SEO Agencies Are a Tax on Ignorance

Here's the dirty secret of the SEO industry, the one that nobody who makes their living from it wants to admit: 90% of what agencies do could be done by one person in a few hours a month.

I know because I've been on both sides of this particular transaction, having run SEO at companies where I saw the agency proposals arrive like clockwork every quarter, each one more elaborate than the last, and having watched the sausage get made in kitchens where the business model was always the same simple formula dressed up in increasingly baroque presentations: charge for complexity that doesn't exist.

The Agency Playbook

Every SEO agency runs the same play, a choreographed routine so predictable you could set your watch by it: first they scare you with an "audit" full of red warnings and urgent alerts suggesting your site is BROKEN and catastrophe is imminent, then they propose a retainer in the range of $5k, $10k, or $20k per month because this is SERIOUS work that demands SERIOUS investment, after which they assign a junior analyst to your account who runs the same automated reports every month, tweaks a few title tags here and there, and writes "optimized content" that reads like it was generated by a robot (which, increasingly, it was), before finally sending you a pretty PDF with charts going up and to the right, because correlation equals causation, right?

What SEO Actually Takes

Here's what actually moves the needle, stripped of all the mystification and consulting-speak: don't break the basics like title tags, meta descriptions, and proper heading structure, which amounts to maybe one afternoon of work if you're being thorough; make pages that answer questions better than anyone else, which is admittedly the hard part and something agencies can't do for you because only you know your business well enough to create genuinely useful content; get other sites to link to you, which happens naturally when you make something worth linking to and absolutely does not happen because an agency sent 500 templated "outreach" emails; and don't be slow, because fast sites rank better and your developer can fix this in a week.

That's it, that's 80% of SEO, the whole mysterious craft that agencies charge tens of thousands of dollars a month to perform.

Why Companies Keep Paying

Ignorance is expensive, and when you don't understand something, you pay whatever the "experts" ask, which is how the entire consulting industry works and has always worked since the first ancient Roman hired someone to read the entrails of a goat.

It's also easier to write a check than to learn, because hiring an agency feels like doing something, like progress by procurement, and there's the added benefit of cover: if SEO doesn't work, you can blame the agency and fire them with righteous indignation, whereas if you did it yourself and it failed, well, that's on you and everyone knows it.

The Alternative

The alternative is almost embarrassingly simple: hire one smart person, give them a few hours a week to focus on SEO, buy them a $200 tool subscription, and let them learn, because in six months they'll know more about your site's SEO than any agency ever will, they'll actually care about the outcome since it's their job and not just one of forty accounts, and they'll cost a fraction of what you were paying to have a junior analyst run automated reports.

Or keep paying the ignorance tax, it's your call, but before you hire someone to do yet another SEO audit, ask yourself whether you really need someone to tell you what's wrong or whether you need someone to actually fix it.

The best SEO investment isn't an agency. It's someone on your team who gives a damn.