Full service SEO vs. SEO consulting

It’s funny how you get an idea of how something could be done better, only to find out you’re completely wrong. A few years ago I started working on the idea for The SEO Consultants. The idea was fairly simple–a lot of small businesses can’t afford search engine optimization services at a price tag of $2,000-$5,000, so let’s create a cheaper option.

I figured there were two ways to lower the cost (and therefore price) of SEO services; 1) automation, and 2) consulting instead of full service. So I started working on a system that would allow a single employee to provide SEO services to 100-200 clients per month at a cost of something around $250. The brilliant part, or so I thought, was that instead of providing full-service SEO, we would just provide advice or “consulting” services. That way we didn’t have to bother with getting FTP access or making updates to the clients’ websites. We would just tell them what to do, provide them with reports, and make a bunch of money.

Then I got the bright idea that hey, if they want to pay us extra to implement the recommendations we’ve given them, why not? So whenever we would send a client a recommendation, we’d have a marketing area that would say “Don’t want to do this yourself? Then let us help!” and it would give them a price and timeline for us to complete the work for them. Everything was designed out and pretty slick, or so I thought.

But here’s the problem with this business model. SEO isn’t well understood by the vast majority of small business owners, and that equals confusion, and confusion means questions, and questions means time, and time eats up profits. Luckily I already started experimenting with SEO consulting services at MWI a year or so ago, and over time I’ve discovered that it often takes more time to tell someone how to do something than it does to just do it yourself. In other words, I was planning on building a business model around a service that was begging to be accompanies by a flood of support phone calls and emails that would end up taking my employees 2-3 times as long to deal with than if they had just done all the work themselves, and I was going to charge less for consulting than full-service, based simply on the assumption that full-service would be more work for me, because it would seem that way to our customers.

As soon as this became obvious, I scrapped the whole consulting idea and decided that everything would be full-service and we would merely offer different levels of service. Not too exciting and not as “clever” as my upsell idea, but hey, I’d rather be rich than stupid. Too bad the name has “consultants” in it, eh? Well, not so much. The word “consultants” means different things to different people, and I’m not too worried about anybody thinking we only give advice. I don’t think it’s the best name in part because it’s simply too long, and I might ultimately change it to something else shorter and easier to remember, but for the time being I care more about the fact that the domain has important keywords in it. Maybe if I start making millions with this business then I can go out and buy a domain that has aged a bit more and also has relevant keywords in it.

I still have content offering SEO consulting services on MWI’s website, even though I won’t let anybody sign up for the service. The pages still help with bringing in traffic, which is worth something. But I think the idea of providing SEO consulting services vs. full service is dead.