Can you believe a professional search marketing company called the Scoreboard Media Group actually posted a claim that the first question you should ask an SEO consultant is:
“If you can rank a site in lucrative markets, why would you do it for clients instead of for yourself?”
And he’s not talking search marketing companies ranking their own company sites (which they should be able to do), he’s actually referring to why would you choose to solely provide that service to clients when you could make more money from that skill set on your own private ventures?
What he really means is why are search marketing consultants spending all their time helping other sites rank when they could devote a large port of their time / energy to ranking their own middle man or affiliate sites and make more money off that.
What kind of a question is that? Doesn’t he understand that SEO involves marketing empowered by various technologies? Most business don’t exist as a one man shop or solely as a website. Marketing is a separate skill from running an entire company and I think most of the websites that are directly profitable from just content creation and SEO related tasks (e.g. opposed to a physical business with employees, bookkeepers, inventory, professional services) are not particularly worthwhile. It’s surprising the author doesn’t get this, considering he claims to have “consulted and trained many of the top global brands in nearly every major vertical market.”. Some examples of site profitable from just SEO and content creation include: affiliate sales, PPC arbitrage, lead generation sites etc.
To answer his question I think devoting half of my time to growing one affiliate site or something similar would not only be very boring, but also not particularly valuable to the world. I don’t want to spend my life trying to get the most people to click on some crappy ads or buy stuff they don’t need. I realize there is some of this in regular search marketing as well, but it’s not only that. I spend a large portion of my day designing blogs, promoting sites online and helping small and medium sizes businesses understand and use the internet to be more effective and meet their customers’ needs.
