Let’s face it, there are lots of Search Engine Optimising companies out there that have been ‘sacked’ by their customers. There can be many reasons for this, from simple poor performance thought to great performance but still not at the level that the customer wants (see my earlier blog on setting customer expectations).
But this blog is not about the customer sacking the SEO expert, it’s about the SEO expert sacking the customer. From a business point of view, the idea of actually telling a customer that you don’t want to work with them any more is far from appealing, after all money is money is it not?
Well that might be the view of many, but not for me. I take a pride in what I do. And, bearing in mind that I am being judged on very strict criteria, i.e the rankings and traffic, if I feel that the customer is not taking my advice, well, what is the point of the relationship. He is after all only going to blame me in the end when it does not work..
However, I doubt whether my views on this matter are agreed with by many, so I imagine that the sacking the customer act is not likely to occur frequently. But, I still stand by this rule and have recently had to put it into practice.
I’m not going to mention names here, but needless to say, the customer wanted what all customers want, a front page (No. 1 please) place on Google for a term that was shall we say competitive (nearly 18 million other pages wanted it). I was not concerned at the level of competition, any battle can be won if you have the right equipment and knowledge (a little bit of luck helps too – Napoleon himself said ‘I don’t want Good Generals, I want Lucky Generals’) and the budget the customer was allocating was fair too.
No, the problem was that the site that wanted this ranking was not up to scratch. I did the research on the competition and worked out just what was needed. The winning strategy it seems being content quality and depth. Sure I can optimise a site for certain words (do it all the time) but when you are trying to get to the top in certain areas, Google seems to take a much wider view than just for the one page. They start looking at the whole site, what it brings to the Internet community, in much more detail than they normally do. This means that content, relevant, non duplicate content is needed.
In this particular market place, it was clear that the competition knew this to be the case and where making quite sure that they covered the ground in full. I knew we had to fight on even terms. I was not asking for the job of writing the content (although I said we could get it done), I just wanted it on the site so that I could interlink it all together and impress Mr Google. But no, he was not going to ‘go to that trouble’.
So what do you do, stick with it and know that you are going to fail, or say, no, I can’t work that way and politely part company.
As you can guess, it was the latter direction that I choose to take and perhaps if more SEO companies did this it would help the web, after all content is what we all want, so let us inspire all to include it on their sites. That way we all win.
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