Do You Really Need an SEO Agency?

It's a fair question. Most small businesses are either getting bombarded by agencies promising top rankings, or they've already tried one and been burned. And now you're left wondering if you really need one at all. The honest answer? Probably not in the way you've been told.

Most businesses don't need a full time agency churning out content and sending over monthly

reports full of graphs and generic advice. What they need is direction. A clear plan, built around what they actually do and who they actually want to reach but that's not what most agencies sell. Most agencies sell convenience but at what cost?

Why Most SEO Agencies Don't Work for Small Businesses.

Before we get into this section, I need to say there are some incredible agencies. Highly reputable and professional businesses that can make a huge difference to their cients business. The problem is that you only need to look at your email spam folder to see that the vast majority of SEO offers feel spammy. There's probably some in there who are genuine and get tarred with the same spam brush. It's almost a dirty word these days which is a real shame. SEO is hugely important for all websites.

So why is it that most SEO agencies don't deliver long term results for small businesses? It could be that the agency doesnt understand your business. They might be off target when it comes to understanding your potential clients and your required goals to operate. It could be that they understand completley but they make 2/3 months work last 12 months. They're in business to make money. Keeping a company on a retainer is a way to make money. Most of us don't want to think of this scenario but they could be deliberatly causing issues with your site to allow them easy fixes at a later date. I have seen this happen recently with one of our clients. Their agency used some very black hat techniques to deliver traffic, and purposefully manipulated elements of the website to then later highlight these as technical errors they had fixed, making themselves seem indispensable, prolonging the contract.

The good agencies are there as are the good individuals with knowledge to share, however, not all businesses need a full agency to become dominant in search results. If you have a huge marketing budget, my advice is invest in high quality SEO rather than ads. You can employ an agency to do all the work for you and just keep on top of progress monthly.

If you dont have a huge budget there are other ways. SEO costs money, it's time consuming and the research element alone can be exhaustive and laborious. What's missing today is a more flexible approach. It's either DIY or £4k a month. Let's look at these options.

DIY SEO.

The DIY approach is close to my heart because thats how we've always done our own SEO. When My partner, Bridget, and I first started trying to get a website found we were working for our families business. It was a shopfitting and furniture manufacturers in north west England. It was cut throat in terms of competition. There was zero budget for marketing and online marketing wasnt really seen as the best way to be found. It was the early 2000's and there were still huge numers of publications that were predominately in print. Trade magazines, lifestyle magazines, industry specific supplier magazines. It was endless. The office was piled high with these slabs of paper and the bosses were adamant that this was the most effective way to advertise and get the phone to ring.

Since we had no marketing budget, Bridget had built a rudimentry website. It was really good. It showed what we did and it was well designed and bright and colourful. Even though it was basic it stood out in the industry. With no budget to use Bridget started listing the site on directories and maintaining the Google profile. She'd write about projects we'd manufactured and update with news. We didn't know about keywords, and we didn't know that this was SEO. Bear in mind we took 95% of orders by fax still. Fax. That was how we operated. We would only accept orders in writing due to their complexity. Customers would hand write them out and fax them to us. It seems so dated.

With the natural progression of things we started to get enquiries from the directory listings and website visits. people started to order via email!. wow. That sounds crazy. it was 50/50 now, the fax machine would ring and the email would ping.

When Bridget and I came away from that business and eventually started our own, we only knew the DIY approach. We had no money, so a website was going to need to be free and the marketing was going to need to be as close to zero as possible.

There were more opportunities now to promote your business online, and since all it took was time this is what we opted for. We still had print publications asking us to take 1/4 pages in magazines but we didnt trust this method and it was big money. So we plodded on building our profile online, using social media was now more of a thing to promote your business and so anything we had to speak about we updated the website and the socials. In 10 years running that business we did cold outreach for around a week. We hated it and it brought no results. The phone was ringing though and the emails were coming in. Our first proper commercial project was for the BBC. We did the job and told people about it, the phone rang more and the emails continued to grow. Then we did another big commercial job and we uopdated the website, told our social media following, and wrote a blog post about it. The phone calls increased. We were doing SEO and it was part of our daily operation. We weren't doing much technical SEO as we didn't know what to do and I often wonder what difference that would have made in the early days. If our website had been the best it could be, if we understood keywords and search intent and implemented it. If we had a better knowledge of backlinks and Alt tags and URL titles. That knowledge cam to us over the years and as we learned new techniques we applied them and they showed results.

The only time SEO failed us was when we outsourced it completely. In 10 years of running that business we didn't pay to advertise on social media and we may have run 2 or 3 ads on google and then reverted to organic search. We didnt cold call. We didnt have a sales rep, our clients found us and contacted us. Thats half the battle in running a business. The client has already told themselves that this company could do what we need them to do. This is why Organic SEO is so effective. Half the sale is out of the way. Google Ads are different, human nature is to go to the best result, usually position 1, 2 or 3, certainly not past page 1 inless they're struggling to find a solution. And Ads nowadays are seen for what they are, buying a position, buying visibility. theres a chart below which shows the percentage difference in click through rate for ads vs organic. It's huge. It's business changing. Rank for your target keywords and the enquiries will come to you.

Agency Provided SEO.

Most businesses looking for help with SEO get told to hire a full service agency. On the surface, it sounds good. You get strategy, content, technical fixes, backlink building, reporting, maybe even a bit of PPC or social thrown in if you negotiate. The idea is you hand over the reins and let them drive. The reality for many businesses is that the experience can be pretty mixed.

There are definitely upsides. A full service agency can bring together a bunch of different skills you’d struggle to find in one person. If you’re short on time, or just don’t want to get buried in the mechanics of SEO, that can be appealing. You’ll usually get an account manager, some regular reports, maybe a roadmap with deliverables, and the sense that someone is handling it all. It’s tidy, structured, and often feels reassuring if SEO is a bit of a mystery to you.

The other side is that these agencies are often built around their own internal processes, not your results. They divide your monthly fee across different teams, each working on their small part. So you might get a bit of development time, a bit of content, a few backlinks, and a call to go over the report. But what you don’t always get is actual traction. It can start to feel like you’re paying for activity rather than outcomes. And that's before you take into account that part of your fee covers their operating costs, the same way a percentage of your sales cover your costs.

The model makes it easy for things to drift. You get locked into a contract, and after a few months the pace slows. The calls feel less urgent, the ideas become recycled, and the reports are full of numbers that don’t really tell you if sales have improved. Some agencies will quietly outsource key tasks like writing or link building to third parties, and unless you dig, you won’t know. It’s shown as progress, but not much changes on your end.

That’s not to say all full service agencies are bad. There are good ones, but the way the model is structured means you’ve got to be on top of it. If you’re not actively involved or don’t know what to look for, you can easily end up locked into a system that runs itself without driving results. And most agencies are not cheap. So if you’re paying thousands a month, you want to know exactly what that money is buying and whether it’s working.

For us the agency experience was bad. Two different agencies with different structures and almost identical results. £4500 per month average spend with both and we lost enquires and sales and our online position and the ethos we wanted to project was damaged badly. They didn't do anything particularly underhand, but they didn't deliver on what they sold it as either.

This is the reason we ended up starting SEOorganic. Once we'd rebuilt our visibility and targeted traffic we began to develop our SEO understanding much further. I became obsessed with it. Finding out the details of the organic method, filling in the gaps in what i'd learned. I read the books, I took some courses and I tried and tested. When something worked, I doubled down on it. I did this until it became second nature.

The absolute truth is, SEO isn’t magic. It’s research, execution, iteration. You don’t always need a massive team, some businesses benefit from working with an agency and others don't. Sometimes just the right person focused on the right things is far more effective than a team of employees. And that’s often easier to find outside the full service setup.

If you've ever paid for SEO and seen traffic go up but enquiries drop, you already know the feeling. The problem isn't that SEO doesn't work. The problem is that the people doing it often don't understand your business. They apply the same approach to every client. They target broad keywords, outsource content, and report on numbers that sound good but don't lead to sales. You pay thousands a month. They say it's working.

That's not SEO. That's a subscription based business keeping you sunscribed.

What Most Businesses Actually Need.

Here's what usually happens when a business takes SEO seriously in house:

- They learn just enough to know what's missing

- They try to write content but don't know what to focus on

- They waste time chasing numbers that don't matter

- Eventually, they give up or outsource it badly

And that's a shame. Because most of these businesses were close.

They just needed someone to look at the whole picture and say:

This page needs fixing.

This keyword has potential.

This is what your competitors are doing.

This is how to structure it.

This is what's worth doing.

This is what isn't.

An agency doesnt offer this...A consultant does.

The Quiet Truth About SEO.

The truth is, once you know what needs doing, most SEO tasks can be handled without an agency. You might already have someone on your team who can publish content. You might already have a site you can update yourself. You might be one conversation away from a strategy that works. So no, you probably don't need an SEO agency. You might just need a clear plan and support you can fall back on every now and then. And that's where we come in.

If that sounds useful, get in touch and we'll have a proper look at what's working, what's not, and what to do next.

We can run a free website review which will give you an idea of whats going on and a few things to focus on or fix.

With the paid audit you'll recieve an in depth audit of your website and, sturcture, keywords, competitors, a strategy to develop your visibility, a content plan for the first 3 months, a blog structure that will help you rank and meet googles best practices, video tutorials and a fully structured 12 month SEO plan to implement in house. Optional quarterly reviews and research and the doors always open for additional services.

SEO ORGANIC

Do You Really Need an SEO Agency?