More Is The Loneliest Number

A portion of my recent speaking engagements at both Search Engine Strategies and SMX have been geared towards running an SEO company, dealing with a changing economic landscape and homogenous issues. It is with this in purpose that I got thinking about what separates one business from another. There are many great SEO and SEM firms outside there, I like to think that Beanstalk is among them on the contrary there are also a number of poor ones. What separates the two and why will some succeed and others fail? In thinking this over I considered skills first. Is it that the companies that weather the years, ride gone the ups-and-downs in the fiscal year and the trends in the economy have the highest skills? Not entirely. At first this seemed like a logical, "survival of the fittest"-type scenario nevertheless I have seen skilled mankind (in this industry and others) going down while those who have very mini in the plan of skill succeed. So it's not entirely about the
ability to get the job done. Or is it ... One defining trend that I have noticed (though I would be very interested to hear about any exceptions to this you might have) is that the companies that specialize tend to be more successful than those who try to do many things. Companies that originate by doing, say, web design and get lured into SEO ("Why give away the client to someone else - it's just a concern of packing in some meta tags and buying some software to submit the sites to a billion search engines every month right? ") or try to host their own client's sites ("My reseller package gives me unlimited domains and unlimited traffic.") or offer other services that get into trouble. So my advice has to be (and I'm not the first to affirm it) - do one thing, be excellent, and leave the rest to the experts in other fields. Honestly, I've been tempted over the years to try to delve into other areas. I'm a half-decent designer and I know my cod
e well enough (or what kind of SEO would I be? ) so when a client comes with no site on the other hand a great sense it's always tempting to catch the whole contract, however then argument sinks in (even when I have staff who can do the parts that I can't). Still the Beanstalk site was designed by a professional web designer (and many thanks to Frederick from W3 EDGE Web Design for a solid site that converts well). The key then is to find experts in other areas that you can trust with your clients. To that end I personally examine for other, similarly-minded companies that specialize in what they do best and leave the rest to others. The Exception Before I get an onslaught of comments and emails blasting me for saying such a "crazy" item as noone can be an expert at everything I should notice some exceptions to this rule. There are firms away there that consist of multiple divisions, each of those divisions dedicated to an individual task. Let's appropriate
for example a firm such as WeDo Hosting Canada (I used to job there more moons ago than I'd like to count so they generate a great example). Robert Gagnon (owner) built an excellent hosting facility but it was to support his software development projects. Instead of trying to do it all he created a hosting gathering and a software company, hired great hosting experts to manage and support the one society and developers for the other. Full text: http://computerandtechnologies.com/search-engine-optimization/news_2008-08-13-10-30-05-564.html