WHAT ABOUT BAD SEO Clients?

Bad Client - I've seen in some fiverr gig review or elance rating (don't remember exactly) that a client asked a SEOer to provide login details of competitor's hosting for which he gave -ve feedback.

Personally, I never had any bad experience providing SEO services. When you are good to all, expect same from others. One thing is that you should not talk technical with all your clients, rather explain them how they want it.

As an SEO, I can see things from the other side of the table.

You see, despite trying hard to make it clear I’m a good, ethical, results-oriented, smarter marketing, white-hat SEO, I have gotten no end of inquiries from bad prospective SEO clients.

Sure, no one who gets cheated is ever entirely to blame, and some cheated businesses are entirely blameless.

But the bad SEOs would have too small a market to stay in business if it weren’t for almost-as-bad clients. )

I have had a client that did not pay me for work $100.

I did his work it was just some SEO tasks and stuff easy peasy.
He asked for a report I didn't make one but he only asked after 1 week was up.

I didn't get paid and could do nothing he was a lawyer.

Now Bad SEO Is Known As Negative SEO For Competitors

First, let me make clear what I mean by “bad” SEOs.

Bad SEOs are bad because they either do unethical things to get e-marketing results, or because they consistently fail to deliver results. A good SEO delivers results and does it without trampling over other people’s rights (like submitting automated comments to their websites or trying to get good sites de-indexed).

A bad SEO client, in turn, is someone who will only be satisfied (albeit temporarily) with a bad SEO. Because they refuse to consider ethical web consultants or smarter marketing strategies, they are creating markets for the e-marketing charlatans and black-hats.

There are two basic types of bad SEO clients: crooks and fool–oops, I mean, ethically challenged and judgmentally-challenged.

This is my view of terms... you can point your opinion about it...

I promised myself I wouldn't be posting too much in the coming months due to the general crappiness of this board recently but this is a good thread.

I think a number of people would think that as long as you make payment you can't be a bad client but thats false. The following things make for a bad SEO client.

1) Clients with illogical expectations

Basically those who want to rank yesterday no matter how much you tell them going in it was a long term project of at least a few months. I recently dealt with a few of them from WF. I could not have been more upfront and even have it in writing (chat and email logs) and yet sure enough they wanted to rank within weeks.

2) Clients who buy the wrong package and then want to make the package they bought into something else

In my case people who buy full SEO services from me and then proceed to try and make it entirely a link package. They discount entirely any on page or research you did for the site as not part of SEO and count only link building (like the other consultations and on page SEO work should be free). Again this is actually another WF phenomenon. I never enounter it with my business clients. they see the whole job as SEO. For people who sell mainly links the flip side are clients who then want you to do on page work or complain that their site did not rank when all they bought were links and their site actually stinks for proper SEO

3) The put some lipstick on my Pig and make it into a beauty queen client

there are alot of people out there that think that if they put together a site and then hire a SEO then its then the SEOs responsibility all by himself without them providing anything meaningful to make their financial dreams come true. You may even rank them and they will complain that they are not making enough money but chiefly because there business model just did not work.

All three will eat up a lot of your time and make your work environment very unenjoyable if you let them.

Very interesting thread. Before I became a CIO I was a management consultant and dealt with all three issues. Generally clients don't know what they want and have no clue about what is involved but since they are holding very important positions they don't want to acknowledge their ignorance of the issue. Those few years were nightmarish so when one of my good clients offered me a job I jumped at the chance. I made half the money but slept like a baby.

I have had my share of bad clients. They expect WAY to much for paying so little. Also they NEED to know where their backlink is..... and i say... no the HELL you dont! All you they need to be concerned about is there rank increases, thats its.

good thread btw

Yes Mike... you got it right again..

But those Good clients that pays 1000$ per month are few. As a matter of fact i have 2 of them. The rest is 100-300$ per month .

This are the majority of all clients. So i develop all kinds of services .... from Private network ( with amazing results), from social pyramids, xrumer blaster ( but i tell them on sale page that is on their own risk) , directory submissions ( this is the best sold ), professional writing services.... etc...

All seo field. I always recommend my tutoring service to explain those clients the importantce and big diferences between them but what the hack : in this field everybody knows what they want!!

So i do What you pay is what you get services and they are satisfied. Some of the very smart ask me to make the strategy and got the best results .. But they are just a few unfortunately...

The ambitious but cheap client: “I’d like to get to the top of Google for the keyword, ‘mortgage’ so I can turn over $100,000/month in revenue. I can spend up to $1,000.”

The Adsense-is-my-business-plan client: you wouldn’t believe the numbers of inquiries I get from people who only plan to make money off Adsense or other on-site advertising-they don’t even have a plan for getting repeat traffic, nor do they have content to synergize with the SEO effort. By buying promotional services, they would essentially be buying advertising in order to make money off advertising-you see where that could be a problem?

Another way of looking at it: why wouldn’t I just create a site myself and keep all the profit from my efforts?

In fact, most SEOs do have their own project sites, which are often monetized by Adsense. The money we could otherwise get from Adsense is one very low baseline for pricing our services.

Legitimate SEO clients are typically selling goods or services at a profit rate that works out to ten or more times what they could get from Adsense.

A few people I know started an SEO company in my country and they outsource all of it to me. We made an agreement that local businesses, like profession + city will cost 199 euro ex VAT/month. 50% is for me and the clients are allowed 6 keywords. Pretty much comparable to my $99/month service on this forum.

Now yesterday he comes up with a story that he closed a deal with a company for 10 nation wide keywords and I am like what the hell, that's not the agreement and he go's like yeah but otherwise I couldn't get this client and since we are new in the market we have to do some extra.

Yeah right, 10 nation wide vs 6 local keyword, just a slight difference uhu. Very bad SEO client!

About clients from this forum I don't run into much problems really, sure there is a good % that doesn't rank well with their crappy sites but it seems they know it their selves as well.

I have given a little deep taught about those bad seo clients and i got another 4 stereotypes up :

SEO-Starry-Eyed Clients: “Search engine traffic is definitely the best way for me to get pet-sitting clients in my tiny Himalayan village.”

The Little-Knowledge-Is-a-Dangerous-Thing Client: “Don’t tell me about keyword research, content, anchor text, or natural linking strategy, just get me the PageRank (or links, keyword density, or whatever the fad is).”

Gullible-and-Not-Letting-Go Client: “I know of at least two services that will submit my site to thousands of search engines for $29.95. If you can’t do that, I’ll take my business elsewhere.”

I-Will-Never-Trust-SEO-But-I’ll-Consider-It-Anyway Client: “No one can guarantee a good search engine ranking so this is all pointless-I’ll just go with that $29.95 search engine submission package someone just emailed me about. At least it’s cheap.”

Do you have these types ... if not i can borrow a few... )

Currently i do not have any 1000+ clients but i have a number of smaller clients. Since the updates my business has really sunk. Out of all the clients i have had i only had one guy that really PISSED me off. Apparently he knew more about seo then i did lol. So when i asked him why cant he do seo for his own site then? He didn't like that at all. i got a $600 charge back very shortly after.

These are great stories, they have really taught me a lot. I am just in the beginning stages of my SEo career, I have been doing it for only about 2-4 years now. I have had a few clients who backed out of contracts just as we had finished negotiating. I find that when it comes time to pay up some people "change". I think a common SEO misconception is that you can get results immediately.