What are your thoughts on an SEO contracting business?

[tucktaco1]

I would email companies asking if they want to be ranked high on Google on a monthly basis. If yes, I'd take the website info and give it to a subcontracter who does SEO. They would give me their price. Then I'd add 1k dollars on top of that for my payment. I'd propose this final price to the business.

They will get monthly high google search ranking which will most likely draw more people to their business and get them more profit.

I have some questions.
1. Is this a legitimate idea?

2. What are the best websites to find an SEO subcontracter?

3. The big one. Taxes. Do I have to do something like a 1099 for every single business I do SEO for?
Thanks

 

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[Jérémy de HelpIn]

1. It is, but be aware that SEO is a highly competitive market.

2. For SEO, select an agency with no long-term contracts, who already owns thousands of websites to put backlinks on and with good client reviews.

3. No idea for your taxes.

 

[sdbrownlie]

I would email companies asking if they want to be ranked high on Google on a monthly basis. If yes, I'd take the website info and give it to a subcontracter who does SEO. They would give me their price. Then I'd add 1k dollars on top of that for my payment. I'd propose this final price to the business.

They will get monthly high google search ranking which will most likely draw more people to their business and get them more profit.

I have some questions.
1. Is this a legitimate idea?

2. What are the best websites to find an SEO subcontracter?

3. The big one. Taxes. Do I have to do something like a 1099 for every single business I do SEO for?
Thanks

Many of our customers are SEO 'agencies' who do exactly what you're proposing. They buy links from us, content from some content agency, web design from an outsourced design firm etc, occasionally use a freelancer to do technical reports/analysis etc (but usually end up doing that part in-house in the long run as it's easy/just a sales thing with some technical waffle to back it up).

From what I've seen of the most successful ones you want to aim for way fewer clients and way higher mark up than you're proposing. Most of them have a minimum retainer of $5k+ and will only spend half of that on the stuff they outsource each month. That means you have to be very good at sales (better than me...) and turn down a lot of people BUT once they have a client book they have very good money coming in with very little hassle given the lower number of high margin clients they manage. The ones operating on tiny margins with loads of clients coming and going tend to end up with too much cost in dealing with all those people to really be what you'd consider a 'fastlane' lifestyle.