The Future of SEO

I think search engine optimization is going to follow the same path as web design, just 10 years behind it.

When I started my web design firm in 1999 I thought I was on the cusp of being wildly rich and amazingly successful. After all, I knew other people who had started web development firms, charged hundreds of dollars per hour, and were raking it in. Unfortunately, I was about two years too late to cash in. For one, the economy was about to take a steep nosedive, and two, I was one of thousands of other people who had all come to the same conclusion at the same time. The double whammy of too many web design firms chasing too few clients resulted in a much more competitive space and that led to lower prices for web design services. Not that you couldn’t be successful, it just wasn’t as easy to charge a client $50K for a 10-page static website when there were 50 other firms within walking distance who could do it for $1K and arguably do a comparative job.

Fast forward almost ten years and things in the SEO industry look a lot like the web design industry did around 1998. Not a lot of firms, a lot of demand, high prices, and a lot of new entrants. Utah by itself is an interesting case study in the progression of the SEO industry. Two years ago MWI had virtually no competition. We had #1 rankings for every keyword we wanted to rank for. Today, it’s much more of a struggle, and having been through it once before, it’s not a battle I want to fight too hard, hence The SEO Consultants, a company that provides low-cost, no-frills, bare bones SEO to small businesses who have a hard time coming up with $500 per month to spend on SEO, let alone $500 per hour.

Could I succeed as a boutique SEO firm? Sure, it wouldn’t be hard to keep bringing in $20-30K per month, but just like a sumo wrestler sitting down to Sizzler’s steak and all-you-can-eat shrimp dinner I want more, more, MORE! Well, not exactly like that. It’s just that I get bored unless there’s progress being made, and providing high-end SEO services to large clients is a business model that doesn’t lend itself to scalability. Not that you can’t scale to a certain extent, but it’s Ruth’s Chris vs. McDonalds, and I’d rather own McDonalds.