Is SEO expertise real or is it just based on luck?

All Seo contracts have 'get out' clauses for non-ranking, or rank fluctuation, as it is not an exact science by any mean sand that is why due diligence in choosing you seo is a must.

Avoid the 'players', those that eulogise about their success stories with no back up. When I take on clients I ask that they would become a referee if they are happy with my service, all but a very few happily agree. When customers now enquire, and ask if I can do what i say I can, I am happy in the knowledge that I can arm them with phone numbers, email addresses etc of people who will give me a reference. This is priceless.

Ding ding ding. SEO industry is full of snakes. The best on-page and off-page SEO is coming up with a product the market raves about. It's gotta be either more efficient than the competitor or more fun. Why is this? Because backlinks from quality sites are still the top ranking factors, and no respectable site with an audience is going to blog about a shitty 'me too' product unless you pay them, and even then they might not. Even if you do manage to pay your way into a few spots on a popular site, their audience is unlikely to spread the news if it's a 'me too' product.

So Tl;dr, SEO starts with the product and really has very little to do with the technical aspects most in the SEO industry preach. They try to make it sound complicated so you'll subscribe to their newsletters. Just remember what business Google is in. They're in the business of providing relevant, high quality search results to their visitors. If you help them do their job, you're likely to be rewarded with organic search traffic. If you try to game the search engines, you're likely to be penalized. Their are no guarantees either way of course.

You're better off focusing on campaigns that are within your control. Organic SEO is a long term play.

SEO takes work, whether you do the work or someone else does the work. Nobody is working for free, it either cost time (do the work yourself) or money (hire an SEO).

Every single keyword has unique competition, even singular vs plural keywords have unique SERP competition.

No offense but a $1,000 budget isn't much to work with. Keep in mind an SEO is paying out roughly 25% of that budget for tax (US) so now you'e down to $750. Then the SEO has expenses for the SEO campaign which can vary depending on what's needed for this particular job, roughly another 25%, so now you're down to $560. Then there's backlinks which could easily eat up $1,000 a month on it's own depending on SERP competition for your keywords. So, If someone else is doing SEO they're looking at roughly $140 a week profit, assuming they're working on the SEO campaign weekly.

Nobody is getting rich off a $1,000 campaign (minus expenses).

My advice is learn the basics of SEO and the difference between quality links and junk links.

The way an SEO builds backlinks will tell you who's selling quality and who's selling junk. Example, long term white hat links vs automated link blast via software (ex: fiverr gigs, most WSOs, etc...). You need links from domains that target the same/similar niche your own domain targets.

Truthfully? It is.

A SEO should be able to guarantee something and be able to charge a fee their clients can afford within reason. The problem is that many clients want to name their own keywords and have an unrealistic expectation they are going to rank for top competitive large volume search terms overnight.

If you want to get results let your SEO chose the keywords BUT with the specification of a certain amount of traffic (so not rank you for some term no one or very few search for) in your niche.

Its kind of like television ads. you can come in and say you want to get lots of traffic so want to show for the Super Bowl but you will need to bring the cash. However a good TV ad person might sit down with you and get you lots of traffic by looking at other advertising times than the superbowl.

If you do that then you should NOT have to pay $1,000 per month. Many small businesses cannot afford that.

I don't think an SEO can really guarantee results but they can certainly lay down a pathway for ranking.

On page should be easy to point out to a client. Schema mark up and on page optimisation can be seen through a check list.

Off page a competitor analysis should give an indication of how much and what type of work is required.

Every keyword if different and requires a different amount of work so budgeting is on a case by case basis. That said as previously pointed out their are minimum pricing if you are dealing with real agencies

Clients understandably want to be page one yesterday but I was always keen to take baby steps. Let's get you on page three then page two then page one. As mentioned previously clients also want the hardest keyword ranked first. A good seo should be able to help a client see some of the quick wins available with long tail (assuming they have a bit business sense they should also give you some indication of how this can benefit the business).

When I was doing SEO I felt I was more of a business developer than an optimiser and as such was vastly underpaid.

If you haven't the patience why not see if you can rank a parasite.

This is an interesting debate, I agree that 1000 usd is a very small budget for a good SEO campaign, however I also agree that many small businesses cant pay even that, so I think there should be some middle ground there depending on the complexity of the job you need to do.

If you only have to build SEO for a local business, with few or no competitors at all, then the job is not complicated, in fact a few on page SEO might do the job just fine, in those cases, I believe its fair to have a small budget.

In other cases, where you have to deal with big clients that have a lot of competitors in their niche, thats different, and its clear you will need a big budget for delivering results.

SEO is not an easy thing to do in these days, there is a lot (I mean really, a lot!) of competition, and Google is changing its algorithm to make it more difficult every day, running a good SEO campaigns is not as easy as building a Facebook audience or doing some copy writing, it needs a lot of work and a lot of resources.

In my opinion, SEO has nothing to do with luck. Of course, there are easy keywords and hard to rank keywords. But it is not about luck...

SEO isn't really based on luck at all these days google is incredibly smart, however be careful of expensive SEO packages that require $1000/month you can get good work done for much cheaper!