When each option makes sense
Hiring an agency makes sense if
An agency makes sense when (1) you need several skills and not a full week of any one of them, (2) you run one to five locations, (3) you want to start in weeks rather than months, (4) you do not yet know how much local SEO your business needs, or (5) you have nobody senior enough to manage a marketing hire well.
Hiring in-house makes sense if
An in-house hire makes sense when (1) marketing is much more than local SEO and you need somebody across all of it, (2) you have enough locations that the work fills a week, (3) knowing your business is the hard part rather than the SEO, (4) you have someone who can manage and develop them, or (5) you want the capability to stay in the building.
Compared point by point
| Point | Hiring an agency | Hiring in-house |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | Better fit. A published monthly fee. Ours start at $499 and the tiers are on the pricing page | Salary, plus employer taxes, benefits, software and the time somebody spends managing them. Price it from your own payroll, not from a job advert |
| What you get for it | Several specialists part-time. Nobody on a retainer is doing forty hours a week of your local SEO | Better fit. One person full-time who learns your customers, your seasons and your offers better than an agency will |
| Range of skills | Better fit. Profile work, citations, content, reviews, reporting and the occasional appeal, all inside the fee | Whatever that person happens to be good at. Most marketing generalists have never run a suspension appeal or a citation cleanup |
| Ramp time | Better fit. Weeks. The playbook already exists and the first audit starts immediately | Months. Hiring takes a quarter, and the quarter after that is learning |
| What happens when they leave | Better fit. Nothing visible. The rest of the team covers it | The work stops, and the knowledge usually walks out with them. Write the process down while they are still there |
| Depth on your business | We will never know your customers the way your own person does | Better fit. This is the real advantage, and it compounds every year they stay |
| Management load | Better fit. A monthly call and some approvals, about an hour | A direct report. Objectives, one to ones, reviews and cover for holidays, all of it a manager's time |
| Changing the level of spend | Better fit. Move tier, or stop with 30 days notice | Hard to change quickly in either direction, and unpleasant in one of them |
| Tools | Better fit. Included in the fee | A separate line in the budget, on top of salary |
| Accountability for results | Better fit. Contractual, and you can end it. Look for a short notice period rather than a promise of positions | Internal and softer. Firing someone over map-pack positions is a bad plan and usually means the objective was wrong |
“Better fit” marks the side that usually does that job better. No mark means it is about even.
The line items people forget to compare
Comparing the fee with the salary is the easy sum, and it leaves out a fair amount of the cost. These are the line items that only land on one side of the table.
| Line item | Hiring an agency | Hiring in-house |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiting | None. | Your time or a recruiter fee. Budget a quarter before anyone starts. |
| Ramp | Setup takes a few weeks and the fee starts when the work does. | Full salary runs through the learning period. |
| Management | About an hour a month. | A weekly one to one, plus reviews, plus cover when they are away. |
| Software | Included in the fee. | Rank tracking, a citation checker and whatever else they ask for. |
| Specialist jobs | Covered while you are on a retainer. | Usually bought in anyway. Verification is from $299 a location, a suspended-listing recovery is $499, and a listing cleanup starts at $799. |
| Stopping | 30 days notice and the work ends cleanly. | Notice period, handover, and a gap until the next hire. |
The agency figures are the prices published on this site. We have left the salary out of the employee column on purpose: the right number is whatever your market pays, and your payroll already knows it better than we do.
The hybrid most businesses land on
A lot of businesses end up somewhere between the two columns. They keep one in-house marketer who owns the customer-facing work and the things only an insider can do, and they keep an agency for the specialist local work behind that.
In practice that means your person writes the offers, replies to reviews in your voice, takes the photos and knows why bookings drop in February. We hold the profile, the citations, the technical work and the jobs that come up twice a year. Your person then spends the week on your business while somebody else keeps up with the data aggregators.
It is also a cheap way to find out how much local SEO you really need. After a year of running both, you will know whether the specialist half adds up to a full job at your size, and for a single location it often does not.
See also: What the retainers include, The one-time fixes.
When to bring it in-house
There is a point where paying an agency stops making sense, and it has less to do with revenue than with the shape of the work. The moment to hire is when the work has become predictable and continuous.
The signals are straightforward. You have enough locations that listings, reviews and profile work fill somebody's week. You have stopped asking what to do next and started asking who is doing it. You have a manager with the time to set objectives for the person and review their work properly. If all three are true, make the hire, and keep an agency on hand for the jobs that come up rarely.
If none of them is true, an in-house hire usually costs more and covers less, because one generalist has to learn six different jobs and the learning happens on your budget.
What to ask before you decide
Two questions settle this for most owners.
The first is how many hours of genuinely local work exist each month at your size. Count them honestly: profile posts, review requests and replies, listing checks, the pages you want written, the reporting somebody has to read. If the answer is under thirty hours, you are buying a fraction of a person either way, and the fraction is cheaper to rent.
The second is who will manage the work. An agency needs about an hour a month of somebody senior, and an employee needs a manager with real time for them. If nobody in the business has time for the second, the hire will drift regardless of how good they are.
Our recommendation
Under about five locations an agency is nearly always the cheaper answer, because you are renting a fraction of six skills rather than buying all of one. Above that, run the numbers with the fully loaded cost of an employee rather than the salary, and include the quarter it takes to hire and the quarter it takes to ramp. If you sit somewhere in the middle, the hybrid keeps you flexible, because you keep one person inside who knows the business and one team outside who has handled the specialist jobs before. Either way, agree up front what proof looks like at thirty days, and do not accept a promise of positions from an agency or a candidate.
Weighing other options? Read SEO agency vs doing SEO yourself or Moz Local vs a managed local SEO service.
Common questions
How do I compare a retainer with a salary fairly?
Put the fully loaded cost of the employee next to the fee. Fully loaded means salary plus employer taxes, benefits, the tools they will ask for and the manager's time. Our retainers start at $499 a month and both plans are published, so our side of that sum is easy to look up.
Can one hire cover local SEO and the rest of marketing?
For a single location, often yes, as long as you accept that they will be learning the specialist parts on your time. For several locations, no. Listings, reviews and profile work will fill the week on their own before anyone writes an email campaign.
What should I ask a candidate to prove?
Ask them to walk you through a Google Business Profile they fixed, including what the categories were before and after, and ask what they did the last time a profile was suspended. The answer to the second question will tell you fairly quickly whether they have handled a suspension themselves.
Do you work alongside an in-house marketer?
Yes, and it is the arrangement we would pick for most businesses with one to five locations. We take the specialist and recurring work, they keep the customer-facing side, and the monthly call is the handover between the two.
What happens to the work if we hire someone later?
You keep it. Profiles, listings and pages live in your accounts rather than ours, and the documentation goes across when you give notice. Cancelling takes 30 days.