The probably provide a lot of consultation about what could be done to improve the SEO of their site. Like the need for better titles, relevant content, meta tag optimization, etc. And some companies still don't have Web 2.0 presence or are under utilizing Web 2.0, these SEO consultant companies would show them what they needed to do.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some black hat techniques being deployed behind the scenes. We all know about how companies have been caught giving their products positive reviews on Amazon and whatnot. It would be foolish to think it stopped there.

I work for a very large media company and have been purchasing services from a couple of "corporate SEO companies". I have done a couple of RFP rounds with them when we started building SEO as part of our strategy. All their offers contained the following components:

- Site structure analysis
- Keyword analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Link building strategy

Note: all this list you must have gone through by now

At the end of the day, the service most of them provide is quite basic and their rates are not cheap. In this case the rate was 1200 USD/day.

We ended up dropping the link building strategy out of the project and focused on on-page factors and keyword analysis. One of their key success factors was their ability to educate management about SEO as well as our operational team. They also managed to convince our techies that SEO is not spamming which had been a bottleneck for me when pushing SEO as part of our strategic agenda.

It seems a big part of their business is to upsell you to their campaign management services after they do the SEO. So basically, first sell SEO then they offer to run your SEM campaigns as organic traffic is only one part of your overall search engine strategy. For SEM they write the adcopy and optimize the campaign, taking 15% of your media budget plus a set up fee. We used their SEM service, as it drastically dropped our cost per visitor without hurting conversion. That was 2 years ago, now we still outsource SEM but with a different model and are thinking of in sourcing it.

We still use them for doing regular SEO, my unit gives them business of a bit over 20k USD a year, and some of our other units are currently running very large projects with them. So yes, it can be very good business. It is also something we could do ourselves, but just don't have the manpower at the moment. I guess eventually we will insource a part of the SEO, but still use consultants in some areas.

These "experts" definetly don't know have the tricks, and I think I am much more savy than them, but in large company they do have their uses.

Hehehe, if someone here wants to do some SEO for me I have one challenging case currently on the table at least it would be interesting to talk.

anyway These companies usually have access to large portfolios of websites from which they "sell" links to the fortune 500 company.
They also purchase links from other blog networks, hence they charge high amounts. The fact remains though, that these links do work and do help improve search engine ranking.

They can charge high amounts to the client as they work alot to make everything look professional. I was just going through a keyword research report by one company and it amazed me how attention to detail it was.. They had produced a beautiful report with the clients logo on it as well.

But at the end, let me tell you straight, you all must be knowing a little or something so called search engine optimization, now all you have to do is spend some time, searching for more inputs and shared knowledge from blog, forums and so on, i am sure you will find more valuable information rather than spending your legs and shoulder over corporate seo companies. i am not saying they are worthless, but if incase you have that much of money to spend, than you are game or else do it as a daily routine by optimizing your blog one day at a time, seo is all about on going process, so don't think it will happen overnight.

Good luck to all