Offshore SEO services that run on a written spec.

An offshore SEO team works from a country many hours away, inside your tools, on a process you’ve written down. Each of the three common locations brings something different.

The Philippines is on UTC+8 with no daylight saving, 12 or 13 hours ahead of US Eastern, and has a large English-speaking back-office workforce. India is on UTC+5:30 and also has a large English-speaking workforce. Egypt is on UTC+2, or UTC+3 in summer, and adds Arabic alongside English.

The team either works its own daytime, which is your night, or a shift that overlaps part of your day. Either way, far fewer hours overlap with your marketing team than with a nearshore team.

Source: IANA Time Zone Database

The first benefit is cost. Offshore is the lowest-cost of the three models, which matters on SEO backlogs with clear rules and lots of pages.

The second is time. A team in Manila or Bangalore works while you sleep, so yesterday’s crawl issues are fixed in staging and the weekly report is waiting when your day starts.

The third is scale. It’s practical to add people for a one-off job, such as tagging a large catalog or cleaning up after a migration, then step back down.

Offshore works best where the answer is already written down. The clearer the spec, the better the fit.

Offshore SEO runs on handoffs, not meetings. Here’s a typical cycle for a US company with a team in the Philippines.

Most offshore SEO problems trace back to a spec that left room to guess. Before handing work over, write down:

Cheap volume is where offshore SEO goes wrong. Google’s spam policies name scaled content abuse, publishing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, however they’re produced. They also name link spam, which includes buying or selling links to pass ranking credit.

Keep offshore teams away from mass page production and paid link building, and write that into the contract. Its guidance on helpful content asks whether a page was made for people first, which is a question for your experts, not a spec.

Schema is a good offshore task with one condition. Google’s structured data guidelines say markup has to describe content that’s actually on the page, so test every template before release.

Sources: Google Search Central, spam policies for Google web search · Google Search Central, creating helpful, people-first content · Google Search Central, introduction to structured data

With fewer shared hours, access rules do more of the work. Put these in writing before launch:

Source: Search Console Help, manage owners, users and permissions

Fewer shared hours mean slower answers to new questions. Keep these closer to home:

Cost falls as distance grows, and so do shared hours. Here’s how the models compare for SEO work.

Start with the spec, not the country. Pilot one task, such as on-page fixes for one template, for a month. Check the work against Search Console and a sample you review yourself, then add tasks.

Many teams run better blended: offshore for the technical backlog, nearshore for strategy and content. OTRO’s SEO and content team works from Mexico, and when part of your backlog suits offshore, we’ll say so in the delivery plan and help write the spec. See the SEO and content outsourcing page, or our guide to what SEO is if you’re starting out.