Our Worst SEO Clients

Well, I've talked about bad web designers and given my piece of mind over that unpleasant topic, but now I think its only fair to turn the discussion around to our more difficult clients and why we sometimes have to turn away SEO business.

Recently, I had a client who had an IT person in-house who completely sabotaged our SEO efforts. Being a web designer myself, I know I don't like it sometimes when people criticize our sites and tell us what we're doing wrong. I can completely understand the animosity that builds when we walk into a business and take over SEO for a developer that hasn't done a good job in this area. This webmaster changed our meta tags and "forgot" to post some code at the top of the site after we asked him to do this repeatedly. Unfortunately, the client trusted the relationship he already had established with his webmaster instead of good common sense. It wasn't worth arguing and trying to save the relationship and, quite frankly, it was a losing battle.We ended up walking away and giving the client a full refund.

Sometimes problems start after we have to go in and take a look around the site to see how its built. If the site was built on a Customer Management platform (allowing the client to edit their own pages) and all the pages are dynamic, this becomes a real nightmare for a search engine submission specialist. Google states on their site, "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." in its Webmaster Guidelines (This is straight from the "horses mouth" folks!)

This means dynamic sites are very hard to get listed and often work against the website and its creators. We can't do submission for sites that are dynamic because they don't get crawled properly and we're wasting the client's time and money so we won't even attempt SEO with these types of sites.

Another difficult client is one who wants results yesterday which is usually the decision maker. They don't understand that we don't have a magic wand that will put them on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN immediately after we start our work. It takes 2 to 6 months sometimes for the engines to list a site on the top page with Google being notoriously the longest. (Great article about this here.) Think about it this way, the engines get more than 10,000 submissions per month. You have to stand in line behind a lot of other sites and wait your turn just like everyone else. Trust me, not matter how hard we try to reeducate decision makers about the fundamental concepts of SEO, they don't care. They want the instantaneous, magic cure. It won't happen immediately, but if you trust your SEO company and they have a track record of proven work, it will happen within 6 months or less.

The bottom line here is our best SEO clients are clients for whom we have actually built the site. We can completely control how content is put into the pages and in what order. We can optimize the images and the code behind the scenes and we always design our sites in HTML. We do use database and dynamic pages, but those are built in between pure HTML pages. The index page must ALWAYS be an index.html page. Our best SEO clients are also very patient and trust that the job we've been given will get done on a timeline that makes sense. We deliver what we say we will deliver and when we can't, we know its time to walk away in an honest and fair manner. That's all you can really ask for of any company you're doing business with.

 

Comments

[Joost]

Dear Desiree,

Great post!

One thing though. There is a difference between dynamic pages and dynamic pages. For instance; the page we are on now is also a dynamic page, generated from a database and created with a CMS.

The difference between this page and a page with the question mark though, is the fact that this one has a 'friendly url' which is created with mod_rewrite. These pages are perfectly ok with search engines.

[Desiree Scales]

I completely agree with you, but most everyday web designers don't know the difference and do not design their sites accordingly. Also, most CMS tools don't allow for "friendly urls" because they use one template. I'm not saying its impossible, just takes a little more programming and know-how from a good web design firm who understands search engines. Thanks for your comment!