Should You Use Separate Agencies for SEO and Web Development?

Two specialist agencies can sound like the best of both worlds. Sometimes they are, but other times, you’re paying twice for what needs to be done once.

If your SEO agency is good and your web developers are good, why would it matter whether they work for the same company?

Plenty of businesses run successful websites with separate specialist agencies. If the relationship is established, responsibilities are clear and you have the internal resource to coordinate both sides, there may be no compelling reason to change it.

The problem starts when the gap between the agencies becomes your problem. SEO recommendations sit in development queues. Developers ask questions you have to relay to the SEO team and try to prioritise amongst your day-to-day (what are you paying experts for, then?!). A search algorithm change affects rankings and both agencies can explain why the issue sits outside their remit. Nobody is necessarily doing bad work but the operating model is simply creating work of its own.

It’s not just about cost – one agency means one strategy, one direction and one shared goal.

SEO and web development won’t cross paths at every stage, but when they do, having both under one roof makes life easier. There are fewer handovers, fewer crossed wires and one project management team keeping everything moving in the same direction.

Two agencies aren’t a problem by default, it’s what happens in between.

A typical technical recommendation can look remarkably simple in an SEO report and remarkably complicated once it has to move between two suppliers:

The SEO agency identifies an issue with a page template.
The SEO agency sends its recommendation to the client.
The client passes the recommendation to the web agency.
The developers review it and have questions about the requirement.
Those questions go back to the client.
The client sends them to the SEO agency.
The SEO agency clarifies what is needed.
The client passes that clarification back to the web agency.
The web agency scopes the work.
The change enters the development queue.
The developers implement it.
The SEO agency reviews the completed work.
Part of the requirement has been interpreted differently.
The process starts again.

Nothing in that chain is particularly dramatic and to be honest, that’s precisely the point. The cost of this sort of fragmentation is usually not one spectacular failure, but lots of small delays, repeated conversations and meetings and important details of context getting lost over the life of the website.

Very often, the marketing manager on the client side becomes the integration layer between two teams of specialists – surely an issue you’d prefer to avoid. If you have ever forwarded a technical SEO ticket to a developer, received three questions back and wondered which parts you are supposed to understand, you are doing work your agencies should be doing between themselves.

So, is one agency always better? Not exactly.

Consolidating suppliers for the sake of it is not a strategy. If you have an excellent SEO agency and an excellent development partner that already collaborate well, there is no urgent reason to replace either simply so that the logos on the invoices match.

A two-agency model can work particularly well when you have a capable internal digital team, clear ownership, agreed processes and enough development capacity to act on SEO recommendations quickly.

The question is whether the structure is helping or hindering the work. Bringing SEO and development together becomes more attractive when you recognise some of these symptoms:

SEO recommendations repeatedly wait weeks or months for development resource.
You spend time relaying questions between agencies or chairing calls simply to get them aligned.
The agencies give conflicting advice and you are expected to decide which specialist is right.
Both suppliers repeatedly need the same background, analytics, access or discovery information.
Nobody feels fully accountable when a website change damages organic performance.
You are approaching a redesign, rebuild or migration where SEO and development decisions will be tightly connected.
You have plenty of SEO insight but struggle to turn it into implemented improvements.

If none of those things are happening, the theoretical efficiency of one agency may not be worth disrupting relationships that already work.

‘But I want specialists, not a jack-of-all-trades agency.’

That is a sensible concern that we’ve had to explore a few times. A full-service agency is not automatically a finely tuned machine, and a long services menu is not evidence of multiplied expertise.

Some agencies technically offer SEO and development but operate them as separate departments with different processes, different priorities and an account manager carrying messages between them. That recreates much of the same problem under one logo.

Having SEO and development on the same website is not the same as having them work as one team.

What you are looking for is depth in both disciplines and evidence that the two actually influence each other’s work. Can the SEO team explain how search demand changed a site’s architecture? Can developers describe how they work through technical SEO requirements before a build reaches QA? Can the agency show a project where strategy, design, development and organic performance were treated as one job?

You still need specialists. The difference is that their expertise is connected, rather than working in isolation.

What should actually change when SEO and development sit together?

Simply put, the main benefit should be visible in how work gets communicated and then implemented.

The developer understands the ‘why’, not just the ticket.

In an integrated team, the SEO and developer can look at the problem together. Sometimes quite literally – our departments sit together on the same floor and work in person more often than they’re working from home. Developers may know a cleaner way to achieve the same outcome. The SEO may decide that a technically expensive recommendation is not worth the likely search gain. The solution gets better because both specialists are solving the problem rather than one implementing the other’s instructions.

Priorities can be decided against one commercial goal.

SEO teams can generate more recommendations than any sensible development roadmap should implement. The useful question is not ‘can we do this?’ but ‘is this the best use of development time?’, then being able to prioritise it sensibly for maximum effect.

When both capabilities share a planning process, search opportunity, implementation effort, UX impact and commercial value can be weighed together. That is more useful than an SEO agency marking a ticket ‘high priority’ while a separate development agency has ten other clients with their own high-priority work.

Accountability survives the handover.

Who owns the problem when rankings fall after a website release? In a split setup, the SEO agency may correctly identify the release as the cause while the developers correctly point out that they implemented the agreed specification. Both can be right, and the client can still be left with the problem.

With one integrated team, the distinction matters less. Whether the answer sits in the code, the SEO strategy or somewhere between the two, it remains the agency’s problem until it is understood and resolved.

Website builds and migrations are where fragmentation gets expensive.

A migration concentrates dozens of SEO and development dependencies into a short period: URL changes, redirect mapping, architecture, internal linking, canonicalisation, XML sitemaps, structured data, metadata, content, analytics, tracking and performance.

The SEO team knows what organic equity needs protecting. The developers control much of the implementation that protects it. With separate agencies, somebody has to make sure the requirement survives every handover. With an integrated team, migration planning can sit inside the build itself.

This does not make migrations risk-free. It does make it much harder for SEO to arrive at the end as a checklist of things the developers were never asked to account for.

Moving from two agencies into one – does everything have to move at once?

No. A sensible transition does not need to be a big-bang exercise, and changing agency should not automatically mean changing your CMS, hosting, website design and SEO strategy at the same time.

An integrated agency should first understand what is already working. That normally means auditing the current website and organic performance, establishing access, understanding the development setup and reviewing any outstanding recommendations or roadmap before deciding what genuinely needs to change.

Depending on contracts and responsibilities, SEO can move first while the existing developer remains in place, or development can be brought in gradually as new work arises. The important thing is to agree where responsibility sits during the handover so there is never a period where everybody assumes somebody else owns an issue.

What should you get from the outgoing agencies?

CMS, hosting, domain and deployment access, with ownership clearly documented.
Analytics, Search Console, tag management and any reporting platform access.
Repositories, technical documentation and details of third-party integrations where relevant.
Current SEO strategy, keyword research, redirect maps and outstanding technical recommendations.
A record of recent releases, known issues and planned development work.
Clarity on licences, plugins, subscriptions or services currently held in an agency account.

And one useful red flag: if an agency’s first answer to inheriting your setup is ‘we need to rebuild everything’, ask them to demonstrate why. Integration is not an excuse to replace perfectly good technology.

What if I really like one of my existing agencies?

Keep them. Seriously.

If you’ve got a developer who knows a complex platform inside out, or an SEO partner that has built years of valuable market knowledge, there’s no prize for replacing them just to get everything under one roof. You could end up creating more disruption than you solve.

Good agencies should be able to play nicely with others. We do it all the time. Sometimes that means working alongside an incumbent agency for a transition period; sometimes it means working together indefinitely. As long as responsibilities are clear, communication is good and everyone is pulling in the same direction, multiple agencies can work perfectly well.

Consolidation makes sense when it fixes a problem. Maybe implementation is painfully slow. Ownership is fuzzy. You’re managing the same conversation twice. Priorities keep clashing. Or you’ve got a big project coming up where SEO and development need to be in each other’s pockets.

If none of those things are happening, don’t manufacture a problem to solve.

One agency isn’t the goal. Better, easier, more effective delivery is.

And what about everything else around the website?

SEO and development are often the most obvious disciplines to bring together because they touch the same website so frequently. But once that relationship is working, there is a wider practical benefit: adding another service does not have to mean adding another agency, another briefing process and another set of people learning the business from scratch.

Hosting and maintenance are the clearest example. The team making technical SEO recommendations can understand the hosting environment, deployment process and maintenance constraints rather than treating them as somebody else’s infrastructure. If a performance issue, plugin update or platform change affects search visibility, there is no debate about which supplier needs to pick it up first.

The same applies to paid media. SEO data can reveal landing pages and search themes worth testing with paid search; PPC data can show which queries actually convert before you invest heavily in organic content. When the website team is part of that conversation too, a good idea can move from search data to landing-page change to campaign without three agencies coordinating calendars.

Social media can fit in for similar reasons. It should not simply mean reposting SEO content on LinkedIn. An integrated team can see which topics are earning organic demand, which campaigns are generating attention, what creative is resonating and where the website needs to support that interest. The channels still need their own specialists, but they can work from the same commercial context rather than separate briefs.

That does not mean every business should put every marketing service under one roof. The test is the same as it is for SEO and development: does bringing the work together remove friction and improve decision-making? If the answer is yes, expanding an existing integrated relationship can be much easier than introducing another standalone supplier.

How do I find the right integrated SEO and web development agency?

Do not just ask whether an agency offers both services. Ask how the relationship works when the two services collide. These questions are some we ask ourselves, and tend to provide a lot more insight than a highly polished set of slides:

Can I speak to the SEO specialists and developers who will actually work on my account?
Show me a project where your SEO team changed how a website was designed or developed.
If your SEO team identifies a development requirement, what happens next?
Is development included within the SEO relationship, drawn from a separate budget or scoped case by case?
Who decides whether an SEO recommendation is worth the development time?
Who is accountable if a website release negatively affects organic performance?
How do SEO and development work together during QA and launch?
Can you take over our existing website, or is your model dependent on rebuilding it?
How would you manage a handover from our current SEO and development agencies?

Listen for practical answers. ‘Our teams collaborate closely’ is easy to say. A strong agency should be able to explain the workflow, who makes decisions, how work is prioritised and what happens when specialists disagree.

What does this look like in practice?

Bailey Walsh

Bailey Walsh is useful here because the website and organic strategy were not treated as two sequential projects. Web design and development, SEO, analytics and conversion tracking were connected from the start, allowing the site itself to support the search strategy rather than leaving SEO to work around decisions made elsewhere.

The campaign went on to reach 700+ average monthly organic visits, 51 page-one rankings and more than 10 leads per month. The point is not that one case study proves an integrated agency will always beat two specialists. It shows what the operating model makes possible when the same team can shape the site, implement the work and learn from the results.

We had to solve the same problem ourselves.

First Internet’s own rebrand involved brand, content, UX, architecture, development, SEO, migration and performance at the same time. Search intent could influence the structure while the site was still being planned; migration requirements could sit inside the development roadmap rather than arriving as an external checklist before launch.

That experience reinforced something we see in client work: the closer a website gets to a major change, the less useful it is to think of SEO as a separate work stream that can simply be bolted on afterwards.

One agency isn’t a perfect solution, but better outcomes are.

The case for bringing SEO and development together is not that two agencies cannot collaborate. Of course they can.

It is that when two disciplines affect each other’s work every week, separating them creates a relationship that somebody has to manage. If you have the internal resource and the right partners, that may be perfectly manageable. If you are routinely forwarding tickets, resolving conflicting advice, chasing implementation or trying to work out who owns a problem, there is probably a better way to structure it.

If you are routinely acting as the project manager between your SEO agency and your developers, integration is already a job. The only question is who should be doing it.

For businesses where organic search is central to website performance, putting SEO and development inside one genuinely integrated team can remove that layer of friction and leave the client focused on the decisions that actually need their input: priorities, commercial goals and results.