Like many businesses, in my business my partners can be my competitors. Take one of the bigger marketing and advertising agencies, for example. It doesn’t have to be that big. If it’s got ten full time employees, that’s ten times what I have. They have a media buyer, web expert, creative director, copywriter, designer—I have those resources as well, less the overhead, as part of my virtual network of professionals.

I like working with agencies. They have talented people and good ideas. Sometimes an agency calls on me to help them with a specific B2B client, usual a technology company that to translate all that cool tech stuff into compelling business benefits and value propositions.

And sometimes I turn to an agency for help. Too bad my most recent experience was disappointing. I’ll call it working with the Hungry Ad Agency.

I have a new client that was looking for a fresh marketing approach to reach a specific target audience. Previously, they had worked with an agency to develop and then maintain its Web site. Truth be told, there hasn’t been a lot of maintenance over the past two years; the content hasn’t changed much.

However, I need to work with this agency-because they still hold the keys to my client’s web site kingdom-to develop a landing page for capturing qualified leads.

Well don’t you know this agency, while willing to take on a tactical deliverable, prefers to look at the bigger picture in terms of overall marketing strategy. I agree, that’s wonderful idea, and I’ll be getting to that as soon as I get this campaign off the ground, which is my first deliverable.

The agency wants to include a proposal to optimize my client’s web site for search engines, to help raise its web pages for specific keyword searches. That’s fine; search engine optimization (SEO) is important. And it takes a lot of work: there’s keyword research to perform, page optimization techniques, external linking strategy, and submission to search engines.

But why would we perform SEO on a Web site whose content is two years old? Or when the overall marketing strategy still needs to be defined? The other thing I didn’t like is that the proposal was for a one-time project. But SEO is anything but a one time project. It is an ongoing, iterative, never-ending initiative to optimize a Web site, analyze SEO performance, make appropriate adjustments, analyze SEO performance, and so on.

I think the Hungry Ad Agency is looking to add in some extra work that a client doesn’t need yet.

 I’m passing on the SEO proposal from the agency. They’re right in one aspect: SEO is important and needs to be performed, but start with your marketing strategy, then develop a web content strategy for keeping web pages fresh and relevant, and finally begin SEO.

 I do like working with agencies. But in this case, I have to register a complaint.