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Why SISTRIX is not an SEO-Agency

At conferences and Industry-meetings, I am asked what exactly happens within a SEO-agency on a fairly regular basis. In these cases, I will most likely have a puzzled look on my face and once I reveal that SISTRIX is not an SEO-agency, that look will usually migrate from my expression to those asking the question. Seeing how it seems that, in general, people do not really know what exactly it is that we do and why I decided against building a SEO-agency, I would like to take the time and write a little bit about our work.

In my eyes, SEO is, by far, different from the other onlinemarketing-branches, with which it is being lumped together. On the one hand, SEO is strongly affected by strategy: to be successful, you will often have to delve deeply into established structures and processes and adjust them. On the other hand, in general, the leverage that you get through SEO is much bigger when compared to other methods: you can create significant user- and profit-streams with comparatively little effort and expenditure. Both of these points, combined with the fact that solid SEO-work has to be laid out for the long-term and the problem that it may also take some time for results to manifest themselves, makes a cooperation with customers rather difficult. Customers want to see immediate results and there is also the subject of a fair billing for both sides, which is not quite so easy as Andre has already noted.

Luckily, the SEO-sector has an alternative to working with customers: your own projects. We use our know-how to further projects that we developed ourselves. These will then make money through direct partnerships, affiliate-programs or AdSense. The big advantage of these projects is that once you have set up and established structures, in general you will still make money off them for years to come while their support-expenditures are often very low. Another benefit is the fact that we can invest a large amount of our working hours into real work and not into the planning of where we should next set up booths for our customer acquisition. Looking back, I think that I made the right decision – especially considering the multitude of new “SEO-agencies” that are pushing onto the market and whose strength are rather in marketing than in SEO. There are still some customers that we work with, but that is mostly because both sides are enjoying the cooperation and not necessarily to make big bucks.