Doing it yourself versus hiring someone

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

The question is not cost, it is which work

The DIY-versus-agency debate is usually framed as a budget decision: can you afford to hire, or must you do it yourself? That framing produces bad decisions in both directions. Well-funded companies outsource work that would have been better done by the person who already knows their industry, and under-funded ones attempt campaigns that require capabilities they will never build.

The better question is which parts of link building depend on things you already have — knowledge of your subject, existing relationships, access to your own data, credibility in your market — and which parts depend on things an outsider has: media contacts, prospecting infrastructure, outreach volume, and the willingness to do repetitive work every day for months.

Split the work that way and the decision usually makes itself. What follows is that split, honestly drawn, including the parts where an agency is genuinely the better answer.

What genuinely requires an outsider

Some work is hard to do in-house for structural reasons, not because you are not clever enough.

National digital PR. Pitching journalists at large publications is a craft with its own conventions, its own timing, and a contact network that takes years to build and decays if you stop maintaining it. A marketer doing this occasionally will not develop it. Agencies that do it well are doing it every day across many clients, which is what keeps the contacts warm. This is the clearest case for hiring, and it is also the most expensive thing to buy.

Sustained outreach volume. Cold outreach converts at rates that require large numbers of contacts to produce a modest number of links. Somebody has to send those emails, track them, follow up, and handle the replies, every day, for months. This is not intellectually difficult. It is difficult to sustain, and it is the first thing to be dropped in-house when something urgent happens — which is every week.

Prospecting infrastructure. Link indexes, crawlers, email finding and verification, and the accumulated knowledge of which sites in a sector are worth approaching. A team doing this continuously has better tooling and better instincts than a team doing it twice a year.

Objectivity about your own content. In-house teams consistently overestimate how interesting their material is. An outsider who tells you the study is not newsworthy before you pitch it has saved you a month.

Specialist production. If a campaign needs an interactive tool, a designed data piece, or original photography, buying that is normal and sensible regardless of who runs the outreach.

What does not require an outsider at all

This list is longer than most people expect, and it contains the highest-yield work in a typical program.

Link reclamation. This is the big one. On my own profile, 717 referring domains at Trust Flow 21 or above have stopped linking entirely, and 97.4% of all lost links were lost while the source page remained perfectly reachable — only four out of 645,202 were lost to a 404. That means the pages are alive, the editors are contactable, and the relationship already existed. Somebody at that site once chose to link to you. Asking why it went is a warm conversation, not a cold pitch, and the person best placed to have it is somebody who works at your company. Every agency I know of charges for this work, and almost none of them are better at it than an informed in-house person with a spreadsheet.

Unlinked mention conversion. Finding places where your brand, your product or your research is named without a link, and asking. Same logic: the relationship is established, the ask is small, and it needs no specialist tooling beyond a mention monitor.

Local and community links. Chambers of commerce, industry associations, suppliers and distributors, sponsorships, local press, the organizations your staff volunteer with. These depend entirely on relationships you already have and an outsider does not. Agencies do this work badly because they cannot pick up the phone as somebody who lives there.

Supplier, partner and customer links. Every company you buy from, sell to, integrate with or certify with is a potential link, and almost every one of them has a partner page, a case study program or a customer list. This is a business development conversation. It is not an SEO task, and outsourcing it makes it worse.

Speaking, podcasts and industry participation. The links are modest; the association and the audience are not. Nobody can do this on your behalf.

Fixing your own site. Internal linking, consolidating duplicate pages, redirecting old URLs that still have links pointing at them. This routinely delivers more than a quarter of outreach and costs nothing but attention.

The crossover point

There is a reasonably clear economic threshold, and it is easier to identify than most people assume.

Agency work is bought by the month at a rate that includes tooling, management, and the provider's margin. In-house work costs a salary plus tools, and the salary is fixed whether the person is busy or not. So the crossover is a utilization question: is there enough link building work at your company to fill a person's week, every week, for a year?

If the honest answer is no, in-house is more expensive than it looks, because you will pay a full salary for partial use and the person will be pulled onto other work — at which point the link building stops, and stopping is what kills programs.

If the answer is yes, in-house is usually cheaper within a year, and better in ways that compound. An internal person accumulates knowledge of your market that does not reset when a contract ends. They can talk to your engineers, your customers and your data. They are present when a story is happening rather than briefed about it a week later.

Two complications are worth naming. The first is the hiring risk: the pool of people who are genuinely good at outreach is small, and a bad hire costs more than a year of agency fees. The second is the single-point-of-failure problem: when your one link builder leaves, the relationships leave with them unless they were documented.

The middle path most functional companies land on is one internal person who owns relationships, reclamation, internal fixes and the editorial calendar, plus a specialist retained for the campaigns that require a media network. That split puts each type of work where it is done best, and it is cheaper than either extreme.

A decision framework

Run through these in order. The answers point at a structure rather than a budget.

That last row decides more programs than any of the others. Link building fails in-house far more often from interruption than from incompetence.

If you do it yourself, do these first

A practical order of operations for a team starting without help. Each step is cheap, and each one makes the next more productive.

1. Export your referring domains and find the ones that stopped linking. Sort by quality. Contact the strongest first, and ask politely what happened rather than demanding restoration.
2. Set up mention monitoring and work the backlog of existing unlinked mentions before worrying about new ones.
3. Fix the internal problems. Redirect old URLs that still receive links, consolidate pages competing with each other, and make sure the pages you want to promote are actually linked from your own site.
4. List every organization you already have a relationship with. Suppliers, partners, associations, local bodies, charities, former employers of your staff. Ask each one the specific question — a partner listing, a supplier directory entry, a case study.
5. Publish one thing worth citing. Data you already hold is usually the cheapest source. You do not need a survey if you have transaction records, support tickets or usage patterns that answer a question your industry argues about.
6. Only then, start cold outreach, with a small qualified list and a specific pitch, and measure the response rate honestly before scaling anything.

If you work through that list and reach the point where the constraint is genuinely capacity or media access rather than knowledge, that is the moment hiring makes sense — and you will be a far better client for having done the work yourself first. If you would rather have somebody else run it from the start, this kind of program is what my firm, Hartzer Consulting, does; the course you are reading is free either way, and the reclamation work above is worth doing before you talk to anybody.