Author: Ryan Walsh

Date: 03/07/2026

About the Author:

Ryan Walsh is an SEO expert with 14 years’ experience. Our work has been cited on leading SEO websites. We have some of the best SEO knowledge in our area.

 

Introduction

It’s a question many businesses ask: should we hire a freelancer or an agency? The truth is that both can greatly enhance visibility, drive more organic traffic, and increase revenue.

However, which one is right for your business?

As always, Walsh & Partners are here to help. We have written this article to help you weigh up the pros and cons of choosing between the two options.

 

E-commerce

In this guide, we will explain the limitations of choosing a freelancer. This is especially apparent when it comes to launching an e-commerce business and brand.

For example, when choosing a freelancer over an agency, you have to appreciate that there are only so many hours in the day. If a freelancer is working for several clients, they often do not have the capabilities that an agency offers for delivering and working on time-consuming work.

Time consuming work when it comes to SEO can be for example fixing technical SEO glitches that often occur on large e-commerce websites.

 

The type of SEO support that your business chooses will influence:

• How fast you will see results and an uplift in sales
• The quality of the work that’s implemented
• How well the website responds to Google algorithm updates
• How well-written and researched the content marketing is
• How effective is the business at building high-powered backlinks?

 

Tell me what exactly is an SEO freelancer?

An SEO freelancer is often an independent specialist who works for themselves. Quite often, the rates they charge will be lower than those of an agency. However, no two freelancers or agencies are quite the same. Therefore, a freelancer can be better and outperform some agencies.

It all boils down to individual execution of the work.

Sometimes, some freelancers have so much experience that they can run rings around some agencies.

However, an agency can also have serious clout. Some agencies employ inexperienced staff to make the agency look large. However, some other marketing agencies employ seriously talented staff who know everything there is to know about search engine optimisation.

Therefore, we must reiterate that no two agencies or freelancers are the same therefore the output and results can often vary massively.

Therefore, comparing the two is sometimes like comparing apples with pears. However, some clear contrasts remain between the two.

What exactly is an SEO agency?

An SEO agency can vary in size; for example, it could have 10 to well over 100 staff members.

The level of experience does vary massively from agency to agency. Some agencies want to increase headcount and offer “on-the-job training”.

However, some agencies employ staff with decades of experience. An agency often has greater capabilities, such as dedicated link builders and technical SEO specialists on hand to help resolve SEO glitches.

An agency, because of its increased head count, can work on more time-intensive projects and sometimes deliver results faster because of this capability.

For example, some agencies work on large e-commerce websites. Large UK e-commerce retailers need to often spend considerable time building links. For example, what often holds one e-commerce retailer in first position is owning an incredibly strong backlink profile with a high domain authority score.

To achieve that high DA score, often a link builder or team of PR link builders may have spent thousands of hours building that backlink profile, for example.

 

Therefore, within an agency, there are often separate roles for:

• Technical SEO experts
• Content teams
• Digital PR and link-building teams
• Data analysis, managers and point of contact

 

Why do freelancer’s vs SEO agencies vary so much in terms of cost per month?

To employ some of the best of the best, in terms of SEO staff, you easily have to pay in excess of 50k a year to the experienced talent that you employ. Therefore, the larger agencies often have highly capable and experienced staff; the overheads are therefore higher.

You will also have agencies that employ inexperienced staff; however, in the long term, the results they produce are often weaker.

Expertise

Both freelancers and agencies can have considerable expertise in there field. In a world where Google is rolling out algorithm updates much more frequently, that level of expertise is tested often on a monthly basis.

The consultant or the agency therefore needs a solid grasp of how Google’s algorithm has evolved over the years. From the Hummingbird updates through to the complex BERT update, to understand how to optimise, you need to understand how Google’s algorithm works, how it’s evolved, and make predictions on where it’s heading in the future.

Often, this only comes through trial and error, which, in turn, often comes only from experience.

Therefore, whether you’re choosing an agency or a freelancer, choose a business with experience. We would say to be really good, to cut the mustard so to speak, often you need 10 years+ experience in this profession to generate the right results.

Communication and project management

A freelancer has to wear many hats, for example, a typical day can include backlink builder, copywriting, sorting out technical SEO issues.

However on top of that there’s client management as well. For example, numerous emails, meeting and phone calls.

This is why its quite easy for a good freelancer to quickly become fully booked. However, with an agency, if the agency has been structured correctly, then there should be dedicated staff which are there just to manage the client and often manage as well client expectations.

Are there cost differences?

There are often considerable cost differences between choosing an agency and a freelancer.

Now the reason for this is overheads. However, in United Kingdom there are freelancers which have such a strong reputation for delivering, that their rates can sometimes be higher than some agencies.

It does all boil down to the level of experience.

However, we would say a general rule, that generally agencies can be 3x more expensive, purely down to the staffing costs that are needed to work for say large e-commerce brands.

Your large e-commerce brands for example, are often going to want to build several high DA that’s domain authority links per month. For this alone, you often need a copy writer, a PR specialist and a link builder to find the correct opportunity of where to build that link that’s going to generate higher organic rankings.

Typically, therefore agencies are more expensive.

 

What are the main pros and cons of hiring a freelancer?

The pros:

Often more affordable

You are often dealing with just one person rather than having to relay messages

Sometimes has expert knowledge in a niche, such as working for example solicitors

 

The cons

Can quickly become fully booked as they grow a reputation for being good at what they do

Sometimes cannot work on large e-commerce projects

As we mentioned right at the top of the article, no two freelancers are ever the same. For example, one might be one of the best in the country, while another might be using outdated tactics.

What are the pros and cons of choosing an agency?

The pros are:

You can hire a highly experienced team, that are excellent in implementing a wide range of SEO tasks

The agency might have experience of working on large e-commerce projects

The agency might have dedicated account managers who can spend the time needed to answer any questions

The cons of choosing an agency

The cons are that often agencies charge higher rates

No guarantee when paying rates to an agency that they will generate better results that a freelancer

An agency might employ inexperienced staff, yet still charge agency rates

 

Which option is better for an e-commerce business?

What you have to consider is, how saturated is your business sector.

If it’s a highly competitive business sector, when it comes to e-commerce retailing, well often its fiercely competitive.

Therefore, it comes down to this, how strong are your direct rivals?

If say they are employing the services of perhaps one of the best agencies in the land, they will have considerable clout, in terms of the staff working for them.

If therefore you employ a freelancer, to compete with a large marketing team at an agency, well sometimes there is simply just no contest.

The reason for that is, simply because of time.

A freelancer can be one of the best in the country, however, they are constrained by time. They cant therefore be building links, writing content marketing and fixing technical SEO glitches at the same rate that an agency with say 10+ staff can.

 

Which option is better for a local business with say a brochure website?

In regards to a local business, you can often choose between a freelancer and an agency.

The reason being when it comes to local businesses there is often a smaller amount of competition.

However, when you consider national or international search engine optimisation, then the level of competition becomes much more vast.

For example, an e-commerce retailer often competes nationally or internationally. Therefore often there’s a huge volume of competitors.

However, when you consider local search engine optimisation, well, sometimes, you only have say 10 major competitors.

Therefore, what you will often find is that some businesses hire agencies, some hire freelancers when comes to local SEO.

 

 

How do you make the right choice for your business?

Our top recommendation for choosing an agency or freelancer comes to there level of experience and if they can demonstrate winning results. For those that are in the know, they will appreciate that when it comes to search engine optimisation, there’s no short-cuts.

Short-cuts, such as using AI to write some or all of the text, or let’s say building a super spammy backlink profile just brings long term complication. For example, lower organic rankings or complete removal from Google’s index.
So, therefore, when choosing an agency or a freelancer, make sure that the work is top quality.

 

Frequently asked questions:

Do agencies deliver better results than freelancers?

The answer to that is outright no.

Some agencies can still make a complete mess of it. Some can even bring about an algorithmic penalty resulting in say the e-commerce business having to shut up shop!

How does occur?

Well, simply lack of experience, following incorrect methods that may work for a short period of time. However, after a Google Core Update often these methods result sometimes in de-indexation or complete removal from Google’s SERPs.

This can still occur when employing a freelancer as well.

Therefore, the results, in terms of whether they generate the sales that are needed, does boil down to how good the agency or freelancer is.

 

Can a freelancer handle the amount of work that an agency can handle?

The answer to this would be often no.

Theres only so many hours in the day, therefore the problem that a lot of good freelancers often encounter is that they quickly become fully booked.

Also, they can become over stretched as well.

Quite simply put when an agency has 10+ staff they simply have more capability.

Can agencies complete work faster than freelancers and generate better results?

The simple answer to that question is yes.

When you hire an agency, if the staff within the agency are high talented then you simply have more experienced staff working on the project.

The freelancer could be the best in the world, however, working across many projects there will only be so much time that they can dedicate to working for your business.

 

Can I start with a freelancer then switch to an agency later on or will this cause issues?

Quite often, a business will start with a freelancer, but as the business grows this may change.

For example, let’s say the e-commerce shop starts by selling just one product.

Well, this is much simpler to optimise the website for. Lets say the business sells gym nutrition supplements.

However, as the product range expands, this is where the e-commerce website will need to be optimised for more keywords. This involves more work, and therefore, this could mean that the company needs to switch from using a freelancer to an agency.

However, the reason why for example, many e-commerce businesses don’t start with an agency is purely down to costs. A winning agency, with a lot of talented staff will be very expensive, and many start-ups’ cant afford this. So when the product range is more limited, you might want to hire a freelancer.

Yet, as the product range expands, for example, most e-commerce websites have over 100 different product lines, then often you will need the help of an agency. The amount of keywords, that the website needs to be optimised for, would mean that you often need a marketing agency instead.

 

Why should we choose Walsh & Partners?

We are a fast-growing agency. We work with many businesses from across the United Kingdom.

What separates us from many other agencies is our level of experience.

For example, our agency owner Ryan Walsh has over 14 years’ experience, which far more than many SEO experts in this area.

We work with well-known e-commerce companies and also many businesses that require local SEO help.

The business is run by Ryan Walsh which is known as one of the best SEO experts in the U.K.