I still enjoy reading the most sour guy in internet marketing, Aaron Wall. This is his summary on his home page of what you get from SEO hahahahaha:

WHAT YOU GET When you SEO
-Totally Arbitrary selective ex-post-facto enforcement of guidelines!
-LendUp’s doorway pages: still rank
-Monopolistic bundling.
-Justification for duplicity.
-Scrape-n-displace.
-Endless fearmongering.
-Wild algorithmic swings.
-Soul-crushing uncertainty.
-Responsive AMP Plus HTTPS … arbitrary complexity to increase the chunk size of competition & defund SEO.
-Ad-heavy search results driving organic listings below the fold.
-“what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits.” – Matt Cutts

For anybody that wants to have success in SEO, you need to produce results when clients pay you. Seems obvious. But take the latest industry craze. Making sure a client’s info is correct on all directory listings. Yes, the search engines like it if your NAP (name, address, phone #) is consistent on all directories. Yes, there’s a consensus in the industry it’s good. Yes, it does take work to do it. So what’s my problem with it? Doing this work doesn’t cause clients to get more customers and make more money. People selling this work say: “it helps improve SEO rankings”. Well ok, that’s possible. But it doesn’t solve the SEO problem of lack of real estate on the 1st page. The fact that there’s maybe 5-8 spots for local businesses to pop up organically. It doesn’t solve the problem for how much competition there is to be in one of those 5-8 spots. And guess what, you’re going to have more than 5-8 SEO companies that know what they’re doing, doing the exact same directory work that everyone else is. The problem in the SEO industry is that people want to get paid for their time and work, but don’t want to be accountable for whether the client makes more money. Why do I care? Because it ruins the credibility of SEO. So much to the point where no one will want to pay for it because they’ve been burned by it too many times. People that do SEO need to be able to point to tangible results and if they can’t, they’re contributing to the problem. For years, some people have predicted the death of SEO. And I believe that we could reach a point where SEO dies. But it won’t be because it’s not possible for SEO to make people money. It would be because no clients want to risk losing their money because of bad experiences of paying someone to do work that’s worthless like working on directory listings.