When I worked for an agency, I like to think they pitched 'white-hat' SEO.
The sell to clients was that there was no magic snake-oil involved, it was:
1. Make your website easy for Google to digest (which could involve some dev work, fixing bugs and markup, speeding up sites, mobile websites)
2. Understand what your market is and what they might be after (which led to a lot of analytical work)
3. Make quality content that makes you an authority (which involves content strategy, and cross-sells into copy and creative)
4. Properly promote your content for backlinks (the agency had a lot of success with promoting creative pieces to sites with strong link equity, such as Daily Mail Online etc.)
SEO is a dirty term, but a strategy for creating what is useful and can actually strengthen brands isn't evil.
#3 can devolve into a bunch of competing content farms that end up burying the legitimate information from people who know and care. #4 is just the reality of modern journalism, but it's still pretty darn disappointing that "journalism" is so strongly influenced by and often consists of PR.
The sell to clients was that there was no magic snake-oil involved, it was:
1. Make your website easy for Google to digest (which could involve some dev work, fixing bugs and markup, speeding up sites, mobile websites)
2. Understand what your market is and what they might be after (which led to a lot of analytical work)
3. Make quality content that makes you an authority (which involves content strategy, and cross-sells into copy and creative)
4. Properly promote your content for backlinks (the agency had a lot of success with promoting creative pieces to sites with strong link equity, such as Daily Mail Online etc.)
SEO is a dirty term, but a strategy for creating what is useful and can actually strengthen brands isn't evil.