Thread: How do SEO companies do it ?

This is something that I've been thinking about for a while. I have visited the websites of several SEO companies and many of them have a small to medium sized staff presumably working with a good handful of client websites. In my opinion, there is simply not enough time in the day to effectively rank all of your client's websites using traditional SEO. As in, all of the conventional white hat SEO theory pertaining to 'creating great content', obtaining high authority links, guest blogging etc would take a millenia to rank numerous websites and would surely require a very large staff to keep on top of this stuff.

So.. what do you guys think? How do they do it? What do they do? Outsource to Fiverr? ODesk? This is something I am very curious to know.. how these small companies can possibly find the time to operate effectively using only professional white hat SEO best practices (or so they say).

In my opinion they have the man power to perform the job. When there are many projects they just recruit more people.

I can only offer conjecture, but outsourcing would be the way to do this. The local staff would be responsible for analyzing the client sites and overseeing the work done. Some of the work would be outsourced on a piece work basis and some would be handled by overseas staff. It is possible to hire competent workers with good English skills in several parts of the world for a fraction of what would be expected as a living wage in more developed areas.

I have worked in an agency and even helped found an agency and I can say the way we did it was to outsource. Our staff handled all of the strategizing, management and (most) of the on-site work for clients, but outsourced content creation and other "mechanical" tasks (i.e. directory submissions, social bookmarking, etc., etc.)

We put the bulk of our client's off-site budget toward quality content...not Fiverr stuff (although we certainly used that for filler and other supporting efforts.) Most of our quality content was in the form of infographics, custom produced videos involving locations, actors, and custom music, animation...also press releases with follow up (we got one of our clients featured on FOX Business news, Mashable, and got them partnered with Def Jam Records and Van's Warped Tour) - this was more PR than SEO, but it definitely came with some good backlinks!

Agencies can hire contractors for specific jobs or outsource specific tasks. I've had some job interviews where they just want someone for a 3 month gig for a specific client.

I currently work at a mid-size agency of about 40 employees, and I think I can shed some light on your question. We are broken up into a few sections for SEO. We have a content team, link building team, and onsite seo team. Each team has a few people on it and handles around 30-50 clients total on average. My agency doesn't outsource any of the labor at all. We have developed a set of processes that has made us very efficient at delivering a quality service. Content and onsite seo pretty much have a set of activities they have to do for each client, and it rarely changes per client, so not much time is needed on each client. The link building department has a set list of campaigns we do for each client, but we also have to get creative and come up with outside-of-the-box ideas for unique clients. If an agency has good organization and good teams in each department, it's actually not hard being able to handle multiple clients at once.