Is Utah SEO the New Utah Web Design?

I started my SEO firm in Utah in 1999. Except back then we weren’t an SEO firm, we were a web design firm, and we were at the tail end of the time when it was easy to start a web design firm, as we soon found out after the stock market crashed in March of 2000. With SEO we were slightly ahead of the curve in that we got into it several years ago, and only now in 2007 has the market started to become saturated.

If you had done a search for “utah seo” two years ago you would have found a handful of companies offering SEO services, and most of them were like us, web design or web development firms that offered SEO as a secondary service to the primary services. Today, most of the companies coming up in the listings are full-on SEO companies offering search engine optimization as their primary service. I suspect a similar trend would be seen if you researched other geographic areas as well.

So who cares, what does it matter? Well, for SEO firms, it means the scene is more competitive. You have to do more to stay on top of the game. I used to do virtually nothing to maintain the #1 spot for all the keywords I wanted, now I actually have to do some work, darn it. But a flood of SEO providers isn’t bad news, it’s good. It’s a sign that there’s a legitimate market that’s growing, and if I can keep my firm in the upper rankings, then that’s a good thing. I’d rather be getting 5% of a huge market than 50% of a small one.

For those purchasing SEO services it’s also a good sign. More competition means lower prices and higher quality (too bad people don’t recognize that this basic principle of economics applies to our public school system as well). So it’s win win. The only losers, perhaps, are the firms that offered SEO services as a secondary service but which now find the market too competitive to maintain a foothold, but hey, even they win. After all, I stopped offering content management systems and custom web app development recently, primarily because I was having more success with SEO, so now those firms don’t have to compete with my firm for those jobs any more.