Posted by randfish

I just want to set this down for the record.

The days when ongoing SEO was required because the search engines kept changing their ranking algorithms are gone. That is no longer the justification for a long-term organic search marketing contract. SEO firms (at least the ones I'm familiar with) charge for monthly services because (here comes the shocker) - SEO is inherently and ongoing task.

Barry pointed to David Pasternack's article on SEO and to an SEW forum thread on the topic. As Jon Mendez said in that thread David's really showing his ignorance about the practice of SEO with this piece. Here's why:

1. The premise for David's piece is the MarketingSherpa study. I shouldn't have to say anything else. The study was flawed multiple people noted why (low levels of participation inaccurate colllection methodology small sample size etc). If you're going to make assertions about the reasons for a trend you should first make sure your source for the trending data is accurate.
2. David says that SEO is a "fix-it-once" task. I'll agree that there are a small number of SEO services that require only a single fix but if David thinks the job of an SEO firm is primarily to make sites crawlable and add title tags he's lost in 2001. Services like link building content creation linkbaiting viral marketing social media optimization reputation management even keyword research and analytics monitoring don't end - they are tasks that demand attention every month. The choices are: bring it in-house outsource it to an SEO firm or have your lunch eaten by your savvier and higher-ranking competitor.
3. Let me suggest my opinion of the real reasons why there might be a drop in SEO revenue year-over-year (if there actually is one):
1. More and more SEO companies are switching business models as they find that their skills can easily be applied to their own projects for greater revenue and profitability.
2. Companies are pulling SEO in-house because they have seen the massive impact success in the SERPs can have on their bottom lines.
3. The firms calling themselves pure "SEOs" are losing out to more fully featured Internet Marketing firms because the tactics they once relied on (I'm talking here about the Internet Advancement's and Traffic Power's of the world) are no longer effective.

In my opinion whenever you have a statement like this accompanying what purports to be a research document:

With all that fabulous ROI plus years of proof that in-house SEO just doesn't do as well as outsourcing why is SEO industry growth sagging so dramatically? It's a mystery to me.

... the wisest course of action is not to make the assumption that the data is flawless and assign causation. David might be a brilliant PPC manager but I'm not sure he's the best qualified guy to write about the death of SEO revenues (and someone needs to kill that flash presentation on did-it's website).

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