The Insider’s Guide to Successful SEO Outsourcing

By now, you have probably heard many people complain about outsourcing to India, yet there are
also even more conflicting success stories of companies that have expanded their businesses into
multimillion dollar industries simply through outsourcing overseas. Outsourcing is something that
large companies have been using to increase their revenue for some time, so what truly makes the
outsourcing experience successful?

To begin, here are a few insider tips to have the best SEO outsourcing experience based on
my work as a provider:

1. Identify what skills you are looking for. Before begin working with an outsourcing
or virtual assistant company, you must identify the skill sets you are looking for in your
provider or outsourcing team from the get-go. If not, you are absolutely setting yourself
up for failure by having unclear or unrealistic expectations. As an example, let us say you
need someone who can do some networking with other webmasters, for this you will need
someone who has persuasive writing skills as well as relationship building skills. So before
you make any hiring, analyze your requirements and identify the skills you are going to need.

With any new project or task you need completed, start out by defining the required skills
in detail, the steps and milestones of the project, and what type of provider you will need
to complete the task. This will ensure that you do not pile an unreasonable workload on an
outsourced employee that is not right for the job, and you will be able to work with the right
provider to get the job done correctly the first time.

If you are wondering how to identify a provider’s skill level, you can start out with small
manageable jobs as a test. As an example, you can ask your virtual assistant to prepare a list
of your competitors and their back link profiles, and then ask them to identify your top three
competitors based on Google SERPs. After that, ask them to find your top three competitors’
back links, and finally, ask them to provide a report on these competitors. Be entirely clear
about what you do and don’t expect within this research, such as if you would like your
assistant to omit multiple incoming links from the same directory. These small instructions
must be specified in detail beforehand because your outsourced employees are not mind
readers. When you make any and every expectation clear, you can then judge the capability of
a provider as they complete a task.

Once you have your task clearly detailed, it is imperative to break it up into manageable
chunks to eliminate a learning curve and boost confidence in your staff. If you are working
with a dedicated outsourced assistant, they will be able to meet your needs for the next task
to make your life even easier because of your clear communication.

2. Identify the tasks you want to outsource. To ask your offshore virtual assistant to write a
persuasive e-mail intended for webmasters might be a disaster, instead, you can ask them to
research webmasters that meet your criteria to create an e-mail list. The idea is to break your
projects into tasks and decide what can be outsourced and to whom. As an example, I always
use native English writers for writing tasks while I use my own team for later tasks like finding
webmasters and potential link partners.

Begin the preparation of your project by identifying the criteria you would like your outsourced
assistant to stick to. As an example, you may want your target blogs to have an Alexa ranking
of less than 200,000 and must be in the technology niche. Whatever your specifications
may be, they must be prepared in a document to instruct your outsourced assistant on
the research that you are asking for. If you do not want to take the time to create this
documentation, be prepared that your provider will find their own way to complete the project

and make potential unexpected mistakes because of a lack of direction. In such situation you
must take ready, fire, aim strategy by telling them their mistakes and correcting them.

3. Understand that your outsourced provider is not an entrepreneur. As a business
owner, you may take many things for granted – one of which being decision-making. As an
example, you may have developed the ability to identify paid links by just looking at the
website, however your outsourcing provider will not be able to take those decisions for you.
You will have to provide them with a clear set of instructions on how to classify a link as paid
link. It is pretty much like training your in-house staff members. Also, you need to understand
and live with the fact that if their decision making skills matched yours then probably they
will be running a business themselves. When starting with outsourcing, try to take away the
decision making part, instead break every decision into a smaller Yes/No type of question set.

Furthermore, shy away from using broad catchphrases or industry terms to describe what you
are looking for. If you would like your provider to find blogs to comment on to get a Do Follow
link back to your website, you must explain the bigger picture to your provider and define
what blog commenting means for your project specifically.

Although these tips are highly detailed, they are truly the just the beginning in creating a positive
outsourcing experience to ensure that you will swim and not sink as you create your outsourced team
to build your company!

This article was contributed by Nitin Aggarwal from Offshore Ally – a virtual assistant and outsourcing
company. Nitin is a full time blogger and SEO enthusiast. His team of virtual assistants is trained on
basic link building jobs and has the internet marketing mindset.