SEO is Amazing, It's Fun, It's Exciting But it's painful.

SEO is Amazing, It's Fun, It's Exciting
But it's painful.
Most SEO is based on:
SEO at the top of the work chain - who evalutes a website, SERP, ranking requirements, testing model. A strategy is built by the SEO based on an analysis, that analysis will then result in the requirements for delegation.
✎ Writers sit below the SEO as the first port of call - an SEO will provide breifs / guidance to writers, those writers are to understand the scope of work, type of content, brand tone of voice, intent, end audience - key messages and priority of messaging based on copy type (selling driven intent, research driven intent).
Web developers can fit in the chain - but the requirement is really down to whether the SEO needs development support or whether the client has their own dev resource for implementation - generally most good, competent SEOs can address most SEO tech issues without the need for a developer.
Either the SEO will buy a load of shit links for cheap as possible to give the client SOMETHING to quanity a deliverable - or they'll sub delegate link acquisition as "outreach", "link earning", "link building" - whatever you want to call it. That sub delegation can be as simple as getting someone who specialsies in it to go and buy links from link platforms or for people to go and earn links via pitching for HARO, crafting digital PR stories and getting them out there on platforms, the output of links is generally quite important for a lot of niches.
Why do so many companies get BURNT with SEO?
A lot of current SEOs in the market are labelling themselves as SEO specialists when they aren't - they are data scrapers & distributors - you aren't an SEO if you think dumping tool data into a sheet constitues a TECH SEO audit - onboard an SEO consultant, seo agency or hire for an internal role - if you get an SEO who isn;t an SEO then the rest of the chain above will fail.
A lot of content writers in the market are have a go heros. Sorry - but from my first hand experience, going through hundreds of writers over the years - good writing talent is hard to find. Most GOOD writers charge a high premium - this is unsustainable for more than 50% of SEO sold - sell an SEO retainer at £2k - how many people will pay £300-£500 per article when you've got links and tech to deliver? There are good writers out there, but many know their worth and those writers are generally always busy - finding good untapped talent is hard - anyone can be a "content creator" but far fewer can craft "good content" - again, SEO chains often fail when the content is crap, poorly written, plagarised, scraped or not properly constructed to fit the SERP / end user.
90% of the link industry is spam, so needless to say the whole link reseller marketplace is littered with crap. Earning good links is hard and can be expensive. Again - many SEO chains fail when it comes to having sufficient budget for good quality links.