So in my head I’m thinking to myself, sure if you’re a top (I really doing mean top, not just quite good) SEO why on earth would you sell your services to others?
Say, for example, your ranking a few websites top 10 for ‘car insurance’ or ‘credit card’ or any other lucrative term. Why would you do that if it wasn’t your own site?
Even if you’re being paid a shed-load you’re still making less than the company your doing SEO for. Instead of optimising other companies sites for ‘car insurance’ why not make money supermarket 2? Even if you can’t make websites yourself you should be able to team up with others who are capable of making competing websites.
Sure, you might not have the business acumen but with the marketing skills there’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to successfully compete.
With a quote aggregation website you don’t even have to provide a service really. Just scrape a few other insurance sites and hey presto.
Aggressively market and your earning a lot already. I can’t really see any reason why a top SEO would provide consultancy services to other companies. Unless they have absolutely no confidence in their own business ideas or they really enjoy the interaction with other business.
If I was skilled enough to compete for ‘personal loans’ I wouldn’t do it for other business – I’d do it for myself!
Does that not make sense? What do you think?
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
You’re quite right in this.
The only reason(as I see it) to do consultations/seo work for someone other than yourself is if the business would require too much work to run. Like if I can rank for “home loans”, but I do not feel like actually offering home loans, then it all comes down to what would make more: an affiliate program, or doing it as a consultation?
In many cases, the affiliate program is worth more. Once you have that kind of volume, you can negotiate betwen companies for whose affiliate program you’ll be using and get incredible commissions.
I completely agree with you.
If you are competent enough to rank higher for some specific keyword then I you shud do SEO for yourself but I think there are number of kws for same service at different location. As well you can’t go in all sectors to you can & shud optimize websites of different country & different sector. As all know exceptions are always there.
Basically you are right. The problem is once you start client work while you are still not that good you just can’t turn it off. You need plenty of time to work for your projects which you don’t have as clients will flock from everywhere. My website sucks, I have a weird name, I turn down many if not most offers and still I got far too many clients to work for myself.
Sadly client work does not pay that well, so I can’t just say I will work the next 6 months for myself only.
@Tad: Yes I suppose there must be a time when you *need* the instant cash flow that can be provided by consulting or working for an agency, that takes away time that could be spend on more profitable personal projects.
The opportunity to work on Fortune 500 brands is very rewarding and offers different challenges than smaller SEO projects. And the money is good and the income security when you have a family is also appealing. I get a lot of personal satisfaction by making a big impact on huge companies that are worth millions and sometimes billions of dollars.
I quite disagree – we are one of the 3 biggest SEO companies in Czech Republic, we got many companies on first pages, and customers can still hire us. The reason is quite simple – we do not want to spread our focus. Yes, we can beat any company on any keyword, but for us it is much better to work with 3 or so companies and put them on top 3 positions, and get some provisions for this.