Build vs Buy: The Hidden Economics of SEO Tools
SEOs love tools. Perhaps to a fault.
Most of us have spent years collecting subscriptions, trialling platforms and convincing ourselves that the next dashboard will finally answer all our questions. At the same time, budgets aren’t infinite, procurement can be slow, and building software has never been more accessible than it is today.
Put those together and there is a reasonable chance you’ve found yourself facing a “build vs buy” decision.
The discussion often starts with features and cost, but I think that’s the wrong place to begin. The better question is whether building something yourself creates more value than buying something that already exists.
That value usually comes down to three things: cost, differentiation and sustainability.
Cost - “We can do it cheaper”
This is normally where we most often try to justify this one.
A tool has a visible monthly cost attached to it. Building something internally often feels cheaper and we have to work less hard to account for the benefits it provides.
The problem is that our time isn’t free. If you’re spending days or weeks building a solution, maintaining it, fixing bugs, explaining it to colleagues and adding features, there is a cost attached to that. It’s just harder to see.
SEOs aren’t usually engineers - we can be technical and know enough to do the job, but it isn’t often our job.
If we’re building a tool we aren’t replacing engineering time, it’s replacing SEO time. Time that could have been spent elsewhere.
That’s not necessarily a reason not to build. It is just worth being honest about the trade-off.
Differentiation - “No tool can do this”
This is where building starts to become more compelling.
If five vendors already solve a problem well, building a sixth version yourself is self indulgent. You might end up with something tailored a little more to your needs, but you are also taking ownership of everything that comes with it.
The equation changes when no existing tool does what you need.
Maybe you need to combine datasets in a unique way. Maybe you have a methodology that no platform supports. Maybe you need a level of flexibility or rigour that commercial tools simply don’t provide.
In those situations, building can become a genuine source of competitive advantage rather than a cost-saving exercise.
The key question is whether the value created is meaningful enough to justify the investment required to get there.
Sustainability - “We build it once and it’s done”
This is the part that gets forgotten most often - getting something working is usually the easy bit. Tech demo’s, PoCs, and answering individual questions are easy to achieve. The harder questions come afterwards.
Who maintains it? Who trains people to use it? Who fixes it when an API changes? Who manages access controls? Who adds new features when stakeholders inevitably ask for them?
A surprising number of internal tools work brilliantly right up until the person who built them goes on holiday.
Likewise, plenty of expensive software platforms deliver very little value because nobody ever properly adopts them.
The tool itself is rarely the entire answer. The operating model around the tool matters just as much.
Why We Build Things
In my experience, most internally-built SEO tools originate from one of four motivations.
It saves budget
Probably the most common reason and, ironically, often the least convincing.
Subscription costs are easy to measure. Internal effort is not.
Can you genuinely prove that building and maintaining the solution is cheaper than buying it? Sometimes the answer is yes. Quite often it isn’t.
No tool does what we need
This is usually the strongest argument.
If the market doesn’t solve your problem, then building may be the right answer. Many of the most useful internal SEO tools exist because somebody needed something that simply wasn’t available elsewhere.
The important thing is to understand whether the gap is significant enough to warrant the investment.
I wanted to see if I could
If this is your reason, you’re in good company.
A huge amount of innovation comes from curiosity rather than business cases. Building things is a great way to learn, experiment and understand what’s possible.
The risk is when an R&D project quietly becomes mission-critical tools.
There’s nothing wrong with building because you’re curious. Just be honest about whether you’re optimising for learning or business impact, because they’re not always the same thing.
It was quicker
Sometimes this is completely true.
A Streamlit app, a Colab notebook or a small script can often be built faster than getting approval for a new software subscription.
For one-off tasks or quick proofs of concept, this can be entirely rational.
The question is whether the solution remains a proof of concept or whether it becomes something the organisation starts to depend on. Those are very different levels of commitment.
Build, Buy or… Blend?
The more I see these decisions play out, the less I think they’re actually build-versus-buy decisions as most mature teams end up doing both.
They buy solutions for commodity problems where the market already has strong products. Rank tracking, crawling, reporting and analytics all fall into this category for many organisations.
They build where they have unique requirements, proprietary data or methodologies that create genuine value. Increasingly, I think that’s where the line sits for SEO teams.
Commodity tooling is becoming harder to justify building yourself. Custom workflows, internal datasets and AI-assisted processes are becoming easier than ever to create.
Neither route is inherently right or wrong.
A vibe-coded app built in an afternoon isn’t automatically a great investment. Equally, a six-figure software contract isn’t automatically a bad one.
The goal isn’t to minimise software spend or maximise internal development. It’s to create the most value with the resources available.
Sometimes that means buying, sometimes that means building. Most of the time, it means being honest about why you’re doing either in the first place.