SEO Services

The SEO Services market is raging hot and has been for several years. But being an industry without standards we have done a fairly poor job of defining what constitutes SEO services. If you were to ask a dozen industry people today, “What kind of SEO services are available?”, how much agreement do you feel you hear among them?

I would classify SEO services in this way: Business-to-Business SEO Services, Business-to-Consumer SEO Services, Do-it-yourself SEO Services, and SEO-to-SEO SEO Services. Here’s how the breakdown works.

Business-to-Business SEO Services

This is the traditional “I’m an SEO service provider and you are my business customer” SEO service. The B2B SEO service provider handles organic and/or PPC search engine optimization services for a business client. These types of relationships fall into two sub-categories: direct SEO services and sub-contracted SEO services.

“Direct SEO services” is self-explanatory. You’re the SEO and the client comes to you with either a Web site or a Web site idea and you do the keyword research, optimize or advise on how to optimize the pages, build links or advise on how to build links, and do some search results monitoring with occasionall follow ups and consulting.

“Sub-contracted SEO services” traditionally occur in one of two ways: a Web designer brings his client to you or another SEO firm passes on a client. However, as online reputation management becomes more popular the Publicity and Public Relations industry has begun reaching out to SEO firms and engaging them in sub-contractor positions. Working with a PR agency may mean you never have contact with the client but you do review the client’s site and possibly pursue links for the client. Your work as a sub-contractor may be only part of a lot of work being done for a client.

Business-to-Consumer SEO Services

Believe it or not, there are private individuals who pay for SEO services. Now, some people may disagree with me on my interpretation of “private individuals” because I am thinking of small, independent business operators like photographers, realtors, craftsmen, specialized consultants, etc. These people operate very small businesses — often out of their homes — and they don’t have formal business procedures. They come to the SEO looking for SEO services help with limited budgets, minimal understanding of what is involved, and a huge sense of frustration.

This market is, in my opinion, the most challenging unless you’re just helping friends (in which case it may be even more challenging). If you’re building an SEO services business you probably cannot afford to take on these types of clients because they require the most hand-holding and don’t have the resources to pay you what you’re really worth. Someone who wants to learn how to do professional search engine optimization on the side would benefit from working with these type of small budget clients. Their verticals can be very competitive and you may find that other SEOs are already involved in the small business SERPs.

You might occasionally — very rarely — run into someone with a cause, perhaps a person who has lost a family member or close friend to tragedy, war, or illness. This person may have created a memorial or activist Web site that is getting no traffic. It would be a good idea to engage in some pro bono work for such a person. If you write up a formal pro bono agreement outlining what you intend to do, providing such guarantees as are reasonable (not the kind that get SEO firms sued for fraud), and set good expectations, you can use pro bono work in your portfolio.

When interviewing SEO job applicants, I ask about pro bono work — I want to know what you’ve done as an SEO and I don’t care if you were paid for it. Show me the SERPs. That’s what matters. Pro bono SEO can pay for itself in other ways.

Do-it-Yourself SEO Services

These providers are a dime a dozen and, frankly, I wouldn’t care if most of them stopped offering their services today. These are the “SEO toolbar” writers, the “free Web site analysis” providers, the “quick SEO tutorial” makers. Do-it-Yourself SEO services don’t have to comply with any minimum standards and they tend to be very quickly thrown together. I’ve talked to several people in the industry who wanted to do it right — who wanted to give quality tools to people for very low fees. But no one has yet really brought it together.

The near-total reliance upon the Google Toolbar PageRank makes all these tools worthless. Worse yet, they hold back the DIY SEOs who are struggling to compete with professional firms that have huge networks to leverage. A decent DIY SEO service should at the very least provide … the kind of stuff my contract won’t allow me to write about. Let’s just say that if all you can come up with is a cheesy toolbar that scrapes Yahoo! link data and Google PR, you’re wasting your time and everyone else’s.

A great SEO toolbar would exclude the Yahoo! links and Google PR. But that’s all I can say on that subject.

SEO-to-SEO SEO Services

What is the difference between sub-contracting SEO services and doing SEO for an SEO?

The SEOs’ SEO is the guy who brings in the links.

The SEOs’ SEO is the guy who figures out why a network suddenly stops working.

The SEOs’ SEO is the guy who trains the other SEOs to do the basic stuff.

The SEOs’ SEO is the guy who sells picks and shovels to the miners in the gold rush. He writes the tools that really serve some useful purpose (and he charges for them). He tests other tools, evaluates them, recommends them, and teaches SEOs how to use the tools more effectively.

The SEOs’ SEO is the guy who provides stealth SEO services to SEOs whose clients want the hard work done without knowing what they just asked for.

The SEOs’ SEO is the guy you never see at the conferences (he may be there on the speakers platform but you have no idea of what he’s really doing for the SEO community). The SEOs’ SEO gets his business through referrals. He doesn’t advertise, or maybe he does just because that is what he always did. He certainly doesn’t NEED to advertise.

SEOs providing SEO services to other SEO services have to be very good at what they do. It’s one thing to run around to forums, scarf up advice, repackage it and sell it to the unsuspecting masses. It’s quite another to have to deliver an intelligent, informed plan to someone who has learned how to sift between the crap and the cool stuff.

There are some things these guys cannot or will not do. They tend (in my limited experience) to become specialists. In fact, it’s their specialization that usually makes them so valuable to the SEO community. Anyone can go out and put links on a Web site. Anyone can set up a blog. When you’ve done everything that the advice gurus can tell you to do and you’re still stuck, that’s when you turn to the big guns who only ask you one question: “Do you understand that we take no responsibility for what may happen once the service begins?”

Those words may seem ominous but it’s not like you’re dealing with gangsters. They just tend to come down very hard on the search engines and sometimes it may prove to be a little too hard. They have their good days and bad days like everyone else.

If you’re asking for training, they’ll teach you some tricks but they will warn you that tricks don’t always work.

If you’re asking for links, they’ll give you links.

If you’re asking for research, they’ll give you research.

Just be sure you ask these guys to do something you cannot do yourself. Don’t waste your money on services that you should be able to turn out yourself, or turn over to sub-contractors.

There are even SEO copy specialists who bring years of experience to landing page and PPC ad development to help you with those highly competitive campaigns where you need the absolute best ROI.

In conclusion

We do actually have a fairly robust industry. SEO services can be categorized in more ways than people usually discuss, but so can SEO specialties. We continue to find new needs each year, so the process of creating new specialties is ongoing. That’s a good thing because we’re still in the ground-floor stage of building this industry. We have not yet reached our fullest potential for differentiation and specialization.

The online reputation management movement is just getting started, for example, and most people don’t yet have a clue what is involved in servicing the higher end clients (social media profiles don’t even enter into the equation). There are other new areas opening up as well (that I’m not at liberty to dicuss). Search engine optimization (and search engine optimization services) hasn’t hit its stride yet.

We’re stilling climbing up the first mountain and we have yet to see what lies beyond. I suspect there will be larger, more interesting mountains to explore. One day someone will write a book on SEO services, devoting a chapter to each type of service.

It will be a large book.