I'm sorry to say, but my first reaction was "How much are they charging for the PDF?"
There are a LOT of SEO snake oil salesmen out there. Or maybe there aren't that many, but they're bad/loud/obnoxious enough to give the majority a bad name. Unfortunately, the result is the same...
So, when hired, you'll make a specific claim like "You'll see a 462% increase in traffic from organic search engine results in 2 weeks."?
Your case study is pretty, but it's not predictive, you just say "We did [proprietary stuff redacted] and afterwards traffic jumped." I'd be impressed if you'd published this PDF beforehand and said "We'll increase traffic to the site at least 3x by 2 weeks from today." and your case study was about how you did or didn't meet that specific goal. (And don't even get me started on the fact that the site with the big percentage increase went from 5 daily visitors to 25, or that you seem to claim that your changes were instantly reflected in search engine rankings.)
I'm not saying what you do is snake oil, just that I've never seen an SEO confident enough to make a testable, quanitified promise. It doesn't sound like you're making them, either.
Not at all. SEO is like farming, we can lay the ground work, but there are tons of factors out of even the best SEO's control. So if SEO is farming Google is the weather. That's why it's an art and not a science.
We can and do apply best practices and we do a good job of increasing traffic and conversions for our clients, but there's no SEO that can guarantee anything. (Unless you're doing black hat which is fine, but is always a short term solution and we usually shy away from that.)
The interesting lesson is that this trivial story made it to a high spot on Hacker News. It is just as with that satire of xkcd: just put some stick figures on whatever you have to say, and people will love it. Obviously it works with fairy tales, too.
Then again the lesson is not that interesting, it was known before.
To be honest, I thought the story was rather stupid. The lesson about SEO would have been more digestible as a "top ten SEO tricks list", and there really is nothing wrong with continuously trying to improve one's site. It is not an unavoidable consequence of trying to improve one's site to end up using black hat SEO tricks. So the story was plain wrong. Maybe the one moral is to not rely on SEO consultants because they might do stuff to your site that is not really beneficial - OK. But to make that single point, the story was too long.
There's a more insidious meaning in that article: Men are reasonable and don't want more than they need but have no balls to stand up to a wife that keeps wanting her husband to get MORE MORE MORE. The SEO stuff could be abstracted over and it would just be a folk story.
