>1 Is The Lonliest Number

A lot 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 similar issues. 

It is with this in mind that I got thinking about what separates one company from another.  There are many great SEO and SEM firms out there, I like to think that Beanstalk is among them but 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 out 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 but I have seen skilled people (in this industry and others) going down while those who have very little in the way 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 start by doing, say, web design and get lured into SEO (“Why give away the client to someone else – it's just a matter 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 say 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 code well enough (or what kind of SEO would I be?) so when a client comes with no site but a great idea it's always tempting to take the whole contract, but then reason sinks in (even when I have staff who can do the parts that I can't).  Even the Beanstalk site was designed by a professional web designer (and many thanks to Frederick from WeDo Hosting Canada (I used to work there more moons ago than I'd like to count so they make 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 company and a software company, hired great hosting experts to manage and support the one company and developers for the other.

If you are yourself trying to be a designer, SEO and host (why not add in a little social media marketing and PPC management just for fun) you've basically created a recipe for disaster and if I keep my eye on my watch I should be able to figure out pretty closely the exact moment that it all tumbles into decline.  It will be the moment an issue arises in an area that you are not an expert.  If your host goes down and you're on a standard reseller package and not able to directly fix your situation, you become reliant on others.  What if they didn't make a backup of the product and/or sales database?  And now your client blames you and will pull the entire set of services you provide them on the shelf – someone else's shelf. 

But I digress ...

Who Are The Experts?

According to Merriam Webster's dictionary, an expert is defined as, “one with the special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject.”  This seems like a pretty fair analysis of the word.  Now, there are certainly the Leonardo Da Vinci's out there who can unquestionably prove themselves to be experts and masters in a variety of fields however I am not on that plane thus – I am limited to focusing all of my time and attention to a single endeavor.  In my case I chose organic optimization and let me tell you (if you don't already know) there's enough going on there to keep one's attention fully occupied and if I had two brains instead of one – both could be kept busy.

The same can be said for all of the other areas that are commonly grouped by individuals.  Developers are generally logic-based thinkers, designers are generally creative, good PPC managers have a knack and skill for weeding out specific trends and stats to maximize revenue while minimizing undesirable clicks (those would be the clicks from people unlikely to convert).  Social media experts focus primarily on the here-and-now (i.e. what's working right now to drive massive traffic through social media sites) and so on.

Because I like to avoid speaking ill of others, especial those in the SEO-realm I'll focus on my limitations as I'm always welcome to pick on myself.  My personal strengths and interests lie in evaluating and understanding trends in ranking fluctuations, analyzing competitors and applying the finding across multiple sites as appropriate.  Ask me to design a site ... goodness no – please don't, for your own sake.  I can't create pretty things in my head (or on paper) and I certainly can't move that image onto the web.  When client's need design or development I send them to designers like Atomic Crayon from Victoria.

Ask me to manage a large-scale PPC campaign – not if you want it to be successful.  I can hold my own on small campaigns or campaigns just for testing keywords but when I think of titles and descriptions I'm thinking of the organic results – write them to get the click as it's free and we can work on converting them when we get them to our site.  This doesn't apply well to PPC.  I'd rather refer a client to David Szetela and crew over at Lunarpages Web Hosting or