Is a SEO Freelancer the way to go?

In our current gig economy and the freelance world is expanding rapidly, it’s a common question amongst business owners to wonder about how much they should rely on freelancers and SEO is no different.

Are there good SEO freelancers? Yes, of course, there are many highly skilled and reliable SEO freelancers.

Are there bad SEO freelancers? Unfortunately, yes. Especially after 2019 and the extended time at home that many endured, hobbies and at home crafts exploded in popularity and a great many of those home made soaps, candles, and resin art have been ubiquitous in craft markets and online makerspaces since to various levels of success. Many who did not find a creative outlet turned to marketable skills they could offer from home – and some of those have joined the ranks of the highly skilled and reliable SEO freelancers mentioned above, but many others have not.

That’s where the risk comes in with choosing a freelancer to take on your SEO and digital marketing plan.

Many freelancers, especially when they are first starting out, set their prices to be ‘competitive’ rather than at market value. This is often done in order to entice new clients into giving them a chance. This does mean that by taking a chance on a newer freelancer, you might just get yourself a bargain on the price.

Because of the nature of freelance work, by hiring one you guarantee yourself a one on one professional relationship with the person you’re contracting. This can be a great bonus, especially for business owners who want to communicate directly with the person carrying out their digital marketing plan.

(Yes, this is both a pro and a con)

Freelancers can often be more expensive to hire than a comparable established company. The reasons for this are many and several are legitimate. It can also be a matter of demand, they have more clients than is practicable for a fulltime load so raise their prices to maximise their margins and lower requests for quotes.

Secondly, it can be a matter of running costs. As a business owner, you know that you have to account for the daily running cost of your business and freelancers are no different. When you hire an SEO company to do your SEO for you, those running costs are spread out over every contract and client they have and due to the nature of a larger company ends up being a smaller cost to you. Whereas a freelancer can only take on one person’s worth of work and therefore the cost is more concentrated.

It’s hard to trust people with business matters – especially on the internet! With the world wide web filled with no end of dodgy websites, phishing emails, and too good to be true offers, it takes an awful lot to trust a stranger with your business website.

Beyond that, many companies and freelancers alike work directly on your site – meaning accesses and passwords need to be shared. That’s a level of trust higher than most IRL friendships can boast!

Whenever you engage a third party to complete a service for your business, it’s vital that you can be sure of their legitimacy. Unfortunately for freelancers, it’s simply much easier to verify the legitimacy of companies than it is individuals.

With registered companies located within your own country there are vast and expansive consumer protections, advertising standards, and legally binding conditions that have to be met by companies. When you go outside of those country borders it is much harder to have those laws enforced.

Working with international companies is safer for you, but when you’re directly contracting a third party it becomes more complicated and less likely that anyone will be able to enforce the relevant laws and protections – if they even apply.

When hiring someone for a specific task, your first concern is generally their aptitude in that specific task – but knowing their history is just as important. There’s a big difference between hiring someone with the technical skill certificate and someone with a long history of experience and those technical skills.

Reviews and testimonials are, generally, all you have to go on when hiring a freelancer and while it’s not a nice position to be in you do have to keep the question of ‘are these real?’ in your mind.

When an established company works with a brand they have proof they can bring to the table, but finding the reliable receipts from a freelancer can be more difficult.

When you hire someone, how do you know that their ethical standards match your own? Can you trust them not to use black hat tactics to gain an initial wave of visitors only for it to fall away and damage your site’s reputation?

Whether this is through buying a following, bot comments and likes, or using your site as a part of a private backlink network (embedding links to other websites at the code level of your website to try and trick the search engines) they all have a huge potential risk of getting your site deindexed and affecting your ongoing ability to reach your customers.

Can you meet your freelancer face to face? Even if this on line, are they willing to sit down with you and have a face to face conversation with you?

We understand that the world is a big place with lots of time zones, but working with someone as closely as you will be with your SEO consultant requires at least the willingness for a face to face meeting – otherwise how can you know who you’re working with?

Working outside of a true contract – such as a verbal or email agreement – is fraught with risks. Tied in to their overall legitimacy – what security do you have that after you pay them that they won’t disappear on you?

Scams can look like this or they can be more insidious like the inclusion of malicious links that link your customers to their affiliate links – or worse.

Think about the sheer amount of information that lives on your site – emails, usernames, physical or home addresses, and in some cases even credit card information.

When you give someone access to your site, you’re also giving them access to all of that information and as we’ve found out from the recent global uptick in data breaches – every piece of identity information is worth its weight in gold.

This is definitely a worst case scenario but sadly it’s not unheard of. When your professional relationship goes south and a contractor has full access to your site and/or emails – there really is no limit as to what they can do in retribution.

This could be as simple as changing your passwords and not telling you, or demanding a payment in order to change them back. It could be as insidious as selling access to the accounts to scammers, or flooding your feeds with distasteful or offensive content.

Is it illegal? Mostly, yes. If they’re located overseas, are you likely to be able to press charges or get compensation? Unlikely.

Not to mention that compensation and a guilty verdict isn’t going to undo the damage! We’ve had to help several Kiwi business owners regain access to their accounts and it’s something we wouldn’t wish on anybody.

We can’t tell you which way to go, but we do highly recommend for you to be running a risk analysis alongside the potential for ROI and cost savings when trying to choose between an SEO freelancer and an established SEO company.

While we definitely aren’t suggesting that there are no good SEO freelancers out there, far from it, we do know how hard it can be to find one that you can really trust with the public facing image and most effective digital marketing approach for your business.

You can get in touch with us today for a free site audit and discussion around the SEO attention your site might need and exactly how we would go about it. We’re a local New Zealand SEO specialist with years of experience backing us up.