Buying Search Engine Optimization Services - Size of the SEO Company
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Generally speaking, smaller firms with a few dedicated professionals are better than corporate-sized companies with 100 + employees. The reason for this is very simple. Good SEOs make very good money and can afford good lifestyles. Big SEO companies simply don't pay nearly as much as an expert SEO can make. Why bother working for $40,000 - $70,000 per year when you can double that with a little more effort? In this case, I'm speaking of the kind of money that can be made by passionate experts.
Another reason is that generally, corporations are full of people who don't really care about anything. It's a corporate thing. Many people spend their days in cubicles with no passion, just because they went to college and now have bills to pay. It's wrong to say that everyone is like that, but a good number of people are, and that's true in any large company.
On the other hand, large search engine marketing companies are the ones that get most corporate accounts. I guess the large scale demonstrates a degree of success and security, especially to corporations with 20,000+ employees who consider a company with 1,000+ employees small.
Small companies are also more passionate about what they do, especially if they're run by passionate people. Great examples of this are Aaron Wall, Wolfhowl, SEO by the SEA and other voices. Those guys get RSS subscriptions naturally, because they enjoy writing about SEO and they enjoy doing it. You should look for equally passionate small firms. When a leader is passionate, he gives off enough free energy to motivate his small team. As a result, a group of seven people can sometimes do things better and faster than a 14-member group of poorly-motivated people.
SEO Professional Directories
Here are a couple of places where you can find professional SEO companies.
SEOpros.org - A list of high quality SEO professionals in various countries. There's a total of 71 companies, in Australia (5), Canada (7), Israel (2), Italy (4), the United Kingdom (2) and the United States (51), so you can't miss.
SEOConsultants.com- A list of 99 SEO consultants. In my opinion, these are the best ones there are.
An organization I'd like to mention now is SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. "SEMPO is a non-profit professional association working to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide." Check out this article about this organization. I'm not exactly impressed with them; my understanding is that their primary objective is to get people to pay several grand to sign up and join, which gives them the right to display logos that say "you're a part of THIS cool SEM organization."
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