How a switch to an ‘In House Digital Agency’ can achieve the best of both worlds

Digitial Agencies vs In-House Teams the Pros & Cons

Why companies use Digital Agencies?

Why do companies, even big enterprise level companies, use digital, and especially SEO, agencies for achieving results in online marketing channels? Well agencies do have a lot going for them, they often hire and develop the best, most ambitious individuals and give them the opportunity to learn quickly by being around seasoned experts and getting to learn from what is happening on several accounts, even seeing what’s going on on the accounts they don’t work on directly.

Why in-house digital teams often fail?

In contrast in house teams are often small, they are focused on one, or a small group of, websites and may hire in mainly junior team members and be led by someone who may only really have experience in one digitial marketing channel, or in some cases is just a marketing veteran of offline and ATL campaigning who has found themslves responsible for a team and function they don’t really understand, or want to understand.

In house teams may be relying on an agency to keep them updated and ensure that the latest best practice is being followed and that the right work is being done. This is especially the case for SEO as organic search moves on fast, Google algorithms update and there’s a lot to keep up on, but much also relies on observation, which seeing what impact there is across a dozen or more sites helps with. Paid search and other paid channels don’t have to move on so fast and they have reps available who are all to keen to help out.

So every once in a while it is natural that a company with a small in-house team, that has used an agency, decides it is time to spend that budget in house instead, and for the reasons given (above and some more below) in-housing often fails and they end up back with an agency, having lost momentum.

Avoid taking the wrong approach to in-housing, for the wrong reasons.

When first deciding to in-house a team, they are often, with few realising, setup to fail and is expected to suddenly perform like the agency did without the experience, expertise and resources because in-housing decisions are often taken purely to save costs. Really investing in an in-house team and running it as an ‘in-house seo agency’ though can make sure you get the right people, working in the right way together and performing like an agency, but with the benefit of being able to get things done much more easily by being in the team. In the long run there can be a big saving compared to using an external agency but the initial investment needs to be there.

Who In-House Agencies work for and who it doesn’t

The below advice isn’t going to work for everyone, it is most suited to Enterprise or at least medium sized businesses for whom organic is, or has the potential to be a major channel; I have seen this work especially well in medium sized e-commerce businesses for example.

However at least some of the tips can be implemented to improve the effectiveness of your in house team even if your budget means that team is only 1-2 people, or an informal team of people with other roles and some responsibiuility for SEO and other digital channels. Small busineeses may struggle right now to run an in-house agency but, for example, having a couple of fractional team members that have more experience and get exposure to other clients and people in the industry may work better than one lone SEO, starting to build this culture with an eye to the future may also help your efforts scale as you grow.

Here’s the 10 things to do differently to run your in house team as an ‘ in-house digital agency’.

1. Hire Experienced, ex-Agency, Leaders

The first step in setting up an in-house agency should be getting in people who know how an agency works, what gives it that different culture to a standard in house team. These people can also then hire the right people to create a team of the type of individuals who want to work in and build that environment, including from contacts they have and just being able to spot people with the right attitude.

Hiring people who have worked in agencies also means bringing in people with experience of working on a range of clients, who have tried different things and seen the impact of different approaches and who should be up to date on the latest industry best practice and trends, again especially important for search engine optimisation. Compare this to moving someone horizontally from another department or hiring someone who has worked in house for another in-house team and therefore been working on one website for a number of years.

2. Avoid Silos & give power to make things happen

Silos can be between departments, functions and individuals. Often in-house digital teams are completely disconnected depending on the structure and responsibilities. This may well mean that the content team have no relationship with the SEO team despite the fact they should be one team. Paid & Organic Search teams have so many things they can share and work together on but often never talk, I spoke about this in a recent Majestic SEO Podcast, if you want to hear more about how this can work.

A good agency brings people together, it creates opportunites for, and rewards, collaboration and communication. Some of my tips below, such as running internal conferences, make a big difference, but just having a team structure where there are people who need to be aware of what everyone is doing and can bring things together is important too.

As well as Dev teams: product managers, pricing teams, customer services and CRM teams all have a lot to offer and a lot to gain from getting closer to digital marketing and again part of the opportunity is to reward collaboration, for example having some joint KPIs.

Hopefully what needs to happen for the good of the business happens then but if someone is really pushing back on what the digital marketing team are trying to push forward then you need to have at least the team lead with the power to make things happen and speak to the board if needed. Agencies are used to having to put together business cases and show coast-benefit analysis and this is a good approach, but also sometimes it is just important that the experts in the team are heard and respected enough that their advice is taken. Again this is most relevant to SEO and again too often a lone SEO in a team who’s too junior and half forgotten about by their boss knows what is holding back the site’s SEO efforts and what needs to be fixed but has to put up with Devs and others ignoring them and pushing back for months and months, while all the time potential sales and leads are being lost.

3. Provide a budget for tools, development etc.

Another reason why agencies can seemingly appear to just be better than in-house teams is simply that they have the best tools available. Most agencies invest in a wide range of tools to let them get access to the data they need and improve efficency, often having several similar tools that each do one specific thing especially well. Yes agencies get to spread the cost over many clients but an in-house team not investing in the right tools, or choosing cheaper tools with less data or less functionality, is usually a false economy, though depending on the type and size of the site, cloud based crawlers may be no better than having a few Screaming Frog or Sitebulb licenses. The amount of time that these tools can save and the impact on results, by uncovering opportunities and making sure that effort is put in the right place make them a easy business case to throw together if needed.

Having a budget for development can also work well though. This could be a percentage of the dev team’s time each quarter or each sprint that gets put into improvements focused on SEO and other digital marketing, or a budget to spend with external dev agencies. This shouldn’t become doing work for the sake of it, or trying to polish a *%$# of a website that simply needs to be replaced and migrated to a new platform to fix underlying issues in a more efficient way.

4. Get the balance between all-rounders and specialisms

This is partly about building a team that meets your needs, partly a team that stays interested, stays motivated and in the end simply stays, and partly about having a setup where team members can support each other and help each other to develop.

A team of all-rounders is great, you have people who are flexible, if you have a migration and everyone needs to be mapping redirects or running audits they can, if you have a marketing campaign coming up and need to create a load of supporting content they can. It also means that everyone knows enough about what they aren’t currently working on to know that what they do might impact it and to update and colloaborate with others.

Having specialists though is also good, you can keep people motivated by letting them focus on what they enjoy and what they are good at and they can therefore become experts and the go to for others in the team. They can train up new and junior members of their team in these areas, talk at meetings and events and be a chamption for their area.

So the balance is making sure everyone knows something about everything but letting people spend some time become an expert in a particular area, if they want to, while ensuring they don’t end up treating it as solely their domain that no-one else can touch, and that they still are involved enough in other areas to know what is going on and how different activities impact each other.

The classic example would be someone who loves the really technical bits of SEO and really understands what can impact indexabiulity of a site or page. They should therefore share that passion and train others on things like technical audits as well as informing, for example, the content team why adding huge high-res images and loads of web fonts may impact page speed and Core Web Vitals.

5. Train up Team members and have an agency style structure for progression and learning

One reason why the best, most ambitious people, especially those starting out, want to work in agencies, and what will make them stay, is the opportunity to learn and get a lot of experience quickly. Sometimes agencies have a perception of having high turnover of team members, but not the good ones, medium sized agencies with a clear structure for progression and training program for getting new starters in and up to speed and a genuinely supportive team often have excellent retention. Without this approach often in-house juniors can be left doing the same repetitive work with little suipport, input or overview for months or years, this suits some people of course, but maybe not the ones you really want pushing your business forwards, and what do you do when you need to fill gaps for more senior roles if your more junior team members have never been given the chance to learn how to do the next job?

Having run agency teams the approach of mixing formal training and learning on the job works well. There’s no point training someone on something new and not giving them ther chance to try it out. If you already have someone who’s good at a particular task or job, don’t just keep giving them all of this work, get them to mentor others and pass on their skills and knowledge. This doesn’t have to just be team members’ line managers doing this. It should become the culture of the in-house agency team that everyone has something they can share and teach, informal mentoring can be a great chance for future trainers and managers to start to hone their skills explaining tasks they know how to do to others.

Case studies and showing off work within a team is great for learning and sharing new, better ways of doing things, but also great for the people showing off, allowing them to feel their work is recognised and valued.

6. Stay connected with the industry and competitors online and offline

Those in other industries and even other marketing channels sometimes find it curious how much people in SEO share. This includes on Social Media such as LinkedIn and X/Twitter, which have massive communities of SEOs both working in-house and agency side. Also SEOs love a conference, there’s some Paid Search conferences, but it’s not the same. SEO conferences often include case studies where actual results are shared, with the permission and enthusiasm of the business, but put there for any competitors to see along with how they were achieved. This might seem foolish, and there of course need to be limits, but talking and sharing some insights and experiences at conferences can have great results.

As well as SEO and other digital marketing events, Industry events can be valuable to send your digital team to. This can be conferences and also expos, knowing what the trends are within an industry, what products and services competitors and suppliers are developing is often forgotten for marketing teams. Having often exhibited at events for certain industries, for example a travel and tourism expo, where maybe I have already had clients, the insights and ideas I come away with for campaigns, content, new areas of keyword research, better understanding of intent etc. are hugely valuable and came from spending some time off the stand and going to talks being run or just talking to other exhibitors.

Some team leads worry sending team members to events is a great chance for them to get hired by competitors but if you have a great team and culture it’s more likely they will sell your company and way of working to potential recruits.

7. Use part time and fractional team members with experience on other projects

It’s difficult to replicate the opportunity in agencies to work on a lot of different clients and projects, unless you are a group of companies and brands with various websites. One way then to bring in more experience and ideas is to include in your team people who work for you part time and also have other projects. This can also work very well if you are a smaller company and having a bigger team of full-time staff isn’t practical to ensure you still have enough people to ensure that sharing of ideas happens.

Many people who work as freelancers or similar like the freedom to work on different projects and clients and have variety, but also love the security of an on-going role for a chunk of their time, often around half of their hours each week. Building this type of team or having some people working in this way is practical therefore and often you can hire people who have previously been in agencies and miss the collaborative element of work.

8. Run internal events and mini-conferences

Previously I worked at a major e-commerce business with offices across Europe and a digital marketing team of around 30 people; 3 or 4 times a year we would all come together in person and have a two day internal conference. People who normally only spoke on the phone or by email met up IRL and we had some great team building and social events in the evenings too to build genuine friendships. The content of the talks we did was great as well, lots of case studies of things people had tried in their markets, or new initiatives we were rolling out for all markets, as well as general training from a team that included a lot of people who had worked in other big e-commerce companies or agencies and really knew their stuff.

9. Encourage experiments and side projects

Another way to help with the issue, that usually an in house agency team is going to work on one website, is to allow side projects. This could be personal websites, or even a joint website that the team run and experiment on. For organic channels, especially SEO, this is low cost and means people can try things out and apply their knowledge in a safe environment, including things that they might not get to do often on the main site such as fixing technical issues or running a/b or MVT tests to improve UX and CRO.

This doesn’t mean that experiments on the main site can’t be encouraged though, some things aren’t practical of course. But how about changing a few pages’ titles to including free shipping information for example, or how about doing a/b or MVT testing to try different landing page layouts and templates. Some experiments will fail and can be changed back, some will be successful and can then be rolled out to more pages. A culture of constant improvement is common in almost all of the best performing businesses online.

10. Have an agency style culture that encourages the best recruits

Even for potential recruits who’ve never heard of you before they may go through a few interview stages and come in to contact with a few of the team in that time. It is, I believe, obvious whether the people selling the company and the culture to you genuinely believe what they are saying or if they are going through the motions.

When interviewees come to ask about things like leanring and development, being able to give a clear structure for progression and mention specific training that’s going on or examples of projects people have had the chance to work on is much better than a vague statement on investing in people with no substance behind it.

At the end of the day the culture and approach of a in-house team is what makes it just another team or something that genuinely fits the moniker of ‘In House Digital Agency’ and all the benefits for the company and team that that entails.