Is it becoming too hard to offer SEO services?

No. And it's making it easier for the players to rank because so many are dropping out of the game.

If you're looking for someone to service your leads, lemme know.

Thing is, G has always played against SEO and over time are just pulling away the ability to use bots and spam links. They also manually review sites and make decisions individually.

But there are techniques that still work. The industry is not dead. And there's still plenty of opportunity to make a small fortune with organic search rankings.

What's happening with your large agencies is they also get tired of the blowback from customers because algo changes disrupt business. The solution is to prepare for that and work toward quick recovery. Not to mention branching out with other marketing. It's obviously dumb to have 100% of the cash flow dependent on SERPS.

You gotta step it up pal

I think it's critical that you setup realistic expectations with your client. Not only do you need to step up your game these days but you also can't promise them the moon either.

Work towards goals, and make sure they understand that SEO is anything but instant or guaranteed. Under promise, over-deliver & you'll have much happier clients.

I think the focus for everyone these days, should be about creating quality content that adds value (eg content marketing). Articles, Videos, Infographics, Press Releases ect.

This is what Google wants, and will never be penalised into the future if it's quality stuff.

Combining this with some of the traditional SEO services seems to work wonders.

My business was purely focused on SEO for my clients up until about 8-9 months ago. Now I offer the SEM which covers your ass with Google Adwords while you work on the SEO.

Sell why SEO compliments PPC and vice verse and the importance of it. I tell clients:

"We'll have 70% focus on PPC and 30% on SEO to make sure we cover all SEM"

It's easy to service if you know what you're doing. Big agencies tend to train people their way, which isn't always the right way. It makes it harder for them to adjust with the changes. Smaller agencies have an easier time switching things up. I think a very small portion of people offering SEO really can get results.

Its becoming a harder to sell service, but easier to perform IMO. It's harder to sell now, because of the amount of people who have bought in the past, numerous times, and have been burned. Easier to perform because so few people are able to perform.

I disagree, I still do SEO the same way I did when is first heard the word, luckily I discovered it through Eric Ward and took his methods to heart so avoided a lot of the shit along the way. Obviously I have added and removed things that worked at the time and no longer do along the way, but the core process is still exactly the same, great research to find link targets, great idea creation, and personal outreach.

My methods are essentially 4 pillars that I use on every campaign and then sprinkled with other methods individual that may work on a traffic/link basis.

It is fairly simple if you understand the basics and do them well, however if am still moving my business over to a more PPC model based purely the time investment I currently have in my business and the time I want to spend on it.

I also disagree with this whole SEO is not instant thing that most people pipe on about, if you can get a link placed on the right site through effective outreach, you can provide any client with an instant increase in sales/income/leads whatever their aim is. 1 email can make a shit load of money in this way.

Fair enough this may not jump you to number 1 in google instantly but it's not always about that.

Diversification !

- Jordan Belfort