SEO Agencies Are a Tax on Ignorance
Most SEO work takes a few hours a month. Agencies charge thousands to do what one person with a checklist could handle. Stop paying the ignorance tax.
Here's the dirty secret of the SEO industry: 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. I've run SEO at companies. I've seen the agency proposals. I've watched the sausage get made.
The business model is simple: charge for complexity that doesn't exist.
The Agency Playbook
Every SEO agency runs the same play:
Step 1: Scare you with an "audit" full of red warnings. Your site is BROKEN. Catastrophe imminent.
Step 2: Propose a retainer. $5k, $10k, $20k per month. Because this is SERIOUS work.
Step 3: Assign a junior analyst to your account who runs the same reports every month, tweaks a few title tags, and writes "optimized content" that reads like it was generated by a robot (because it probably was).
Step 4: Send you a pretty PDF with charts going up. Correlation equals causation, right?
What SEO Actually Takes
Here's what moves the needle:
1. Don't break the basics. Title tags, meta descriptions, proper heading structure. One afternoon of work.
2. Make pages that answer questions better than anyone else. This is the hard part - and agencies can't do it for you. Only you know your business well enough to create genuinely useful content.
3. Get other sites to link to you. This happens naturally when you make something worth linking to. It doesn't happen because an agency sent 500 "outreach" emails.
4. Don't be slow. Fast sites rank better. Your developer can fix this.
That's it. That's 80% of SEO.
Why Companies Keep Paying
Ignorance is expensive. When you don't understand something, you pay whatever the "experts" ask.
It's also easier to write a check than to learn. Hiring an agency feels like doing something. Progress by procurement.
And there's cover. If SEO doesn't work, you can blame the agency. If you did it yourself and it failed, that's on you.
The Alternative
Hire one smart person. Give them a few hours a week to focus on SEO. Buy them a $200 tool subscription. Let them learn.
In six months, they'll know more about your site's SEO than any agency ever will. And they'll cost a fraction of what you were paying.
Or keep paying the ignorance tax. Your call. And before you hire someone to do yet another SEO audit, ask yourself if that's really what you need.
The best SEO investment isn't an agency. It's someone on your team who gives a damn.