We have been asked to prepare a pitch for a very large local retailer about hiring us to do their SEO work, vs. hiring an in-house employee, so we have been talking about the relative merits for a company of doing their SEO/SEM in-house or outsourcing (out-house SEO, as Chris Silver Smith humorously puts it in his Natural Search Blog post).One of the sharpest comments I saw on the matter was a commenter, Tyler West, at Webmama’s blog:

I distinguish between an SEM marketing manager and outsourced search engine consultants by asking the client this question. “Would you rather pay another salaried employee to sit behind a desk with no guarantee they’ll perform OR would it make more sense to compensate your expert out of the money they make your company?” The answer is always unanimous in favor of the less risky proposition.

In reviewing some of the posts I found, it seemed to me that many of the valid arguments in favor of in-house SEM really applied to large companies that could justify an entire department of people to work on SEM - in such a case there are factors like internal politics, institutional gridlock, etc. however if the choice is between hiring a single SEO employee, or outsourcing to a firm with experience, multiple resources with expertise in different aspects of SEO/SEM, tried and true techniques and tools (how’s that for alliteration - if ’strategies’ started with ‘t’ I would have included that as well)…the results are bound to be both quicker and more effective.

Even for the larger companies, i didn’t see anyone address what we consider to be an ideal solution - use in-house staff to write copy, update the website, and other business specific tasks, while using an SEO firm like SalemGlobal to manage those resources, do the research, utilize best practices and tools, and provide direction and prioritization.

Here are some of the more interesting contributions on the topic:
Chris Diprose
Lee Odden
Manoj Jasra