Hybrid writer+agency finally unlocked our content

weekendhustle

Posting this in case anyone's at the same fork we were last year, trying to figure out the next move.

We're a 25-person B2B SaaS and I run marketing. Hired our first content writer right when we started taking inbound seriously. By month 12 we'd clearly plateaued, even though she was solid.

She was shipping 4 articles a month, could interview product, nail our voice - all of that. But what we couldn't get from her alone was the SEO side. The BOFU keyword picking, figuring out what people are actually searching for. She's a writer, not an SEO strategist, and expecting her to be both was honestly our mistake from the jump.

So in month 13 we brought in an agency to handle just the strategy layer. They pick the keywords and put together the briefs, and she writes against what they hand over.

Our output didn't even change - still 4 articles a month - but the keyword quality and search intent went way up because we finally had someone actually thinking about it.

By month 18 we hit our first 3 demos a month from organic, and I'm pretty sure we couldn't have got there with just the writer or just the agency alone. We'd be paying agency writer rates if we went full agency, and we'd still be plateaued if we kept her solo, so the hybrid is what actually made the maths work for us.

Anyone else running this kind of split setup? I'd love to know how you're dividing the work between your in-house person and whoever's doing the strategy side 🙂

chatbox

We hit the same plateau around month 14, but took a different route. Instead of bringing in an agency for strategy, I hired a second writer who came from an SEO background - the kind of person who lives in Ahrefs and GSC rather than just worrying about word count.

Here's how we restructured:

Writer A does interviews and drafting. Full stop. No keyword research, no optimisation worries, just getting the raw content down.
Writer B handles keyword strategy and editing. They pull search intent data from Ahrefs, cross-reference with what's actually ranking in GSC, then edit for structure and on-page signals.

The pairing took about two months to make the workflow stick - lots of back-and-forth on handoff templates and editorial briefs. But by month 18, we'd doubled our publishing cadence without any drop in quality. Screaming Frog crawls still look clean, and organic traffic on those newer posts is already outperforming the earlier stuff.

Cost-wise it's probably similar to "writer plus agency" - just the overhead is internal headcount rather than external coordination. Less friction on amendments, more control over the data layer in GTM when we track content performance.

copycat

It really comes down to who you bring in first. I've seen teams try to do it with a single generalist writer and no agency - and it usually doesn't last unless that person already thinks like a strategist. If your first content hire is somebody who's done in-house SEO before and can write, you can skip the agency layer entirely. But if you're hiring a pure writer who needs strategy fed to them, then yes - layering in an agency makes a lot more sense. The size of the team matters too; at 12 people you've got more room to hand-hold, but at 25 you're probably spread thin enough that a hybrid model buys you sanity.

weekendhustle

Interesting you took the second-writer path - we hit the exact same fork in the road. How did you frame that role in the end? When we tried, we couldn't get the budget signed off for a senior-strategist title as hire number two, so agency it was. Would love to know if you called it a content strategist or just a writer with strategy instincts - that distinction seems to make all the difference when you're explaining the role to stakeholders 🤔