Is Outsourcing Social Media, SEO and Other Online Marketing Worth The Risk?

It seems that companies are turning to outsourcing overseas more now then ever before. I have been asked to evaluate and train many of these companies and I’ve found they have a lot to learn. Now I am not here to slam outsourced work. I am just giving my view on what I have come across in the last 7+ years in online marketing.

Outsourcing in many cases comes as a result of filling a need. It could be that a company doesn’t have the resources to bring the work in-house or it could be that they feel search marketing is search marketing and the cheaper they can get it… the more they save. They couldn’t be more wrong.

For example, just about every overseas company I’ve dealt with for link building does link bombing. They go after major terms and target them all to the homepage. That’s not the worse part. The worse part is the sites the links are coming from are totally unrelated. They come from link farms and link pages that are already filled with thousands of links.

All the customer sees is the site’s rankings improving and continues with the service. The problem is, eventually the site gets caught and then penalized. Who suffers? The client obviously. The outsource company’s response?….”we do this for all our clients and no one has been banned before, it must be something else.” Many of these outsourced companies have very basic knowledge of SEO and online marketing and couldn’t tell you what was wrong regardless. If they could… they’d know what they were doing was wrong.

Social media is another area where the low price lures people into thinking that as long as someone is doing it, the cheaper the better. I’ve seen out sourced companies create profiles and not even create them around the company name or main keyterm. They aren’t targeting the right demographic and they can’t really tell you the value of the service they are providing.

These overseas companies don’t even know that there are ways to use customer email addresses to find them on the social networks. Why reinvent the wheel? You have a customer base and an email list, use it.

Article marketing is another huge problem. With English being a second language, content creation is fair at best. This is your companies image on the line. People reading that content may buy based on what they read. Is the content accurate? Is it written well? If you don’t know… you may be doing more harm then good. Good article marketing involves lots of unique content and going after terms that are relevant to your site. If all links in the articles are going to your home page and they are all different and unrelated terms, this is being done incorrectly.

The point of this is to make people aware that just because a service is cheap, doesn’t mean it’s better. Not to say paying more is, but do your research and ask questions. Many small businesses get cold called or emailed with big promises for little cost. What many small business don’t realize is that bad SEO and marketing can not only waste their money, but can hurt their rankings and brand. Think bout it.. someone with more experience will charge you more, but will do a better job and in most cases faster. Or, you can pay less over more time and still have it done incorrectly. Then you have to pay someone to fix the mistakes. That doesn’t sound cost effective to me.

Unfortunately, some companies prey on small businesses and their lack of knowledge and take advantage of it. While others genuinely think they know what they are doing, but really don’t. Educate yourself. Know the basics and get involved. You can always hire a search marketing consultant to over see the process. I’ve been hired to train overseas companies on best practices. It might be the the best solution for companies looking to outsource.