If you have been paying attention to the latest SEO agency rankings from major reports such as that from Jupiter Research, you are probably familiar with names such as iCrossing and iProspect. These companies have been consistently ranked high on the reports from Jupiter and Forrester. But are these guys overrated?

It really depends how you define overrated. These companies are great at what they do. They have designed sophisticated SEO processes to achieve the best rankings possible for your company. They employ and test some of the best and brightest marketers around, so there is a good chance that your company ends up getting a marketing genius to manage your SEO. But here is the kicker. Not everyone gets the A-team with these companies. Not every marketer is a genius, and at some point you are going to be assigned a team that is not worth the large sum of money that you will pay to these companies. In addition, some of these companies are often behind by 6 months or so in their approaches to SEO. So don’t expect these companies to do guerrilla marketing for your business.

The plus side is that these companies have a lot of awards and if you have to sell them to the CEO of your company, you can easily use their awards as the selling points. But other than that, I find these services to be expensive for most small businesses. I personally rather pay a young bright solo marketer a quarter of the money these guys usually ask for to do the job, but that’s just me.