Is hiring an SEO agency worth it? For the in-house marketing folks, I’m sure you’ve heard this question once or twice from your boss, or you’ve even questioned it yourself. How do you know if your company is ready to bring on an SEO agency, and will your marketing dollars be better served in-house or shared across a partner team?

You’ve already read our top 10 considerations for hiring an SEO company, and we even gave you 14 more questions to ask an agency, but how do you know if your dollars will stretch as far as they could with an agency partner?

If you’re already in conversations with a potential agency partner, read our top 3 questions to ask the agency before saying yes to determine if it will be worth it for you.

This is by far the most important question to ask to determine if hiring an agency partner is worth it. For every company, ROI from organic search will look a little differently depending on your business model, sales cycle and industry. However, if your potential agency partner can’t answer this question, hiring them might not be worth it.

Seer has developed an SEO ROI calculator that our entire team leverages daily to answer this question for our clients.

Pro Tip: Ask your potential partner to do a quick back of the napkin math calculation to show how we’d approach getting to an ROI for your team. If your SEO partner can’t show ROI in dollars, what’s the point in investing your money up front?

I highly encourage you to ask this of your potential SEO agency, because chances are if you’re looking to invest in SEO, you’ve already invested marketing dollars in Paid Search, Analytics, Email, Social Media, Print, Programmatic, Creative, CRO, etc. the list goes on.

Seer’s approach to SEO isn’t actually channel specific at all. We take your business challenge and create a custom solution for your company, and at the end of the exercise, your solution might not even include SEO.

Pro Tip: Hire an agency that has the guts to admit that what you came to them initially for might not be the right solution for your business challenge. An agency that’s worth it will admit when spending dollars in a certain channel isn’t the right solution for you.

If you’re willing to invest your marketing dollars in an SEO agency, wouldn’t it be nice if that agency team invested time back to make your team better, smarter and more efficient? Surprise, not all agencies have it in their core values to make your team better. Some take your money and run.

Seer loves planning a day with your team, on your turf, and doing a training based on your team’s knowledge gaps. SEO 101, PowerBI demos, Google Analytics training, you name it.

Pro Tip: Work with an agency that wants to invest time back into your team. One of the greatest joys I personally find from working at an agency is helping my client teams grow, get better and learn over time. We’re glad when our clients determine they’ve built up a strong enough team internally to take their SEO back in-house.