

How SEO companies scale - SlightGenius

I've always been curious how SEO companies manage to scale and automate?<p>Large SEO companies want to automate repetitive tasks, so they'll create software to scrape relevant sites along with emails, content fueled through API's to create massive websites for the sole purposes of creating own links, and automate processes such as publishing on article sites (ezine, articlezine, etc...).<p>I've read software like xRumer will even automate a conversation on forums, not sure to what extent though.
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janesvilleseo
Disclaimer: I work for an SEO agency.

Scaling is a challenging thing, but as with any other company it depends on
the growth of the company itself. If the company is not gaining clients then
there is no real need to grow. But let's assume that the company is growing
and gaining clients at a brisk pace.

How to scale: Finding people who are actually qualified in SEO is tough. Each
firm does things differently (White Hat vs Black Hat). The best way to over
come this dearth in talent, is to actually train people who want to learn and
have a passion for SEO. If you time it right you will have a cycle going so
that once the pupil turns to master there will be sufficient clients for that
person to handle on their own.

While they are in training you are able to pass on the tasks that take a lot
of time and are less client facing (implementation, link building, report
generation, etc).

This allows your master to spend time developing the strategy and training the
student.

Automation: There are tons of tools to help in various aspects. As for the
program you mention, stay away. That is unless you want to see short term
results and unhappy clients. The true gains in automation come from not
building out crappy links, but by increasing your ability to produce
meaningful results thru efficiency gains of repetitive tasks. While that
program helps you do that in the short term, it is not a long term solution.

An example of a true gain would be as simple as automating your reporting and
monitoring of the various signals that are important in SEO.

As a side note, some of those Large SEO companies who do what you say, may not
be so large ;). They may be doing that because either they limited resources
or don't know how to do it the right way.

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Animus7
An SEO company that starts automating more than they don't has given up on SEO
and turned to spam-for-hire. So I think you're asking the wrong question.

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SlightGenius
Well providing a competitive analysis of your website/company is purely
automated now a days by SEO companies. That is one big example.

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mattgratt
Ross Hudgens (who's one of the best white-hat/grey-hat link guys) wrote a
great post on this topic - [http://www.rosshudgens.com/link-brokers-can-rule-
the-interne...](http://www.rosshudgens.com/link-brokers-can-rule-the-
internet/)

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franze
the art of scaling SEO for a company is to make SEOs superfluous. there are a
sh*tload of activities a company does anyway (marketing, biz dev, product
development, q&a, ...) - all these parts of a company, all activities of a
company can be SEO optimized. if the companies scales its activities, so their
SEO efforts scale.

in theory very easy, the hard part is to make it happen. so you basically need
someone who is half psychopath/sociopath, the other half consultant.

if you are interested, google me.

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vyrotek
I was recently told about an SEO firm near me that has a farm of college kids
sitting in cubes creating fake blogs and content to create back links. Talk
about scaling out.

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SlightGenius
I've noticed a lot of companies have started doing that.

Some have automated software that finds good targeted domains purchases them,
auto populates content, and then pays freelancers to create relevant articles.
Octante360 did a good job of it.

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starter
How? Not well. SEO is in the service industry. Someone needs to do something
to get paid. If you want scalability, build a product that people need.

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RealGeek
I know of SEO companies who have an army of laborers working for $4 a day in
India. They build thousands of fake blogs and link farms.

