In many business settings, the more people you have working on a project the better. You want things to get done quickly, you want everyone to have a specific job they can truly master, and the more minds ready to collaborate the better product you’ll have in the end.
Now that SEO is becoming more and more important to an overall business strategy, this idea leads many to that inevitable question: Is the same true for SEO work?
The Cons of Hiring More than One SEO Company at One Time
Most SEOs will advise you against trying to cheat the system and hire a bunch of different agencies. Having too many people working on your SEO could get messy for a few reasons:
1. It’s an Ongoing Process
SEO is all about creating a long-term strategy and modifying that strategy as you go. While some business projects might give you a list of things to be checked off, SEO doesn’t work that way. You need to use analytics and other data to make decisions, and that makes it too difficult for different agencies to work together.
2. Steady Link Building Matters
Backlinks are probably the number one reason that small businesses want to use multiple SEO agencies. It seems easy—the more people working to get you backlinks, the faster you’ll earn them, the better your PR—as simple as that. However, good SEO agencies know that it isn’t that simple.
Google doesn’t want to see a website suddenly have a bunch of backlinks because it looks like something is up (perhaps a paid backlink situation). You want to grow your backlinks at a steady pace, which can be done easiest with one agency.
3. Responsibility
When something goes wrong in an SEO strategy, you want to know who is at fault. With one agency, you’ll immediately be able to ask them questions, and then they can figure out exactly what part of their plan didn’t work. With multiple agencies, you’re sure to get a lot of pointing fingers, and it’s tough to know who to believe. In the end, this usually makes solving a problem even more difficult.
So are there any pros?
If two agencies or two experts are working very, very closely with each other, you might be able to get things done a little bit faster. It does help to have more than one agency when it comes to fostering ideas or solving a problem, but it’s best if you have one main agency that simply uses its resources to talk with others. In other words, you don’t need to hire another to get different ideas. However, in the end, and in all other cases, it truly seems that hiring two agencies will give you more trouble than help.
Have you ever had success using two SEO agencies at once? Have you had a bad experience? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments below.