The costs each model hides
In-house looks cheapest per hour and frequently is, once the person is productive and stays. What the salary line omits is the six to twelve weeks of recruitment, the two to four months of ramp-up at partial output, the tool stack that costs several hundred a month for one seat, and the fact that a single generalist cannot cover technical SEO, content and digital PR at senior level. Budget the gap, or accept a narrower programme.
Freelancers give you the best senior-thinking-per-euro in the market, and the thinnest safety net. The management overhead is systematically underestimated: briefing, reviewing, chasing and integrating one external person into your delivery chain routinely costs six to ten hours of internal time a month, which at a loaded internal rate is a meaningful fraction of the fee itself.
Agencies charge the most per delivered hour, and what the margin buys is worth naming: several specialists instead of one generalist, coverage during holidays and illness, tools already paid for, and a body of pattern recognition from other accounts. Whether that is worth the premium depends almost entirely on how much breadth your programme genuinely needs — which is exactly what our agency versus freelancer guide works through.
The hybrid that usually wins
The arrangement that outperforms all three pure models in mid-sized companies is one internal owner plus external specialists. The internal person holds context, priorities and access; the external side brings depth in the discipline that currently limits growth. It costs less than a full agency retainer and removes the freelancer's single-point-of-failure risk, because the knowledge lives inside the company.
If you go hybrid, be explicit about who owns what. The most common failure is an internal owner with no mandate: they can brief but not decide, so every technical fix waits three sprints and the external partner is blamed for a delay they cannot control. Write the decision rights into the engagement, alongside the reporting cadence.
Whichever model you pick, evaluate candidates on evidence rather than on format. Agencies and freelancers listed in this directory that connect their Search Console publish anonymised, verified performance data, which is a far better filter than team size — and if you need the pricing context first, the budget estimator sizes the workload before you talk to anyone.
- Load salaries with contributions, recruitment, equipment and tools
- Count 1,600 productive hours a year, minus the ramp
- Budget 6-10 internal hours a month to manage a freelancer
- Ask an agency how many hours the retainer buys, and at what seniority
- Prefer one internal owner plus specialists over any pure model above ~30 people
- Write decision rights and reporting cadence into the engagement