Working with an agency
DIY, freelancer or agency: who should run your search marketing?
Do it yourself when your time is cheaper than money and you will genuinely stay consistent. Hire a freelancer when you know exactly which skill you are missing. Use an agency when the spend, the complexity or the stakes justify a team's attention every week. Each is right for someone, and the expensive mistake is not the option you pick but picking it for a stage you are not at.
the honest case for DIY
Nobody knows your customers better, the tools are learnable, and this blog plus a few honest sources covers most of the craft. DIY suits the early stage, tight budgets, and founders who like the work. Its failure mode is not incompetence but abandonment: the account set up in a motivated weekend and untouched for six months. If you cannot promise the weekly hour, you are choosing one of the other options with extra steps.
the honest case for a freelancer
A good freelancer is precision: one skill, applied directly, without agency overhead. Perfect for a defined gap, a Google Ads rebuild, a technical SEO pass, a batch of answer-first pages. The risks are bus-factor and breadth: one person cannot be senior at everything, and when they are ill or leave, the machine stops. Freelancers shine on projects; steady multi-channel systems strain them.
the honest case for an agency
What you are buying is not secrets but institutionalised attention: several specialists, tests always running, patterns recognised from many accounts, and continuity that survives any one person's holiday. The maths works when improvements on your spend outgrow the fee, which is why honest agencies talk about your customer value in the first call. The failure mode is paying for reporting instead of work, which references and plain-English reviews expose quickly.
the honest catch
We are an agency, so this page argues against our interest twice: some readers should DIY, and some should hire a freelancer, and we would rather say so here than discover it together on an invoice. The tell that you are ready for an agency is specific: real spend at stake, a working offer, and more opportunity visible than hands available. Before that point, buy the thirty-minute conversation, not the retainer.
Common questions
Can we mix the options?
- The best setups usually do: an agency or freelancer to build and stabilise, an internal person trained to run the day-to-day, outside review quarterly. Skills in, dependency out.
What does a freelancer versus an agency cost?
- Freelancers price a person's time; agencies price a system's attention. Compare them on the same line: total cost per customer acquired, including your own hours.
What is the minimum for DIY to work?
- A written weekly hour, a monthly look at the numbers, and one page improved or added each week. Small, but only if it actually happens.
Tom Claydon
Co-founder of Nudge
Ask Tom anything about search, he answers on WhatsApp.