So as SearchViz has geared up, I can tell that the industry I’ve re-entered as an agency (after going in-house with a customer for a few years) has matured by the pitches some of my customers are getting from other search engine optimization (SEO) firms. What’s puzzling to me, though, is why so many of these companies are pitching toolkits or packages of reports instead of actual business intelligence.

As an SEO, I’m actually glad to see so much competition in the toolkit space. Honestly, I’m still evaluating a number of available tools (reviews likely forthcoming in a later post) to see whether there’s anything that I can regularly use to benefit my customers outside of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and the AdWords tools (Keyword Tool and Placement Tool), which are all extremely helpful.

But for people who know enough about SEO to understand that it can add value to their businesses but also know enough to know that they aren’t equipped to manage SEO effectively themselves, it’s hard for me to see what benefit a paid toolkit or automated reports offer.

If you operate a business that maintains a website but is small enough in terms of personnel and revenue that you don’t maintain a full-time or even part-time webmaster or other Web professional, I’d doubt very much that you’re going to be able to leverage comprehensive reports or have time to spend interpreting your search engine result page (SERP) trends for important keywords. I mean, you might get out of it the sort of thing that a CEO or CFO gets out of seeing an overview of projects, but you’re unlikely to be able to spend any time leveraging the information immediately in a way that advantages your business.

And if you operate a business that is large enough or mature enough to have a full-time in-house SEO on staff, then this person probably has a preferred set of tools for doing the important work of SEO.

We hope you’ll consider us for the middle ground if you can’t afford a full-time SEO. Because there is added value in getting found. And no matter how smart and refined the search engine algorithms become, there will still be room to optimize the search experience. Because search engines don’t (yet, anyway) control your content; you do. And for a decade, we’ve seen sites designed to look good but not perform well in search. Here at SearchViz, we will still focus on SEO web design by making text text (instead of images) and exposing previously unexposed and uncrawlable pages on entirely Flash sites. Our SEO web design process means we’re designing for both users and search engines.

I’ve known some people who have stated that the concept of business success is making money while you sleep. And the Web and real-time commerce certainly enable this concept. Retail sales and subscription-based revenue models do not require you to be minding the shop to book revenue. But in the world of SEO, just like with much of the Web, where we’re only now seeing some maturity in the content management system (CMS) space, automation is often used as a poor substitute for added value.

Often, the most valuable thing I bring to the table for inbound marketing projects is the consultative process. I should be the one reviewing the analytics and implementing changes recommended by the results I interpret. What I shouldn’t be doing is signing up my customers for a recurring Web-based service that sends an email every now and again and hoping they mostly forget about the monthly charge and never call me.

I tell our customers up front: the day we stop delivering value, you should fire us. I stay very focused on the bottom line. We typically know something about the value proposition and revenue stream of our customers, and we’re lucky to have customers who trust us with their numbers and their data. One of the core SearchViz maxims is that you can’t improve it if you can’t measure it. I’m measuring all the time, and when I cease being able to improve for one of my customers, I either cut my rates (assuming that if I continue measuring, I might see something later that can be improved) or walk away.

Similarly, all of our recurring services come with customer time built in. We want our customers to understand what we’re doing. We offer transparency and thoroughness. That’s where our value proposition is. Customer service as a concept has been remarkably devalued in the big box, franchised, IVR marketplace. We’re prepared to bring it back as an agency.

There might come a time where we develop our own toolkit that meets our business needs perfectly, and that’ll be great. But we won’t use it as an excuse to have to stop talking to our customers. Providing better customer service adds value to our business.

So if you’re tired of seeing a monthly charge on your business credit card for a report you never read anyway or a service you logged into a few times several months ago, and you want to renew your focus on getting found, please contact us. We like customer interaction, and we have great customers.