This client has spoken to me before about SEO, but I have previously lost out to other people he had hired to work on his site, some two and four years ago…

Now, the client has come back to me, because:

– what the other people had delivered in the name of SEO wasn’t good enough. it dodn’t lead to any significant increase in sales.

– More than thirty companies had given the same promises and mentioned the same methods. he tried two for two years each and got no significant results.

– my “tough love” approach was very different to the other 30+ design/SEO companies/agencies the client had previously spoken to.

– I was the only one to highlight problems like: splash page, same title on every page, same meta description on every page, www and non-www duplicate content, poor internal navigation, not enough textual content per page, no use of CSS, all javascript embedded in the HTML page, and so on.

It seems like the others were only interested in bulding links, and stuffing the meta keywords tag. So, 1998-style SEO is still alive in many parts of the world.

Heck, he was paying 50 quid per month for search engine submission services (for the last five years, plus) up until last week! Fek!

With the HTML code completely rewritten, the navigation improved, and a myriad of other changes implemented, I think things will change quite a lot very quickly. Most of the URLs on the site will stay the same, except for a few with spaces in them which will be redirected to new URLs (about 3% of the site is affected by that problem).

Heck, the first job is to get some analytics on the site, as he has no record of visitor numbers or conversions for the last year or more. The previous SEO charged a monthly fee simply to let him see the awstats stats pages on the site. Double fek!

Taking your first example – wherein the client rejected your proposed text changes on the homepage of the site. I would have been inclined to open up a dialogue with the client re this. OK, so they didn’t like some of your proposed changes – no problem; but surely a middle-ground could have been found.

If you were allowed to explain what you were trying to do with the text changes, and the reasons why the changes needed to be made, then alongside the client you may have been able to create some text which the client was happy with AND benefited the client in terms of rankings.

By the way, there’s something wrong with the way you’ve got the Sphinn button set up. No votes are showing here.

Client communication is a skill you pick up with experience. It takes a lot to learn how to tell them what they don’t want to hear in a way that they want to hear it. It’s not about who is right from a technical standpoint, but how the communication can occur given the constraints the customer operates under. Tough love may not work — it all depends upon the context.

I too work for an agency – and my sometimes incredulous responses to client requests has gotten me in hot water in a few different instances.

I guess learning the “nice” way to say “that sucks” is the key – fortunately I dont have to do that much – I make the account managers “soften” the tone of my replies before they go to the clients 🙂

Great piece, I think my record is 28 “WTFs?” in one day!
~Carrie

Sphunn!