The SEO Industry is Changing…Do You Want to Be Part of It?
2024 caused many changes in SEO.
We saw redundancies galore.
We saw agencies fold.
We saw more people reduce prices.
We saw more people launch productized SEO and DPR services.
We saw freelancers emerge as serious competitors to agencies.
We saw prices for SEO and digital PR drop.
SEO went through a crisis year, which has benefitted customers, not agencies.
Agencies want to offer bespoke SEO services at high profit in an uncontested market.
Clients want a crowded market where SEO is cheap, fast and productized.
In a crowded and productized market, SEO and Digital PR lower in cost and are usually delivered at a fixed price, with contracts that have more favourable terms to the clients.
And we’ve seen this becoming more common.
In 2024, I saw fixed fees and ‘cancel at any time’ SEO and digital PR services being promoted.
This is in stark contrast to the post-COVID boom years.
Being locked up and with the government handing out free cash and loans, we saw digital become an area of brand investment.
SEO agencies were in huge demand and could charge large fees for work, as judged by internal hourly rates.
But this changed.
With the cost-of-living crisis and economic issues facing businesses, SEO has become a crowded market.
With reduced demand for SEO, agencies have lowered the price of their offerings, added more to packages, and lowered the thresholds in retainer contracts.
So, what’s that resulted in?
A race to the bottom.
To avoid this, we’ve started to see agencies offer 2 new ‘services’.
SEO for AI and SEO for social search:
AI SEO/ Social media SEO are 2 new areas where there is less competition, and this means that agencies can again charge higher prices. Leaving others to scrap it out in the traditional SEO world.
Niching down has been another technique used for a long time to do the same.
However, while some SEO agencies might be able to sell social and AI search-based SEO services, they’ll run into the same problems.
If it succeeds, it will become a crowded market at speed.
And, once the first retainer periods end, attribution will rear its ugly head.
As such, both services will also end up in the same place as we are now.
All roads generally lead to a crowded market, SaaS platforms and low, fixed prices.
This is why 2025 is the year SEO agencies need to become anti-fragile.
Why Antifragile SEO Agencies (and SEOs) Are the Future
Without understanding the core concepts of antifragility (my advice is to read Nassim Taleb’s book), SEO agencies need to become the opposite of fragile.
So, what makes SEO careers and, indeed, agencies fragile?
Reliant on sector demand.
Reliance on Google and their updates.
Issues with scaling service delivery.
AI impacting service delivery.
AI search.
AI overviews.
SEO SaaS platforms.
I could list plenty of other reasons why the SEO sector is fragile.
Of course, the same can be applied to many sectors and industries, but we’re talking about SEO here.
To change this, SEO agencies will only thrive when they become antifragile.
And this means that agencies need to thrive and grow stronger through adversity, not become weaker.
To give you a quote that resonates with me on this:
“If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
So, what does this mean for you?
As technology becomes more embedded in our market (thanks to AI), as an SEO, we’ll move naturally to a manager’s and marketer’s role.
Whereas in the past, SEO agencies liked to do all SEO tasks at a high hourly rate,
The antifragile SEO agencies will start to look at tasks within retainers and break them apart.
To become ‘antifragile,’ an agency must look for efficiency savings across all its tasks to maximise profits.
Of course, AI will handle much of the work. We’ll also see SaaS and web platforms grow in their ability to handle many previously highly skilled/ manual SEO tasks.
Agencies will also be able to outsource their work to other nations to leverage economic and scaling advantages.
Your skills as an SEO will include checking work to ensure it is done to the required standard and delivering maximum efficiency for clients.
If you’re reading this and wondering how agencies of the future will grow their profit margins, this next part will make more sense.
It’s All About SEO Agency Fame
That’s why I say it’s time to rethink your SEO career.
I say this because we are moving in a direction where agency fame is the only leverage.
SEO delivery is in a race to maximum efficiency.
SEO tasks will naturally gravitate towards the lowest viable cost.
Your job as an SEO of the future won’t be divided by ‘tech or content’.
Your job as an SEO will be one of strategy, management, client service and marketing.
And this might not be your skill set.
You might only want to be the ‘guy or girl in the chair’.
You might only want to do tech SEO.
You might not enjoy pitching.
You might be an SEO who doesn’t want to be client-facing.
If this is you, I’m giving you early notice that SEO as a career will become less sustainable in the future.
This will, of course, leave SEOs to do the work of human interaction.
Building agency brands that are distinctive and famous.
Interacting with clients and providing high levels of customer service.
Creating strategies that deliver across any platform.
I personally like this type of future.
But it’s not for everyone.
This is why I urge people to think about the direction in which their careers and, indeed, agencies are heading.
If it’s not for you, make a change.
If it is for you, move to that future as fast as possible.
Thanks for reading.
Andrew Holland
Originally published on LinkedIn on 6 January 2025.