeoPros, consultants like Dan Thies, Jill Whalen or myself that do reviews of the site which include information that the agency can use to hire the consultant/firm or determine if in house SEO is viable! IME, agencies often are more concerned with the services they have and can sell then they are concerned with what is actually needed and best bang for the clients buck.