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If SEO expert are legit why aren’t they making website that generates money
Posted by on January 15, 2026 at 7:17 pmHello
I am a creator of 3 webapp, and of course I am struggling to have oeganic traffic, so I'm tempted to hire one the expert to help me out. But I can’t help but wonder : If someone truly mastered SEO end-to-end, selling it is usually not the best business model.
Am I missing something ?
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1 Reply
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You would be surprised how many “seo experts” aren’t business savvy. They just know the trade to help websites and can’t think of creating a business model or even find something to sell in my opinion.
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Why do you think this?
Do what you’re good at – finding niches, running shitty little businesses to make money off them is not the most efficient use of a true SEO expert’s time. There’s all kinds of low-value stuff you have to do to build these businesses up, few people are good at all that and SEO.
I’ll just work with people who are already good at running businesses and make plenty of money.
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For a long time we ran our own ecommerce stores and ran advertising on our own blogs. All did well because of our SEO.
Eventually sourcing products and servicing consumers become more work than we wanted. At that point we were already a full service agency and found that doing SEO for our own services and for clients was a more desirable way forward.
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It’s a fair question, and one that many people have asked and many others have answered.
In my particular case, years ago I did exactly that, and yes, I made a lot of money. But I also got bored very quickly. I don’t have a strong commercial drive, I’m quite nerdy, not much of a people person, and I ended up doing a lot of work on both the business and SEO sides. I tried hiring people to handle the commercial part, but I still got bored and eventually let it die.
That said, I know a lot of marketing and SEO people who did this and still do.
Nowadays, aside from my lack of interest in selling some miraculous CBT, magic device, or amazing app, I actually make more money doing what I enjoy than I ever would selling any of those things. (hence why you’d never see me selling anything at all)
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It’s more time consuming & expensive for me to rank for my money keywords than acquiring clients through other channels.
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How do you know they aren’t?
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Because making sites that generate money is mainly a myth.
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SEO doesn’t create demand, it captures intent.
Most SEOs sell expertise because building + monetizing is their niche – most miss the audience/product intent part of it.
-> Intent still decides who wins – know your product, understand the audience it best serves + sprinkle some SEO in, and you’ll start cooking up results before you know it 🔥
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Why dont mechanics build cars?
Why dont teachers start schools?
Why dont Product marketing managers build products
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What if you’re earning $250k a year as an SEO – most online websites dont make that much money.
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My start in SEO was from aff and adsense, picking niches is important, vendors go away, aff models end, you can get kicked out for outranking who you are selling for.. it’s a totally different business model.
Ive met maybe 3 actual SEO”s in corporate business and I never had a “real” one apply for a job.
So you are mostly correct. I bet there are fewer than 2000 actual SEO”s in the business.
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This is why I never went into SEO as a service and hit it reasonably big with my own product selling business.
But.. remember I have overhead for holding products in the hundreds of thousands of dollars at ANY given time. It is a much different business model that takes different skills and risk to achieve.
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There are so many of us who learned SEO in the 00s, made tons of money in the 10s, and have built entire brands or services on the back of SEO that you’ll never hear of. We used to live in old bbs forums (WF, BHW) and Skype groups.
You hit the nail on the head, though. Most people never learn other skills or have the risk tolerance to invest in their own projects and make a fine living working for others. You’re not in an entrepreneur’s forum on r/SEO
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If programmer are legit why aren’t they make ChatGPT or Meecrosoft themself?
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