While it is nice to find a genuinely talented Social Media Mercenary (like you) or a boutique firm who can work small miracles for clients—ne off victories on the cheap, it sometimes pays off to hire someone like you as an integral part of a comprehensive team, more like a squad of highly trained commandos that can not only collaborate to optimize your site strategy before it gets off the ground, but also offer the full package of strategic planning design, development, content and creative all working together towards a common goal on behalf of a client. A team that can not only get the job done right and completely the first time, but one who can and is willing to teach your client how to maintain the momentum once the commandos are off doing other things for the rest of their clients.

As you can attest to, Google and all of the major search engines change up their algorithms and methodologies for ranking sites on an ongoing basis. As a result, what works today, does not necessarily work six or even three months from now.

In the long run, clients are better off familiarizing themselves with and keeping up to date on the tips, tricks and tools of the SEO trade (on page and off) so that they can tweak and refine their keyword strategy on their own, as their company, products and customers evolve over time, but also and some would say as importantly, as the search engines and their (top secret) algorithms and methodologies evolve over time to stay ahead of the rest of the search engine Yahoos in this business.

Give your client a fish, you give them a meal, teach your client to fish and you keep a client happy and healthy for life. Don’t worry, if they like what you have been doing for them, as evidenced in their search rankings, they’ll keep coming back for more.

I agree that bloggers are often better than professional copywriters because of their authenticity. But that title is too wild to be real. How about: Smojoe gets noticed and appreciated by telling his story everywhere. Or maybe you were trying to squeeze in more keywords for the robots?

Anyways, great post. Point taken. As a sensitive professional writer, I had to criticize something.

I agree, real bloggers write much better content. And more importantly what they write is often more on topic and practical.

The problem however is the old advertising industry, the “dinosaurs” as my friend and colleague Vanessa calls them, who don’t understand online social media, how it works and have unrealistic expectations when it comes to keywords and budgets. Vanessa works for an old advertising company and is the only SEO/SEM person on their staff… and she has to explain to her dinosaur boss on a regular basis that she can’t guarantee the top spot in a particular topic (let alone multiple keyword phrases) because there might be other people or companies out there competing for the same phrases/keywords.

So really the only difference between different SEO/SEM companies is the quality of the work they put in. Carefully monitored content is too time consuming and when you want to make 100 different blog posts promoting the same topic you can’t micro-manage them all.