If someone claims they are and "SEO Expert," wouldn't they be rich?

[Charlie]

If they were such an expert, wouldn't they make a bunch of Wordpress blogs, get them to rank on Google, and pump the site full of Clickbank affiliate links, amazon links, etc and make commissions???

[Yoosef]

Only claiming does not make the person rich. But the quality of the value is what make rich.

[Word Urge fiend]

Most SEO experts live in India or Pakistan. Many are comfortably lower-middle-class by local standards. Their net worth could well run into the thousands, possibly even tens of thousands.

As for what they actually do, that would depend on their area of expertise. Some are actually quite good at it.

[Inda Cloud]

A true seo expert wouldn't have time. It's a full time job, and one could easily have just one client and be kept busy on a daily basis.

I know someone who does seo and she has one client. She lives well too.

[Techxan]

The reality of keeping a bunch of sites ranked and making money is that it is a lot of work, and expensive. To many people, taking a website that is already built for a specific market, and getting paid to perform monthly SEO is a steady income is a better choice of job.

Also, SEO encompasses a huge sea of disciplines, and someone who is an expert at keyword research and on page optimization, may not know traffic generation or citation building. The Internet Marketer must understand all of this even if they are hiring the work out.

It is much easier to make a living with a marketable skill, than to learn enough to compete in Internet Marketing and make a fortune.

Making money on the Internet is a very challenging thing, and it costs a lot of money to research, build, and rank these websites because they are so lucrative and there is so much competition worldwide. You have to watch trends and constantly take advantage of what is popular. Every quirk in Google's algorithm can cause your site to drop rankings and lose your entire investment.

In the long run, the SEO provider is much more likely to succeed than an Internet marketer, and their expenses are paid for by the customer. In Internet marketing, you must constantly watch everything, and either do all the work yourself, or pay to have it done. This includes market research, building web properties, SEO, SEM, Social media, site monitoring, graphics, and a ton of other stuff.

By contrast, especially with local businesses, the product is set, the costs passed on to the customer, the website is built, graphics all done, keywords defined by the business product, the competition is generally much lower, and the whole thing is much less stressful.

There are accepted statistics that 98% of people who try Internet Marketing never make money, and even among professionals who know what they are doing and have the resources to do it, only 3 out of 10 endeavors will make good money.

[Mahbub]

There is no relation with an expert and a rich man. An expert can do the work with an excellent. After booking him for your work you may feel comfortable that your work will be done with a grace. They surely demand high but their work also needs more time. So they cannot do much work. Owner of an SEO farm can be a rich man but it doesn’t mean that he is an expert. He may appoint lots of experts to do his clients' work.

[kyle]

Of course not. People can be an SEO expert and not be rich because Google is always changing the SEO guidelines. Each new update causes websites to lose money.

[Hal Smith]

Some of the answers here especially the ones on where SEO experts "live" and what family "status" they have are laughable at best and are totally a joke.

It's like Inda Cloud said, any SEO expert wouldn't have:
1) The time
2) The business. You need a business first to build an SEO campaign around it, otherwise it's just adsense not earning through SEO, and most experts already have that setup

Other than that, most SEO experts got to being experts by first doing it on their sites and working with it and building a reputation and clients and then building a company around all that reputation and keeping those clients satisfied. SEO is not a one day code writing competition to see who does what best, there are so many things to SEO that require time and patience and a steady hand.

Hal Smith
URLdreamer Consultant