Are you a bad SEO client?

People make much ado about bad SEO consultants and firms, and yes just as in any other industry you do get mediocre and unethical optimisers. On the other hand, people find it just about impossible to realise that they themselves can be incredibly bad optimization clients. Often an ethical optimiser that works to best standards and is results driven, is faced with clients that are not in the same ballgame. Bad SEO clients fall into different categories. However, but across the board they make life incredibly difficult for the optimiser that wants to give his client value and the best possible services.

Clients with dodgy ethics

There are clients that have a very grey cloud enveloping their own standards of ethics, especially around SEO. If an optimiser politely points out that the suggestions the client is making is unethical and screams of spamming techniques, the client becomes agitated. Most times the client will reply that “everyone is doing it, so why won’t you”.

Often such clients will accuse an ethical optimiser of simply wanting to milk extra money out of them. They believe that experts are out for money instead of getting their websites to first place in the SERPs. Clients sometimes have the sense that if it is not completely unethical, but just dodgy, it is allowed. Clients such as these simply fuel the fire for unethical SEO’s that indulge in black hat tactics.

Clients with impaired judgement

This group of bad clients are often much more difficult to deal with as they do not expect unsavoury and unethical optimisation services from a consultant. Their expectations are simply not realistic. These include ambitious clients that insist it is possible for an optimiser to get them to the top ranking spot for a completely generic keyword on a miniscule budget.

There are the stars-in-the-eyes clients that are convinced that all it will take is SEO to get them website traffic even if they are promoting ski holidays in the Sahara desert. There is the belligerent client that threatens to take his business away. He is convinced that there are plenty of optimisers that can get him ranked and submitted to ‘thousands’ of directories.

There are also the clients that negligently wave a hand and demands that the optimiser must get him top page rank and not talk nonsense about keywords and other silly fads. The negative attitude client hampers an optimiser greatly. He is already convinced that all this SEO nonsense is really senseless as it does not really work.

Conclusion

If any of the above scenarios are vaguely familiar to your own situation, it is time for some soul-searching. Clients that want the services of good SEO’s must first have realistic expectations and have solid information, not hearsay or information from unreliable sources.

An optimiser can only work with a realistic budget as optimising is time consuming and labour intensive. If you come to the table with dusty ethics and expecting to get excellent services for free, you are heading for trouble. The chances that you will fall victim to the smooth talk of a bad SEO is great. In the end you will have spent money and your website will pay the price.

Related posts:

1. Content misconceptions that kill your ranking
2. Keep it ethical – keep away from con artists
3. What are SEO design mistakes?
4. Proof of the pudding is in the doing
5. In house or outsource, the key to a solution?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.