SEO Consultants and Experts

Theres a third and its EXTREMELY common. The company has a webmaster or IT guy and everything code related to the site goes through him or his /her department. You are blessed to not have run into it but you will as you do SEO for a larger companies at some point. IN nik0s case it might not be getting to the It guy (or one of your other scenarios is at play as you said)

This is especially the case where the company employs code beyond HTML and CSS. Many ASP.net, coldfusion,ruby,Django and even php operations do not want any one but the IT guy handling changes and in some cases the page titles and other elements are generated by scripts so its even more imperative.

In fact even some small companies have a "web guy" that put together the dynamic site and only he even really knows how to interface with it (some crappy code too). It can be a pain in the poorly run companies as the connection from you to the It guy might not be direct and the message doesn't get there but it can be pretty sweet and painless in the well run ones where he/she just pretty much implements what you tell him.

Majority of my clients are real companies somehow, I think there are some other possiblities as well:

1) They don't have access to the web hosting, this happened to me as well long ago when I outsourced a site, or can't find the login details and too lazy to find it.

2) They don't feel much for creating a webmasters account

I think it's more the work involved then trust issues. some might also get scared of the list I come up with or disagree with some things, afterall most are somewhat hobbyists, that's why they find an SEO on these forums, often after trying it their selves (hobbyists in the sense of ranking their own site, not hobbyists in their profession of course).

Quoting money might be the solution. Last time I had a client with a virus issue, I did get login data and access to webmasters account but after a long time, in between she asked twice how much it would cost. Twice I told her it would be free as I already had a good idea where to look and would cost me only 5 minutes, maybe that's what made her sceptical lol.

Maybe I should also be more direct in my communication instead of saying, likely it's this or maybe that but well I'm no psyhic to know everything upfront without looking into it.

This other client had a tag page, some sort of plugin that created a page for each post that he published and added that page to an index/overview page. So we dealt with 100+ extreme thin pages that only contained a link to his post, like a buffer page in between.

Told him to fix that or I could do it for $50,-, he didn't want to fix it as it was so useful that he didn't have to add the link to the overview page. I say dude, you spend more then an hour on that post and add dozens of images to it but you can't spend an additional 30 seconds on adding a link to an overview page. He would think about it, never heard back and never saw anything changed.

So I suppose it's the initial plan that they will do it their selves but end up being busy and forgetting it and at the same time see it as an easy job they don't want to pay for and/or not being able to find login details right away and push it away for a later moment and forget about it.

Could be one more reason that I once ran into in the past and that are expensive web developers that charge $xxx/hour and/or conflicting advices between SEO and web developer. Very possible they outsourced their website to a company for a couple of thousand dollars and the client ends up asking a second opinion from the web dev guy who tells them all is fine and perfectly optimized for SEO. These things do happen, they dealt with a huge company that charged many thousands and I'm some forum noob that builds some cheap links.

Who they trust, the small guy or the huge company that does everything official.