In the course of judging the SEMMYs, one of the great posts I read was The SEO Playbook – Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice by Stuntdubl (aka Todd Malicoat). It’s a great post because it helps outline how SEO is expanding in it’s scope. There are those that might suggest that SEO shops are losing their value (thanks to Kevin Heisler for pointing this out).

It’s all really a matter of definition. If by SEO you mean twiddling metatags, doing keyword research, and fussing with title tags and on page content tweaks, yes I agree that this will lose its value over time. However, I predict that this will happen MUCH more slowly than people think. We just published an SEO case study that showed a 4.5 X gain in search traffic for a site primarily based on “technical SEO”. Think people will pay for that? Ayuh (Mike G, if you read this, that’s a technical American English term, you know, the real English, meaning “Yes”).

In addition, as a crusty old veteran I have seen this story many times. The first time was when I was told that Fortran would disappear as a language. After I first heard that it took a decade before it really fell off as a programming language at all. And let me tell you something, these are MILLIONS of Fortran programs still in use in corporate America today (and COBOL programs too). People who know how to program Fortran or COBOL get paid BIG bucks.

Nonetheless, there is much more to SEO than just the traditional technical SEO tasks. Top tier SEOs know that you need to address the content of the site and the promotion of the site. In fact, this is a major strategic role for the SEO, and here are the major components:

1. Determine where the opportunities are for promoting the business of the site, and size all of these opportunities
2. Evaluate the current site content quality – would someone link to it?
3. Find out what the client is willing to invest in content development
4. Determine if there are any “brand” related restrictions (e.g. the company does not want to produce videos that poke fun at the use of their products)
5. With these points in mind, decide where future content development resources will be invested

This whole process involves seeing the bigger market picture and is the type of discussion that inherently involves the CMO/VP of Marketing, and in some companies, the CEO. This is not twiddling a few bits in a dark corner of the back room. It is driving the process of determining the entire strategy for the web site.

So I know that Mike knows everything I have said here, and his article was really pointed at pure technical SEO shops. Yes, those will fade in value. Want to make sure that your SEO shop does not lose value over time? Then expand your role. Become the strategic visionary for your client’s web sites.

One of the most important things an SEO can do when speaking with a prospective customer is to qualify the customer first. There are people out there who are ready to pay you money for your time and services that you should turn away. There are a couple of major reasons why:

1. It’s just good ethics to turn away a potential client that you can’t help
2. You should want every client to become a success story, because that is how you build a great reputation. As a result, it’s bad business to take money from someone you can’t help.

When we get engaged with a new client we always start with a detailed look at the big picture. What does the competitive landscape look like, where do the opportunities lie, what types of content or tools will the site need, what will the demands on development needs, etc. In fact, a very preliminary look at the big picture is an important part of how we qualify clients before taking them on.

When we take a look at the big picture before accepting a new client, we run into several scenarios which lead to our telling the prospect that we can’t help them. Here are a few examples:

1. Business size too small: We get lots of leads from companies that are too small. For example, if they spend $20K on an SEO contract over some number of months, even if we hit all of our goals for helping their site out, they wouldn’t get the ROI. The problem here is not the quality of our service, or lack of results, it’s a lack of revenue potential for the business.

An example of this might be a small regional real estate company that serves a five towns in Massachusetts. Even if we score number one for them on all the most relevant terms, they might get enough revenue from the resulting leads from the web site to justify the SEO expense. That doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with their business. It’s just not a match for an SEO exercise, and we turn these types of prospects away.

2. Fundamental Misunderstanding of SEO: I spoke to a prospect recently that had built up a really nice amount of traffic to their site, purely through word of mouth. I spoke to the founders, and they were rightly proud of what they had done. Now, however, they were looking to get more traffic from search engines.

Where the problem started was that one of the founders kept referring to SEO as a game, and believed that the focus was on tricking the search engines into giving you traffic. Something along these lines came out of his mouth every time he spoke. And, I interrupted him every time he said it and corrected him. Needless to say the opportunity exploration ended with the first call.

There are other flavors of this problem too. For example, if someone comes to us and expects us to get them into all the places where you can buy links that still pass PageRank. This just isn’t what we do.

3. Can’t Meet the Content Demands: Part of the big picture evaluation is making sure that the prospect understands that they need to have sufficient content or tools on their site, or a strategy to promote content and tools on the web. Links are still incredibly important in SEO, and will be for a long time to come. The phrase I usually use to explain it to people is “People will not link to your site to help you make money”.

Bottom line is that you get links by having great content or tools. You can put it one your site, or you can syndicate it (publish in major magazines), promote it (e.g. sites like Digg and Eddit), or distribute it (e.g. widgets that become popular on the web). All these various strategies for getting links require some great content or tools.

When we find a client that doesn’t understand it, or is unable to invest in it, we turn them away.

Summary

Ultimately, for us it is about making every client a success story. This is the best way for us to grow our business for the long term. In addition, instead of closing a client we can’t help, we focus that same energy on finding new clients we can help. It just works out the best for everybody that way.