SEO is just a form of Marketing consulting. I work with lawyers and insurance agents - and I don't do blackhat,or greyhat, nor do I make promises. What we do is go after our keywords by writing quality content, and press releases mostly - as well as very good on-page optimization.
I guarantee that people need the service, I also do web development, which gives me even more insight into how everything plugs together.
Most lawyers and Insurance agents don't even know what a robots.txt file is, or javascript, or the dom, or alt / title tags - they just want leads for their business.
I do think some people place a little too much emphasis being #1 for specific searches, because #1 doesn't always mean tons of money, or business.
A/B testing is also important, as is other methods of business gathering. Also, a lot of times adwords can be more beneficial and less costly than SEO -- if you're paying an SEO 300 a month, vs a 300 a month Adwords budget where adwords is guaranteed clicks -though there's optimization there as well.
The best solution in my opinion is to hire a web developer who knows SEO and SEM, because to lower Adwords costs, and rank high requires some level of programming - for instance I had a site that was costing $2.49 per click, I made it so that the adwords landed on a dynamic url which would grab the keyword they searched for, load it strategically throughout the webpage in specific locations including description, title, keyword tags. This increased the page value in Google's eyes, and brought my cost per click down to $1.68 which was a huge savings! My client could never have come up with that on their own, and would've lost a thousand dollars by just spending the extra money without knowing how to optimize..
Where ever there is something technical, there are people who don't know jack about it, and sometimes people take advantage of them, sometimes people are honest, same goes for other industries like Plumbing, or house repairs...
I guarantee that people need the service, I also do web development, which gives me even more insight into how everything plugs together.
Most lawyers and Insurance agents don't even know what a robots.txt file is, or javascript, or the dom, or alt / title tags - they just want leads for their business.
I do think some people place a little too much emphasis being #1 for specific searches, because #1 doesn't always mean tons of money, or business.
A/B testing is also important, as is other methods of business gathering. Also, a lot of times adwords can be more beneficial and less costly than SEO -- if you're paying an SEO 300 a month, vs a 300 a month Adwords budget where adwords is guaranteed clicks -though there's optimization there as well.
The best solution in my opinion is to hire a web developer who knows SEO and SEM, because to lower Adwords costs, and rank high requires some level of programming - for instance I had a site that was costing $2.49 per click, I made it so that the adwords landed on a dynamic url which would grab the keyword they searched for, load it strategically throughout the webpage in specific locations including description, title, keyword tags. This increased the page value in Google's eyes, and brought my cost per click down to $1.68 which was a huge savings! My client could never have come up with that on their own, and would've lost a thousand dollars by just spending the extra money without knowing how to optimize..
Where ever there is something technical, there are people who don't know jack about it, and sometimes people take advantage of them, sometimes people are honest, same goes for other industries like Plumbing, or house repairs...