After visiting a conference last week on search and marketing topics, we’ve been thinking about how to explain why we might be in a unique position to help our clients. Many folks make their living offering dedicated search engine optimization and social marketing services, a big and complicated topic. It might work well if you’re a large organization with tons of content. But we think there’s a better solution for a smaller business than that.

Let’s look at how many websites get built. Typically, you have your website designed by a web design firm. You get back a website that may be very attractive, but also may not have involved much thought into writing the content for Google to find it, or integrating it with Twitter or Facebook properly, or keeping with modern standards so that the work is easy to discover, and so forth. There’s a risk that you end up with something that’s just… pretty.

Afterwards, you might decide that you’d like people to actually find your website, so you hire an SEO firm to come in and fix your website so that it has lots of good content, works well with the Social Web, and all sorts of things that they probably feel should have been there in the first place. Maybe they blame the designer.

So in the end, you end up with a website that’s a bit of compromise. Changes had to be made to the design to make it more functional. Lots of stuff had to be done twice, by two different teams of people.

It’s like you had a brilliant architect design and build you a lovely house. Then hired an electrician to come in and tear up the walls to actually put in electricity. It doesn’t make sense.

That’s why we see things differently.

We do both. We think that’s what a good agency should do. Good ranking in search engines, and a good presence in social media, ideally requires thought from day one. We plan for this from the outset of a project, and follow through after launch, tracking our results all the while.

That’s why businesses like working with us. We don’t just make pretty things. We get results, too.