Much as I agree with you to an extent, I think that there is still significant merit to specialisation.

Clearly it would be unwise to listen to an SEO agency that made recommendations with no regard to related marketing disciplines include web design, copywriting, usability, paid search, email and affiliate marketing, however, as they are all more established disciplines (aside from paid search) I would argue that it's more likely that a senior SEO engineer with have a reasonable appreciation of them than the other way round.

Equally, I think that web design and digital agencies that claim to offer SEO are now ten a penny and few of them are likely to have the level of skill and insight, not to mention up to date knowledge, to get results to rival the better dedicated agencies.

Also, regarding your point on them gaining AdWords professional status. We claim to be search marketing specialists, and employ a three pronged approach including organic SEO, PPC and web analytics, as we believe that they complement each other.

PPC is a great short term solution and sometimes also profitable for ongoing campaigns, as well as being an ideal testing ground to assess keyword conversion rates, if not offers and strap lines too. Besides, they are the two sets of listings comprising the leading search engines' results pages, so arguably their strategies should reinforce each other anyway.

PPC information can be invaluable in the early stages of SEO campaigns helping to prevent expensive mistakes, as not all high traffic keywords convert equally well.

Also, as one of the biggest advantages of the web and search marketing is their improved traceability as compared to most other marketing channels I believe that web analytics is an important piece of the puzzle allowing us to prove our ROI as well as enabling us to continue improve our performance in future.

Finally, the fact that we're a dedicated search marketing company means that while we work with an appreciation of other disciplines, we don't end up in power struggles with companies existing design or marketing teams (whether agencies or inhouse), ultimately we always have in mind the fact that we will be judged by our results from SEO.

On 09:55:06 26 September 2008 TimothyRoberts wrote:

I've just read a press release published here on e-consultancy by Vertical Leap.

It seems to suggest that to be a good SEO company you need to do nothing else but SEO. It seems a bit rich coming from a company who's last press release was about them gaining Google Adwords Qualified company status.

We're a full service firm, but we're driven by our natural search activities and do everything else to ensure best results for our clients.

We've written about this on our SEO blog, I feel quite incensed by the press release, I can't see how any type of extreme polarisation can be of real value to clients and to suggest it is, is wrong.

We'll have to agree to disagree then. The fact is, many, many, many web design houses and people who claim to be great at every aspect of websites "seo-friendly sites" create sites that are utterly pants at SEO.

The frontline here is that great SEO starts from the ground up with site structure and planning. But many web houses and people use packages that do things in a certain way (ie CMS or eCommerce packages) so the needs of SEO are secondary to the creation process.