Here are the reasons why he thinks the SEO Industry needs SMBs, according to the article:
- Your big clients will eventually disappear. (Meaning they will have in-house SEO talent.)
- Small businesses are/will be increasingly interested in search marketing.
- Finding accurate information about SEO and search marketing is tough.
I agree with all of his points.
Unfortunately, Matt is looking at this from the angle.
Small businesses need Search Engine Optimization. They are now educated enough to know they need it.
Unfortunately, large SEO firms will never serve small businesses.
What IS happening is that most small businesses rely on local web design and development firms to do SEO for them.
This isn't good either because most of these firms aren't that good. Or the good ones are too expensive. And worse, most do it in isolation without their clients involvement and treat SEO like a one time activity.
SEO should be done by the people that invent, make and sell the products at the company. They will need to learn the basics and manage the process internally. After they learn the basics and have the right SEO tools and systems in place to track leads and sales generated from their activities, they should should hire a full time blogger and social media marketing coordinator who is responsible for teaching the entire organization how to leverage the web to generate interest, website traffic, leads and sales. Outsourcing this task is like outsourcing your face to face networking or all of your customer service. It's core to the business.
The most time consuming task required - in order to do SEO successfully - is content creation. Should you really fully outsource the voice of your company? If you're going to outsource it, shouldn't it be to a writer or a messaging person?
Further, in the very near future, even GOOD SEO skills will ultimately be like html writing skills. Many more people know how to write html now than in the 90s. Now, you wouldn't pay someone $150/hour to write html like people did in the 90s. In a few years, we'll look back at the $150-$300/hour pay that good SEO firms receive and think that was pretty silly too.