Sometimes there is an advantage to hiring a smaller SEO firm. This is because in some cases the firms that only do consulting lose sight of the details. This is because they have forgotten how to take care of the details.

In this article I explain why you need to keep focus on those details and how you can do it, especially if you are one of those SEO “consultants.”

In my day job I am one of the “consultants.” With most of my clients I define the long term strategy required to ensure their online success. I’ve taken sites with zero visibility and virtually no pages indexed to having over 4 million indexed pages and more than tripling their search engine referrals in an extremely competitive market space.

I’ve also worked with still other sites in other very competitive industries and been able to bring them the most qualified traffic, increasing their conversions by four fold and more.

And it did it all without once opening a web editor or FTPing a file.

Yet sometimes I miss the old days. The days when I used to build sitemaps and create meta tags. Nowadays most of my clients are database driven sites that have teams of tech’s in foreign countries that implement my recommendations.

And that’s why I keep a few clients that need the hands on experience (That and I have my own sites to play with). I do this because I don’t want to lose my edge – my ability to properly optimize a page.

Because while I can still draw satisfaction when I see a client crack the top 3 on a competitive phrase for the first time, and I can rejoice with them when their sales hit a new all time record, I sometimes wish I could have been more a part of that success then just a voice at the other end of the phone.

But I’ve also learned something else in my time in this industry. That is, you have to have sites you can touch and “get your hands dirty” so that you can more intimately understand what is really affecting the engines.

Let me give you an example.

I recently had a client who sold discount test vouchers for technical exams. It’s a pretty competitive market in that the you are always competing for Microsoft for “MCSE test” and Comp TIA for “A+ exam” but it was rewarding because this client said to me “do what you need to.” And that’s what I did (short of cloaking and other black hat tactics mind you – I kept it all above board).

So I had a bit of a routine. On one month I’d optimize, on the second month I’d do link building and on the third month I’d build/tweak content and re-optimize.

I kept this routine for over a year and in that time I saw his rankings and traffic steadily improve.

But the way I did it wasn’t merely consulting – extolling the virtues of best practices. It was in the doing – the looking at the currently ranking pages to see what they did, and then emulating it if I felt it was appropriate. Trying to find the little loopholes which could make a big difference to my client.

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