Every major industry started off with companies trying to stake their early claim on the market share of clients. Eventually, smaller companies cannot compete with big budget companies who are networked, and have investors supplementing money into their business. The increase expenditures into advertising, online marketing, campaigning, and word of mouth due to superior service and funds, causes a shakeout process where all the smaller companies are relegated to work within their local area. The bigger corporations begin advancing their way throughout the world, branding and advertising their products and services in Asia, Europe, and South America's developing countries. Soon after, even those loyal to small businesses will amplify any small problem with their current company, in order to find a reason to switch to a bigger, more trustworthy corporation.



What does mean for the SEO industry?

Is the formula so bleak? Not necessarily. Eventually, Google and the internet's growth will cause more small businesses and thousands more searches by humans over search engines. Certain SEO companies will expand exponentially, and will become SEO giants across the world. SEO will be so widely recognized that it will be commercially televised, and understood as a regular concept throughout humanity. Even now, millions of businesses are not even aware of title tags, or the fact they need to have specific content related to searches, they simply believe if their website is on the internet, it should attract clients.

The only way for these small SEO companies to keep competing in the future, is now, in the present. Create a customer base, keep attracting more customers, and provide solid SEO service. Give your customers reports of their increased traffic and new keywords, display their results, and their sales conversions since your SEO Company began working on their website. If SEO companies don't focus on brand loyalty towards their customers and providing superior service, the customers will eventually go to reputable SEO companies which are already dominating across search engines.

Time will tell whether the internet continues to boast hundreds of SEO companies. To my belief, once we enter the franchising and licensing era of SEO, you'll see less free lancing, and more free lancers working under big companies for large salaries due to their know-how. Understanding SEO as of now is truly a secretive trait, but once it becomes more main stream, the competitiveness and knowledge of people will also grow. Another disadvantage to SEO is the fact you can do it straight from home, which will give more incentive for self-taught SEO specialists to learn from home and develop their own personal businesses, staking their own market share through local ad requests.

Over in India, SEO companies are developing their workforce and SEO software technology rapidly, and are able to grab SEO clients instantly due to their low priced economy, something the North American search engine optimization industry cannot possibly compete with. Local North American SEO clients will have problems trusting SEO companies overseas and will continue to hire locally, so Indian SEO companies have been targeting SEO companies to outsource their clients to them for cheaper labor and earn the majority of the profit.

With all this movement in the search engine optimization industry, we can expect a major shakeout within the next 10-15 years, resulting in a few SEO giants which will own franchises worldwide and promote websites online.