SEO Is Easy? Let’s Look At The Hard 5 Percent

The SEO world has always had its supporters and its detractors, and it's never made a great deal of difference. The bigger battles often waged within the community between the whitehats and blackhats. The whitehats would rant and rave about how the blackhats could get clients in trouble and how blackhat tactics generally junked up the SERPs. The blackhats would fire back with, well, not much really. I suppose they were mostly busy with making money. This internal squabbling was largely ignored by the outside world and that was fine. Lately that is not the case.

There is a new battle waging, and on one side you have people calling SEO 'stupid easy,' 'bullshit,' 'snake oil' and so forth. On the other side, you have folks like me taking some pretty serious offence to our livelihood being denigrated by non-SEOs. A large part of the argument is that SEO is 95 percent easy, and it's the other 5 percent that is what we really get paid for -- and that 5 percent is the slimy stuff that makes the web a worse place to be.

We're going to take a look at that 5 percent in this article based on actual work I've done for real clients. These clients all have one end goal. That goal is revenue – pure and simple or, more specifically, targeted traffic that converts by handing over their hard-earned money for your product or service. Revenue is the only measure of any relevance. Traffic and rankings are just fluff, if you're not making your client money.

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