SEO is a pain in the....[please excuse my rant]

Well you are right, especially if that is how they pitch it. I look at it differently though, due to most of the SEO selling population being incapable of performing, it opens up a lot of opportunity for the 1% that actually can consistently deliver awesome results.

An awesome question to ask, which brings up the point earlier that business owners need to know a bit about SEO to be able to hire properly. Same thing when people talk about hiring telemarketers because they don't do it well themselves, you have to know a bit about what you're hiring for in order to hire the right people.

With SEO... the odds are stacked against you as a business owner, and even as someone offering SEO, the odds are stacked against you because almost every guide out there you can learn from is filled with inaccuracies and crap content that is pushed around the SEO community without any real testing.

Neil Patel has an ad on FB that I see daily, saying most SEOs have it wrong, they focus on rankings instead of revenue. To break it down even more, you have to get traffic to get revenue when it comes to online.

First, you need to ask yourself what you want to get out of SEO. Is it traffic? What kind of traffic do you want? Do you want people that research and continue to come back? Do you want the type of traffic that has a sense of urgency? This is all important when it comes to deciding on how you should approach SEO.

I've looked on oDesk and have been unable to find anyone offering SEO, capable of performing.

What you should look for in an SEO company or freelancer, is where they place their importance. Ask them how they gauge progress in an SEO campaign. Most will say rankings, and if they say rankings then you can automatically eliminate them. When they say they can provide ranking reports, and backlink reports, etc. then eliminate them because the most important thing is not being reported. Why do you want SEO? You want money. You want customers. You want leads. Are backlinks the metric you use? Are rankings the metric you use to estimate your sales pipeline? No... leads are the metric you use, because leads mean money. How can you get leads online? With traffic... it can be PPC, SEO, social media, whatever... traffic is the way you get leads.

An SEO company that measures success of a campaign by rankings, or backlinks, is an SEO company that is better at selling than providing a solution to a problem their customer has.

Another way to eliminate a lot of bogus SEO people, is to ask about how they approach backlinking. If they mention the word dofollow... never speak to them again. If they mention profile links, blog comments, etc. then they are clearly out of touch. If they talk about high PR backlinks, then you should probably forget about them.

A lot of SEO companies, don't even both talking about on page optimization, which in my opinion is the most important thing that needs to be done. Page speed matters, but is rarely talked about. Trendy SEO people, the ones you want to avoid, talk about social signals, tiered backlinking schemes, and things like that. The ones you want to deal with, talk about user experience, on page optimization, and traffic generation.

An SEO campaign does NOT take months in order to find out if its successful or not. It takes weeks... Why? When doing OFF PAGE, the links the SEO company are building, should be generating traffic to your website. SEO is a very broad thing, and should be approached as a very broad service instead of breaking things down as search engine marketing, ppc, smm, etc. It truly is a high end service that generates traffic before you even have rankings, when done properly.

First off I totally agree with Iam and Massive. However you are stil lfaced with a huge list of potential SEO companies to survey, so to cut them down first off I would suggest you search on Google for SEO consultant type terms , if the same people are coming up for a number of relevant keyphrases, then its a good bet they know what they're doing for the rankings part, then you can go into what Iam says with a shorter list of companies you know can at least rank for competitive terms.

When you buy a racehorse, you don't go to see it sitting down taking a nap, you check it out in action , at the gallops or at a selling race, so when looking for an SEO supplier, check them out where they should be performing , of course then it comes down to your real budget .

Press releases have completely been devalued as a form of backlinks.
https://productforums.google.com/for...nZw/discussion
Further explained by SEroundtable interview: "Now, when you do press releases, it might get your web site in front of the eyes of bloggers, reporters and others, where what they write or link to may have an impact on your rankings. But the links within the releases themselves, Google says - they won't benefit your rankings."

Now with saying I was wrong about content marketing being a part of SEO... please explain. I don't see how you can disagree with that. Content marketing is part of SEO, it always has been. Content marketing just became a new buzz word, thats all. When you market your content, you're promoting good SEO strategies. This is not up for debate. Search engine watch wrote a perfect article about this which can be found: The Myth of Content Marketing, the New SEO & Penguin 2.0 - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

Of course I said personal belief... but my personal belief is aligned with what is happening in search. The way both Google and Bing are becoming more about semantic search, case in point, hummingbird.

The way that Google's knowledge graph works, supports the line of thinking within semantic search that pages can rank for keywords they are not optimized for just based on what would be a contextual backlink without a link, using word association with certain entities.

Why do you think that leaders in the SEO community are changing the way they approach even the term of SEO? From search experience optimization to search entitity optimization, and etc.

SEO no matter how you view it, has most certainly progressed to become much more than just backlinks. Research co-citations and co-occurence in SEO..