Are SEO Companies Lowering their Prices?

When I decided to learn everything there is to know about SEO, about 5 years ago, there were a few SEO consultants that I found to be notably truthful, practical, focused and they did an excellent job at conveying their knowledge. There were 3 optimization experts that I chose to follow closely and continue to follow until today.
To date, there is no “official” training or certification that is required in order for someone to call themselves an SEO pro. The average business owner who does some or all of his business online does not truly grasp what SEO is or what to look for in an SEO consultant. He knows it’s really important to SEO his site and appear in Google and other search engines. And as more and more SEO companies sprout up from India to Argentina to Israel to California (outsourcing to Russia), the range of pricing is quite varied and clients are getting more and more confused. They struggle to grasp the differences in the services offered or what they can/should get for their investment.
I started to write this post because I was surprised to see that one of the top SEO experts in the US has lowered her prices dramatically. She attributes it to the recession but I think it is more related to an overall trend in SEO becoming a commodity. And the other two experts I follow long ago ditched the consulting side of their businesses presumably because it could not continue to make business sense to go client by client. Both of those gurus now sell subscription services to all kinds of SEO tools – some decent, some not so decent.
It is really hard for clients to understand what is required. There is an abundance of information and misinformation out there. So services are being offered like off the shelf products – link packages, per page optimization, keyword reports by the pound . . . Prices can get pretty low because it is easy work that in theory, can be outsourced to an Indian firm or a student with some experience. I think everyone I have ever met who has worked at a large SEO company has either become independent or is moonlighting.
We spent about one year offering SEO services and learned quickly, that it is not how we should be positioned. Not because we can not compete but because we know that the traditional SEO expert, especially in Israel, are not taking a healthy business approach to their work. Whether it is getting links from hundreds of worthless websites, generating automatic content and littering the web with yet more crap content or adding lots of senseless pages to a website, techniques that have no real value other than some short term impact in search (and even that is being addressed more effectively by the search engines every day), are bad for business.
I still write about and talk about SEO. But it is not the same SEO most people are talking about. We build the SEO into the online business strategy. No one should be allowed to do SEO for your business until they really understand the business and its goals. And even then, they should understand how to make the SEO both contribute positively to your image and be productive (convert). I just can’t understand how a business can turn over such an essential part of their marketing to someone who does not really understand business. The nice thing about our positioning is that it attracts good clients who “get it”. And for those who don’t get it and feel confused, we are happy to spend the time to explain.