Ask HN: How to get into SEO consulting?

brk 16y ago ↗

At 17, I'd suggest you probably just bypass this altogether.

SEO is not magic or difficult, it is what HTML was in the 90's.

I remember when a person who did little more than a webpage layout could charge $3,000+ for what was basically a set of static page templates because most people thought that HTML was a "language" akin to C++ or something. Now you can get a web page template for free, or $50 at the most.

When you get right down to it, SEO is just basic layout best-practices and having fresh, relevant content on your page. You can carry on all you want about "backlinks" and "pagerank" and "referrer text", but at the end of the day you can fit 98% of all SEO rules on the back of business card.

In the next few years, SEO is going to be thought of as highly as "HTML writing": it will be assumed that any 14 year old can do it for free (and this will be mostly true).

Most of the more savvy web-marketing types I've spoken with over the last couple of years don't see a future in SEO as a "career".

At your age, you need to be looking toward the next thing, not the last thing. If you really want to play with SEO in the meantime though, start with seobook.com.

aaronwall 16y ago ↗

Thanks for recommending our site. :D

I think there will always be a career in SEO, but what that career looks like will change over time. Years ago it was tweaking page titles and meta tags. Page titles are still important, of course, but then links got added to the mix. And so then it was link trading. And then people figured links had value so it became about buying links. And then Google pushed hard to crack down on that and it became about how to buy links creatively and/or indirectly to maximize returns while minimizing risks. And Google has got more aggressive at folding query stream data into the relevancy algorithms, and they are working on a new infrastructure called Caffeine, which will allow them to fold even more data into the relevancy algorithms. As Google collects more data, eventually the distinction between SEO and marketing blurs as lots of SEO techniques will just parallel strong marketing principals.

As far as doing the consulting business model...its a hard business model to succeed at because it is a saturated market AND...

- some people excel at doing SEO

- others excel at selling SEO

the difference between the 2 is non-trivial...depending on what you are good at, (like if you are better at implementation than sales) you might do better as a publisher than as a service provider. and running your own sites lets you keep more of the profits recurring while also being able to test stuff that you might not want to test on a client website.

further, there are a few catch-22 situations with selling SEO services

- in many ways in the economic sense the SEO consulting market is a market for lemons

http://www.johnon.com/293/seo-consulting-2.html

how this works, is people are told it is risky, so they invest little...and the investment is so small that they hire a scammer. the scammer takes their money and does nothing, and then they think the whole field of SEO is a scam, and are afraid to invest much with anyone else

- the biggest way to get around that market for lemons effect is to be well known and well branded so that people trust you a lot and are willing to pay extra to work with you specifically because they trust you. one of the best ways to do this is be socially active online, go to any offline events you can afford to and network (I got my first SEO conference pas for free for helping stuff all the programming things in the bag and hand them out to attendees), and write a blog. one more key here is that its hard to just try to own the keyword SEO brutally hard ... a better approach is to take a niche and try to own it. reelseo.com is doing video seo. David Mihm is doing local search. and so on. back when I got started I ran one of the first SEO blogs and I wrote an ebook back when it was common knowledge that all written books were out of date (and used that as my strategy in terms of reason for format delivery and product naming). some common niches that people target when starting out are doing stuff in their local area (makes sales easier as you can meet people face to face) and a particular vertical they want to have exposure in (say legal or automotive)

- as a consultant who does a really good job you rarely get to capture 1% of the value you create. even if you charge high 5 or low 6 figures for a project, you typically end up adding hundreds to thousands of times that much value to the company. and you still have to fight the in house legal teams to get stuff done (some what you to have x potential upside and limitless downside exposure).

- one last tricky thing is that if they don't have an in-house SEO they likely don't care enough about it to invest in having a consultant work on it. and if they do have an in-house team there is a fear/risk in the minds of some which sets a limit as to how much they can pay you before they worry about looking incompetent for hiring $x worth of external help when they already have an in-house team

- 2 more tips with consulting here...i...

jaxc 16y ago ↗

If you wanted to learn about SEO then you could always jump in the deep end and setup a small website or blog with a dot.com domain name with some original content around a niche (topic) something small that you know a lot about and try play the Google/bing/yahoo(?) game and aim to get your site ranked well. It will take a while especially with a new 'virgin' site.

The best place to start would be google webmaster Tools. Follow best practices they recommend and go from there. There are loads of articles on SEO, some good, some bad and some erm shady.

Google's algorithm is regularly updated and changes and there is no 100% certified or guaranteed no matter what anyone may say or try to sell you to get to number 1 spot. It is a mixture of luck, links, good original content and more luck. There's no one way to be top and the best is to just jump straight into it and get your hands dirty. Build up experience and go from there.

Some people who I would trust with good SEO advice is Google's Matt Cutts. His blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ is a good way of keeping in the loop.

For search engine news there is a journalist called Danny Sullivan. His personal blog is http://daggle.com/ and he also blogs at http://searchengineland.com/ He is someone who I would respect with good reporting on search engines.

There's plenty of others too. Google et al are your friends there. They are just a couple that came into my mind.

The only way to stay on top is to follow Google's and other best practices as they evolve and experiment with your own site and plenty of research.

Sorry its not quick but best way to learn is through experience.

Good luck.

Edited for typos and readability.

jfi 16y ago ↗

One person you might want to Google is Mike Mothner - he's a Dartmouth College graduate and started a business from his dorm room when he was a senior (I believe). He turned it into a company called wPromote, which specializes in site optimization (which, I agree, will pretty much fall into the category of "writing HTML" if it hasn't already) and other consultative areas. He's an interesting guy and his story might be of interest to you!