Why SEO Guru's work for themselves.

I have been thinking allot lately, why some of the top SEO Guru's work for themselves. Now I immediately want to through out a disclaimer and say that I do not claim to be an SEO guru. With that statement in mind, I have come to a conclusion. The reason SEO Gurus often work for themselves is they are often innovative free thinkers that really do things their way, and don't listen to “what everybody else does” or always trust when there boss says, “this is the best way to do it”, and because of their expertise, they really DON't need to have a boss. Furthermore, I think it is also possible that at times their ideas are too radical and cutting edge for the mainstream corporate world.

Yesterday I interviewed with SEOP, they pay very well for my level of experience. The starting pay was 70-90k DOE. I did my research a bit before I interviewed and decided to see how their own site www.SEOP.com ranked in the SERPS. Sure maybe they use to be number 1, but maybe they pushed the line just a bit too much and now are penalized, but either way, they weren't in the top 100 for their exact page title (they were 193), yet they claim to be one of the foremost SEO companies worldwide. I will mention that they did have a few of their doorway pages listed higher that 193. Either way it was for this reason that I took a bit of skepticism into the interview.

Then I got into the room with three of their “experts”. Now I should mention that this job was actually for PPC management not SEO. I noticed right away that two of the “experts” were very reluctant to put forward any ideas, as if they weren't sure they actually knew what that were talking about, and the third guy, a self proclaimed “self taught engineer” was all about making sure I would be able to help him install tracking code to all the websites. Not just drop in the tracking code, but actually alter query strings and problem solve variable issues. This is where the my annoyance began, they seamed to want someone to help more with technical support than PPC and SEO. They were going to “tell me” what I should be doing as and expert PPC professional.

I was amazed at how things had changed since the initial phone call when they told me I would be interviewing for a PPC account management position that would be work from home 3 days a week working on purely bid and campaign management, with an occasional touch with landing page SEO.

First of all this company had promised me a 1pm interview and it turned out to be closer to 1:45, then they had promised me a senior level PPC management job where I could work from home 3 days a week and the first thing the owner said to me is “we would really prefer someone in house”. Keep in mind this is after I drove one hour north from San Diego, CA to Irvine, CA to meet with them only because of the opportunity to only have to travel to Irvine twice a week. Then they wanted to “test” me to manage the PPC accounts. Then they wanted to know the budgets I had worked on at previous employers as if bottom line budgets were more important than, Quality Score, CPC, CTR, and CPA. Am I mission something? When I look at the majority of their ads online, the are very low in quality, maybe that is because they are being managed by someone who is working on a $150,000 monthly budget who has no time to study the actually art of PPC. Apparently same is true with their SEO's. They must be so busy doing SEO for other people that they aren't even in top 100 for their own page title.