From an agency perspective
You raise a matter than struck me recently 3rigena, in linkage terms there seems a growing divergence between what SEOs/SEMs can do for themselves and what they can do for clients.
This is an extremely good point and one I should blog about, thanks for the idea!
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Let me share my thoughts from the other side of the fence. As someone who worked at an SEO firm or Internet based services company, let me just say that some of us genuinely want to help our clients, the problem lies in several areas.
- Existing Website Content Management System
- Dealing with the original authors or designers of the system
- Getting clients to understand the importance of the recommended changes.
- Educating the client on content writing
- Finding and building links to a client site (probably one of the hardest parts).
1.) Existing content management systems can be a royal pain in the backside for SEO's to deal with especially the proprietary ones. We have to hack / slash and chop these systems up sometimes just to get the desired result (extremely time consuming).
2.) We don't want to upset your existing developers / designers by saying what they have done is rubbish - although alot of the time it is (fact!). We have to coach them on how to implement the changes we suggested and getting them to make these changes is a pita at the best of times.
3.) Sometimes clients don't take our recommendations on board or just expect that once we provide them with a solution everything will take care of itself. Sometimes I think they feel that providing links will solve all their issues.
4.) Telling clients how to write meta descriptions / post titles / heading tags and the like, can be somewhat difficult to explain and of course requires time to educate a client. (This is something that is more important for clients with good cms systems already).
5.) Links are probably the most difficult part. It used to be simple, have a good directory with page rank and link your clients from it with the right keywords. All that has changed and many directories are useless now. The fact of the matter is this is extremely time consuming to do and requires much patience and manual labor - many have tried to automate this, but its like chasing your tail.
In conclusion unless you have a big budget an agency can only do so much for you. It might be better to hire an in house SEO who can dedicate his time toward improving your site. This is what I am doing now, but even so there are still challenges that lie ahead and I do miss the diversity of an agency myself.
I hope that explains why some agencies can do more for themselves than their clients.
