I recently spent a few days in New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey, and got to meet with great friends at consulting firms. One conversation in particular stuck with me regarding the hardest project they'd worked on in the last few years. It got me thinking that I should share a few of my most challenging SEO projects, and see if the community had stories they could share, too. I learned a lot in my short chat on the subject, and I'm hopeful that will translate here on the web, too.
Thus, my top 3 "toughest" SEO projects over the last decade were:
- The "I Just Want PageRank 10"
It's hard to believe in 2011, but in 2005, Moz really did have a client who's entire goal was increasing toolbar PageRank. He was a very wealthy individual who fretted over his PageRank score in comparison to a rival's organization in the same sphere. We were able to grow it from 6 to 8 with mostly white hat stuff (yes, even I used to dabble with link buying back in the day), but when he continued pressing for a PageRank 9, we gave up and sent him to a link broker. We provided very stern, very aggressive warnings that this could hurt his traffic or even make Google penalize the PageRank score, but he wanted all the options and did end up spending a small fortune on paid links. To my knowledge, the PageRank score never went above 8/10, and of course, since he wasn't doing any keyword targeting to speak of and didn't care about traffic, the value of those links was virtually nil.
_ - The "Breaking Out of the Sandbox"
One of my first few SEO consulting clients, starting in 2003, was a commercial lender in Seattle. I did very old school SEO for them (not knowing any better, and really learning the practice as I went along), jamming anchor text and links wherever I could. Unfortunately, this was right around the time of Google's "sandbox effect," which a Googler explained to me once as "an artifact of something else we created." For nearly 18 months, I fought against the sandbox, earning #1 rankings for nearly every term in MSN search and Yahoo! (which, at the time, had much more significant market share), but page 10+ on Google. Then, suddenly, one morning, we were #1 across the board in Google, along with a number of other sites that also "popped out." One odd element of the sandbox was that Google seemed to release sites en masse, similar to the Panda updates this year. We celebrated heavily, the company started getting customers and over the next few years, we paid off a lot of nasty debt.
But, I remember most that every day and every night, I did virtually nothing but crawl the web (manually - there weren't any tools like OSE or Link Intersect) and try to find link opportunities of any kind. I hadn't really discover the power of inbound marketing, and the social web was nearly non-existant outside of blogs + forums, which I used heavily. Walk to work. Build links. Walk home. Think about other places to get links. Eat dinner in a crappy, old 500 sq ft. apt. with Geraldine. Build links until 2am. Get up. Do it again. I sometimes wonder if we hadn't broken out whether I'd have career at all today.
- The "Linkbait that Brings Customers"
Later in my career - around 2007 - we had a client that wanted to invest heavily in linkbait, but wasn't quite sold on how the process worked. To be fair, neither were we. We'd seen plenty of examples of linkbait being very successful in driving links, which then drove great search rankings and more high quality traffic (vs. the typically more high-bounce-rate visits to linkbait pieces) and on occasion, we'd had success with a linkbait piece that did get email addresses or trials of a product. But, this was in the housing/real estate field, and those consumers are very research-heavy. It's hard to get a first-time visitor from any channel to fill out an application or leadgen form in that world, but this was the project, so we executed the best we could.
Needless to say, it failed. Of 3 linkbait content attempts I recall, 2 generated some decent links and 1 was a real success, but only from a links perspective. The customers never appeared, and the client left, unsatisfied. If I recall properly, we refunded half of the cost and lost money on the deal overall (we hadn't charged enough in the first place, honestly), but wanted to preserve a positive relationship. Lesson learned - create realistic expectations and don't agree to a project that goes against the laws of marketing.
Of course, there have been (and still are, though I only provide consulting pro bono and through Q+A, now) plenty of other big challenges, but these ones stand out in my mind. I also asked some folks on Twitter and Google+ and received some terrific responses, highlighted below:
You can read the Google+ thread here and see Twitter replies here (at least for the next hour or two). I'd love to continue the conversation and the sharing in the comments. I'm flying back to Seattle tomorrow, but will try to be in the comments. I've also got a post coming tomorrow AM on a new Linkscape update.
No comment.
HAHA I thought it may be best to keep silent on this issue as well :)
However, against my better judgement:
I have lots of other grievances though I think the first one was the most difficult in terms of education and meeting demanding (unreasonable) targets and the second is something that I see with loads of clients and again, is about education. Though what makes it tough is when the client refuses to do the activity without some sort of estimate.
I must agree with Cyrus! ha ha we all have tough gigs and early on in our careers may have done tactics that I'd advise against as well. IMO it's that challenge and the ever changing world that keeps us here!
One tough gig I had was a SEO brand reputation management case for a very large law firm around 2 years ago.
Basically what had happened was their was a crazy ex customer who kept attacking the firm, via all forms of media both online and offline.
Once we engaged into Brand Reputation Management and clened up alot of this guys mess he had made in Google, the angry customer took aim at the agecny we worked at sending death threats to us, sure enough the police were involved as this guy rocked up to the offices looking for any one who worked on the specific law firm as a client.
This was all after the guy was re funded by the law firm, it was all quite an experience.
Sure enough once all the storm passed, the firm did treat us very well as we had increased business by around 1400% on Google, and business for law firms is huge, you also have to abide by very strict guide lines set out by the local legal bodies, so it was a huge learning experience for them.
But law firms do know how to treat its agency very well they took us out to numerous expensive restaurants and wined and dined us =) So in the end it was worth all the hassel =)
In my first job as a SEO I was sent to a company for a day to teach them how to use Hitwise. I had never seen Hitwise before.
My company said "we are counting on you to pull this off"
My last company seemed to be made entirely of hippos. Near the end of our relationship, I bet the farm and convinced the CTO to come with me to the 2 day SEOmoz conference in London.
Tom Critchlow said at some point "I can teach SEO to anyone in half a day". Cue "why aren't we #1 for all or keywords, it only takes half a day to learn everything you need"
I've had people sending me links to blog posts/articles that 'prove' certain aspects of SEO don't work - things like keywords in anchor text and title tags - just because that particular author says no, with not even a link to any sources - this is when this person has already asked me for proof that something I want to do works! I usually send them a convincing link or two that 'proves' we never landed on the moon, and that Paul McCartney is actually dead - that sort of thing. If you want to believe it enough, you can get 'proof' of anything on the Internet!
The "my [insert relation] did a degree in [random tenuously related subject] so they know what they're talking about..." is another good one.
Oh yes, or the brilliant: "I feel this will make/makes a difference" (despite what the statistical analysis of the last 18 months says).
I think that we have to differentiate between tough SEO gig but challenging and rewarding and tough SEO gig as a synonim of "shittiest SEO gig".
In the first case I'd include to invent from nothing not just the SEO, but the entire web presence of three tv websites. Tough because I knew nothing about web marketing (and even less about SEO)... I mean, I was buying Movies and TV Series until the day before! Secondly, because the budget was - retrospectively thinking - ridicoulous. But, I can consider that my team and I did a good job: shame that the evolution of the italian TV industry in the following years meant the disappearence of those channels and their webs.
In the second case I'd include a period I worked in house. The boss was of the kind who centralized everything and was not able to delegate decisions: substantially he wanted to be SEO, PPCer, Content Strategist, Link Builder, Dev and Web Designer at the same time...
One word: mesothelioma.
My toughest SEO gig is still haunting me to this date, its not a client or an internal project but upper management!
The phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" come to mind with them. It's the same old story...they read something posted by someone on a "expert" blog and they think that’s it, i know SEO. The constant recommendations to implement spammy and out-dated tactics are annoying to say the least.
The other irritation is the fact they do keyword research, they don’t task it to the SEOs they employ but do it themselves and proceed to moan when clients static stagnant updated sites don’t rank for a keyword such as "valve".
I find it the most frustrating thing about working in this industry and it quite often make me want to walk away from it.
Sounds like we were both working on the same project... ;-)
:-/ Sounds frustrating. But stay with it, because in the end your experience will trump the 'little knowledge' card - you will be shown by your results. Don't give up :)
You need to strike back and show them research why ranking for things like "Valve" are way to braod. Show why the terms you are ranking for are more CPA driven for example.
I find that if you strike the problem before the storm hits it can be good, that is why we try and make decks for upper management to educate them before things happen.
Stick with it, it does get BETTER, we all have / had crapy projects and account managers one time or another who simply have no idea wht they're saying and make crazy promises to clients. You'll be #1 for 'valve', no problem!
Probably the well-known TV personality reputation management project. Our first piece of advice was "stop doing the stupid shit". Needless to say, that advice was not heeded and it set the pattern for the rest of the project. The results looked worse when we finished than when we started - due to new things that came out during the course of our work.
Now I'm curious to know what was the best thing you have learnt from that "gig" :)
That is the one thing that turns me off so badly about reputation management. I worked on a case once (one that Rand hasn't mentioned here!) where results were not only difficult to move due to being on very prestigious websites, but new results would pop up too. It didn't appear that anything had changed in terms of the things that had earned them the bad reputation.
"I'll treat your pneumonia, but please, please quit smoking..."
Had a minor but good looking celebrity who also has their own business sales line named after them.
They phoned up to get us to get Google to take down all the partying/drinking images of them that all the newspapers posted and linked to and make Google put the shops items in its place. We said we would ask Google but couldnt guarantee anything...
I think this is the best approach to let the client know about what is possible and what’s not! Like it is possible that after doing everything things may not change (Although it’s very rear)! Like in your case may be after doing everything every request you sent to search engine there are chances that Google may not turn down the images...
Me: "Sure, I can optimize that 4400 page website. It will take a while, as you probably know.
--- 1 rotation of the earth occurs... ---
Client: "Hey, are you done with SEO yet?"
Me: "Um, no."
Client: "Why the hell not?"
It just does downhill from there.
haha good one.. I've got the same problem... push things towards the clients, send them reports etc... no responses from them. A few weeks/months down the line: "Why aren't my rankings increasing? Why such low visits per month?" HEADACHES!!!
that's easy: SEO for the world leader in sports betting - 4 months, hundreds(!!!) of dev man-days later and a few people kicked out of the company - we managed to change the footer links.....
no really, at one point i realized that 7 dev teams which represented about 70 devs were involved....
let's just say i now prefere to evaluate the company culture before i take on a big - established player - project.
AMEN.
I had a client who thought he knew SEO. He believed he was only hiring me to manage SEO. He also argued SEO was a "set and forget" process... refused to listen and would randomly email at all hours of the night asking why he wasn't showing up for "random term + location" in Yahoo and Bing but was halfway down the 1st or 2nd page in Google....
I've been there.
A recurring trait of my clients is their curiousity over random keyword phrases.
The worst case when your client thinks he knows SEO! I got such a client few months back I ended up with him within 2 months of time! Can’t take 10 emails a day from one client only!! :S
Some of my biggest hassles have been working in-house. At least agency-side there are good clients and bad clients - if you're working full-time, in-house for a 'bad client' then it can really be a lousy experience.
I had one 3-week nightmare with one company in particular (so bad that I don't include it on my CV or LinkedIn). For the whole duration, the Marketing Manager wasn't there, but they still wanted me to make SEO & PPC changes based on her previous work, even though I didn't know what she'd done / not done (i.e. what worked and didn't work), and didn't know her future intentions. They wanted me to write an SEO plan too - completely blind, with no guidance as to what they wanted to get from it.
Oh and the best bit (although not strictly SEO): they wanted me to help with social media, even though Twitter & Facebook were banned company-wide (even for the Marketing department). Figure that one out.
Aha! The PageRank 10 people! I remember that very well. It was one of my first link building tasks, as a very junior SEO.
I believe they went full steam ahead with the link brokers too, because I've seen some very poor links pointing to them that we most certainly had nothing to do with.
The best thing was, the local version of Google in the country in which they want to rank was also 8. But there was no convincing them of anything but PR10's magical qualities :\
At my first full time job after uni, I worked for a woman who was very print-focused and had only extremely basic knowledge of the internet. She insisted that every single page of the 10,000 page ecommerce website was printed out and then photocopied multiple times to hand round to staff to check. I'd made a large number of copy edits on each page to avoid duplicate content and get text on category pages, most of which she insisted on reversing by scribbling notes on the print outs. I knew it was time to leave when she asked us to do the same for the 8 other websites/brands the company owned...that and the fact that they deleted all the pages at the end of the season and had the system build new ones every time.
Nice post, Rand.
Thanks for sharing the less-than-glamorous early parts of your career - it's inspirational for those of us who are still up late in our crappy apartments, trying hard to get links.
It sounds like a lot of your "toughest gigs" came from creative, unique assignments from clients (here I use creative and unique in place of other adjectives) - it looks like the sandbox issue was the only search-engine inflicted issue. I wonder how many of the other folks surveyed have bigger issues with clients then pure SEO.
Also, from looking at the Google Plus thread, it looks like the issues roughly break out as follows:
- SEOs working with Small Organziations - Links/Content/Budget
- SEOs Working with Large Organizations - Bureacracy/Red Tape/Getting Technical Changes Made/Organization Buy In
(This breakdown is completely consistent with my experience.)
Oy. Could I tell stories.
But mine -- an everyone else's -- often have a common theme at their core.
"A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again."
- Alexander Pope
Too many clients attach too much importance to isolated factoids they have picked up from random blog posts. Often, the information is wrong or outdated, or they have ripped it out of context. They fixate on a single tactic. But life is complicated.
So is SEO.
Client education is an important part of our job. But so is saying no. I'm happy to invest 3-5 hours in trying to land a new client...including an in-person pitch. But it's gotten to the point where I can spot hopeless cases upfront.
Definitely for me it's been the small business effect - they're spending a lot of money (by their standards) so they expect the earth, and the moon and if you could just thrown in a few gold stars there too, that'd be fab...
I think some of the more tricky clients I have worked on deal with local SEO. With certain local business types it becomes difficult to get their sites ranking and getting traffic due to the SERPs displaying mostly local search results. Especially when it involves a highly competitive category for local businesses. Ranking for terms related to restaurants for example becomes very challenging in big cities or downtown areas of cities where there are thousands of restaurants competing to show up in the Google Places 7 pack on the first page results. In these situations I think you have to be more creative and really expand on your SEO strategies to bring in those quality visitors.
Jeebs...I've had to stop reading - these comments are almost making me reconsider a career in SEO! Some scary stuff. ;)
I think perhaps the most important thing if the client wants to get heavily involved in the process is education; if they aren't willing to listen or be educated, and won't let you get on with your job, then perhaps they're not worth the money they're paying you. Finding out their expectations and how hands-on they are, are possibly the two most important things we need to know before taking a client on. Don't go into it blind! Saying that, often a client who wants to get involved is a great thing, so it's about weighing up which way they'll go.
Thankfully SEOmoz has some great resources and tips that we can show to non-SEO folk - it often helps.
Working with smaller clients is very much about education and it helps tremendously when they are hands on, and have a willingness to understand. I work with 2 clients in particular who I commit to training a few hours a week. This has a compound effect of them seeing the impact of the work they put in, as well as keeping me on my toes. I'm a great advocate of the idea that there is no better test of what you know, than to teach somebody else what you know.
Following on from gfiorelli1's slant on the shittiest SEO gig...
My first ever client was a new ecommerce website with no previous SEO work done, they used a basic OsCommerce installation as their platform which had been coded by two different people at different times and was a complete mess!
This was also around the time of the sandbox effect on Google. After tons of work sorting out the site, link building and all the rest of it we finally escaped the sand box and jumped from no where to page 1 rankings for many of our keywords.
Organic traffic jumped from next to nothing to around 500 - 600 visits per day almost overnight and the business began taking many more orders (they sold quite expensive items so this was very worthwhile for them).
The worst thing?
Bearing in mind I was charging them hardly anything for the SEO service (my fault as it was my first real customer and I had little experience) they went and hired somebody to work for them full time who they got to take over all their web development and SEO work which was promised to me!
The best thing?
6 years later the site is essentially still the same, all their web guy has done is upload more products and applied a new skin to the OsCommerce installation.
Their rankings have slipped lower than when I left them and they are obviously to scared to make any changes to some of the SEO landing pages I created as the title tags and body text have not changed one bit in 6 years! ha ha
Two come to mind.
First was a LASIK surgeon in a tier 1 city whose previous designer had built the site in Joomla and somehow broke it so that we literally couldn't update anything. After enduring a few weeks of listening to him scream obscenities at us, he finally allowed us to convert the site to HTML (hey, it was a small site). We got him up to the second page once we were able to make edits, which was quite a feat considering that he was targeting a fairly saturated major city from the suburbs. He insisted (in more abusive, threatening phone calls) that the website wasn't bringing in any leads, but would not let us have access to his form emails (third party, and definitely not our choice) and wouldn't let us use a tracking phone number, so we had no way of countering him except to point out that since the beginning of the recession the search numbers on LASIK had dropped off considerably. I really wanted management to fire him as a client. He was clearly unhappy with us and no monthly fee on earth is worth the abuse we took from this guy. Oh, and he threw fits when he didn't see himself on the first page of AOL's search results. Because that was HIS search engine of choice. I thought that was rather telling, too.
Second was the private medical group that wanted to rank along side some very authoritative heavy hitters on the order of the Mayo Clinic and Web MD with a site that was less than two years old, had a fraction of the content, and on which they were willing to spend almost nothing. To make matters worse, they passed off all of their social media efforts on an account manager at our agency when they really needed someone full-time in-house to manage it, and were adding tons of content for procedures and conditions in which they had zero interest where lead generation was concerned. "We're getting tons of leads for X, Y and Z, but what we really want is Q."
Edited to add a third: This one isn't a client horror story so much as a tough project that ended pretty well. I was assigned a website that was built almost entirely in tables, was a mishmash of the "new" site and a few pages from the previous version. Once I got into the file structure, I discovered a third version of the site from the paleolithic era, and all of those pages were all still live, though disconnected from the main version. And at some point, someone wisely decided to move all the testimonials from subfolders (each had it's own, GAH!) into the root folder, but never 301'd the subfolder versions. It was crazy sorting out what needed to stay, what needed to be redirected, editing content using two different half-broken CSS schemes. I even found pieces of code that were still sending info to a web designer from three agencies ago and sniffed out another piece of code that looked like a botched attempt by a previous scorned SEO to install something to prevent it from being indexed. It was crazy and tedious, but in the end it was really satisfying. This client liked us so much after all that mess that we were able to talk him into a full redesign. I kind of wish I was still involved with this project, because I sense that getting him out of the table mishmash is going to be amazing for him.
The worst experience for me was when I was hired by a certain "businessman" to overlook his “search engine”. Add to that the website which I had to work with; it wasn’t even complete as the contracted designer had abruptly stopped over some issues.
It gets worse though, the person wanted me to get him “first page Google” for keywords that had nothing to do whatsoever with the service we used to provide.
I stayed there for as long as I could and obtained good ranking for the keywords that were applicable but we parted ways in the end.
Its difficult to work with those who do not understand the basic concepts of SEO.
A reputation management job for a company with multiple ripoff reports and a very persistent enemy who posted more negative reviews every time we were able to get their SERPs cleaned up.
Of course, our first suggestion was to stop doing what made their clients so angry to begin, but they were one of those companies who cared more about their public perception than their actual customers.
I had better luck with a similar project.
The client knew nothing about SEO but was very open to huge changes, including:
- new website and new content
- blogging over the names of top execs
- multiple, high quality directory listing that buried the negative results within 30 days
- press releases
- general de-cloaking and ore transparency about an opaque business
Lucky you! The only one of those tactics this client was open to was using press releases. Ah well, learned a lot from that gig and have moved on to better clients.
I would have to say that after reading the blog and 90% of the comments the "Toughest SEO gig" is simply managing expectations of the clients and being confident in what you can, or can not do. If I had a client that said I want #1 rank on google for x,y, and z terms in a week and those were non-negotiable terms of the agreement in their mind my job then as an SEO is to realize that its a waste of their time, and mine, to even try. It would be more effective to let them know what a realistic goal is and let them know they will be hard pressed to find anyone who can make that possible but they are welcome to look. Sometimes being new to SEO can feel like being a "starving artist" and cause you to take cases out of need for income, but if we in the SEO world fee those unrealistic expectations we will continue to see people frustrated with us and badmouthing SEO as a whole.
It may be just me but I have begun to view SEO like being a web site fitness trainer. If I tell my clients they will loose 20 lbs in 2 weeks and all they have to do is watch me work thats not realistic. They have to understand that SEO is not about content, and links, and rankings its all about the customer, and untill companies understand that they are still watching TV, eating bon bons, and expecting the 20 lbs to melt right off. Its not healthy for anyone involved.
I think the toght part of the job is dealing with customers in a market that is still maturing, like in Brazil, for eg. Nice post Rand!
Yeah I support your comment.. also still fairly young in South Africa. Problem is keyword search volume is relatively low in developing countries, which makes keyword research tough as well!
hey nice another SA seo. You can extrapolate a lot for SA from general english language queries tho. Problem is more the horrific websites that are the norm in SA!
My first ever gig was this issue and man it was tiresome! I started in April and just hustled literally everyone I could to try and break out of the sandbox - I even hustled Rand to give some advice. No one really had an answer - Google didn't have an answer.
I put in developments and did a load of checking the site out - architecture was pretty bad but there wasn't much we could do without spending a small fortune...
Then on the 22nd July it just came out of the Sandbox - probably the defining day of my career so far. Traffic went up by 80% in a week and then we continued, redesigned the site and did a ton of link building pretty much exactly like this:
In the end, FHM.com got the website of the year in our media group awards, got nominated for four industry awards, and global search traffic was up by 200% - yes, 200% - in 12 months.
Heavy gig. Heavy reward.
I guess a few here can relate to this one:
Customer (in this case a big cooperation) comes along and basically wants EVERYTHING with a minimum budget.
Problem: The EVERYTHING included things, which had nothing to do with SEO but which the department head in charge had picked up somewhere on the internet.
We started with the stuff we could do while at the same time educating our client (I was with an agency then) about what SEO actually was.
The really tough part was the constant, counter-productive interference. The money was good but the hour-long phone calls and meaningless weekly meetings got to me.
At one of my old places of work, which shall remain anonymous, we had a major disconnect between sales and the SEO team for the client. We often got clients with unrealistic expectations.
We sold this HUGE client, and told them we would only do white hat link building, no articles, no directories, and - for good measure - that we wouldn't need to add any content to their site. In addition, it was said that something like 30% of our links would be on blogs, and that below PR3 was not ok. If someone knows of a way to get 70% non-blog white hat authoritative relevant links and show ROI, you are a better SEO than I :)
The toughest I ever had was an SEO project for a ... convenience store!!
I still can't figure out why on earth our sales rep sold SEO to such a client. I mean, is there any business that can be more "localized" than a convenience store without franchise?
Budget was really, really low; Around three hundred dollars.
I ended up promoting an offer on a local groupon clone, and hopefully, the client was happy about the results. Call this internet marketing... not SEO, but well!
This sales rep freaked me out honestly...! :)
One of the toughest gigs I did a few years back came to me through one of the old school social networks (which Ihad ceased to update). The guy had a peculiar problem. He was a basketball enthusiast, was working at a New York Univ but wanted to take up a career in absketball journalism. His requests were:
Get me to a place where I can pitch to the NBAs, ESPNs or some biggie firm for a gig
Make sure that my name search in Google shows my name and doesnt have other folks appearing.
The trouble was that his name was similar to a popular TV actor and we had to work around wiki entries and similar stuff.
It was a hard toil, but he paid off. He was the social media guy for the knicks last season and now a community manager at a good basketball company.
Fascinating! Thanks for posting.
yeh, i have one for you, but its not exactly difficult for SEO.
I had a gig a couple years back. These were the things that they wanted.
To be ranked number 1 in 1 week and make money online.
Needless to say, I was able to negotiate the term for a longer forecast and succeeded in the make money catagory.
Their site never made it to the #1 slot, but would flounder between 3 - 6 position of SERP.
Yes, their ROI was a success, made $$ online.
Now here's the kicker that everyone did not know is that the conditions that I had to work with.
-client did not want to refresh their (makeover) websites appearances (old Front Page)
-was using an 03 shopping cart, (which I broke and put it back together) trying to change the placements of image and gallery/checkout buttons, etc...
-because i needed to work, I traveled daily(mon-fri) 6 hrs/day by bus (saving gas) to make ends meet.
This gig lasted 7 months, until I moved on to other projects that were closer to home.
Nice post Rand, its great to hear real life stories which turn into great success (ie where you are now). All that hard work has paid off. Reminds me of my own father, you have to work hard for success.
As for my toughest SEO gig, well I only do (try to!) SEO for my own site, the hardest thing I find is applying SEO for rankings, I understand it but just find it tough when carrying out the work.
SEOMoz has helped though and I am slowly getting to where I want to be. Nothing is easy in this world, well certainly not if you want to get somewhere.
In my experience, the toughest situation to be in is one in which different internal forces (C-level, Development, PR) are all pulling in separate directions. Everybody thinks that their toes are being stepped on, and they instantly start resisting change, making progress really, really difficult. An SEO is only as good as their supporting cast.
Great post. The sandbox days really were the worst. Honestly, how do you sell a client a marketing service that won't render any success for at least 6 to 9 months?
Have found some sites can have great improvement in rank, visits + enquiries / conversions in as little as 30 days, however a good SEO should be able to sell on the basis, that for certain sites may not be sufficient local or long tail demand to convert quickly and may take from 6 - 18 months to feel full benefit of SEO. But once it works, will be well worth while.
If this is the case and unlikely to convert quickly, should encourage a full range of online marketing services initially, using PPC Ads - Google, Facebook + Twitter and social networking in tandem with SEO, for short and long term results.
Once SEO kicks in, can either scale down PPC Ads, or solely focus them on sources away from the search engines and let SEO pick up visits from search engines.
Personally try and stear all clients towards splitting their budget between SEO, PPC + Social Media for best results, aware this can divert funds away from your own pocket, however online marketing now very different to how it was a few years ago.
I'm sorry... I had to chuckle when I read about your client who wanted a page rank 10. Unbelievable!
I do a little in-house SEO here at the company -- nothing serious. Mostly I help our actual SEO. I worry that we're the worst gig he's had, thanks to having a dodgy SEO before who taught us things we're still unlearning. I don't know how many times our guy's had to say, "Yeah, that's not actually how it works..."
I'm so sorry that you had to refund your customer's money for the link bait gig. It really must have been tough. Also that's crazy that someone cares about their page rank so much. It means nothing. It's like the guy's buying a ferrari and gets angry that his neighbor got bugatti veyron. I think the client's link bait problem could've been solved if BloggersCompete.com launched earlier. I actually know the Founder and he gave me a free contest credit on the site. Basically it gets a crowd of quality bloggers to blog about a topic and link back to a URL with specific anchor text. All bloggers write unique content on their blogs and push it out as much as possible on facebook, twitter and Google+ inorder to try and win the contest. Your content goes viral and the Bloggers get paid if they win. It's a link bait maker's heaven on steroids.
Anyway my worst gig was when a client told me that they couldn't pay for the rest of the campaign because they couldn't accurately measure results from the rankings I achieved from them. Google Analytics wasn't enough for them. Lesson learned on my part. I never do SEO unless I own the site.
Got First page rank for the website www.msnindia.co.in for the keyword "msn india" with almost single page iframe website(minimal seo compliant). Pushed MSN assets down on google first page.
The only major problems I've had so far, have come from senior management, most of the clients are / have been great, particularly since working exclusively as a freelancer.
More risky working freelance, less financial stability and can take a while to build up a profitable client base, however means can choose which clients want to work with and do not have to deal with any bad senior management :-)
Still very early days in my freelance SEO career, however now building up a nice balance of clients, on a monthly ongoing basis, long may it continue, relatively hassle free :-)
When I landed an oral contract with my first "big" client, I essentially put all my eggs in that one basket, referring other business to colleagues while I developed a plan and educated them on some of the basics of SEO.
Before they ever paid me a dime, the client tried to execute my plan themselves.
Unfortunately, they didn't execute my advice correctly (they didn't understand that nofollow links existed, for instance). They later got in touch with me, somewhat apologetically, asking me to fix the work they'd done. I refused to work with them again, and moved on.
What made this SEO gig so tough wasn't the actual SEO, it was the politics and greediness of the client.
The experience definitely helped me realize that we have to be choosy with whom we work..!
I'm glad to here you sent your PR10 chasing client to a link broker rather than continue to take his money knowing full well there was no value in it for the client.
I'm really in two minds about the ethics behind working for unrealistic goals when the SEO is full aware that the goals are unrealistic or have llittle value.
If i asked a reputable builder to build me a house out of chocolate i would hope that that builder turned down the work out of pride in their work and to protect their reputation.
Personally if a client wants something from me that is of little or no value i won't sell it to them and make it clear why.
I'll offer an alternative solution that has real value and they can take it or leave it.
OK, its the one I just started working on...
"Clean" obsessed client who insists they will not have more than 3 side by side paragraphs of text on the page.
In the next breath, "how long will it take to get us on the front page in Google?"
[With 178 words of text? Right.]
As with anything in life, if you hired a firm because you didn't think SEO or design were in your area of expertise, you were right the first time.
I would say that my tough ones typically fall under the "we don't listen to or sign off on anything you want to do. Then we complain when doing nothing winds up not working."
However there are two that will always stick with me as wonderful learning experiences.
First job in SEO the company wanted to rank for highly competitive keywords without actually using the words on site. This (as you can guess) was daunting and ultimately unsuccessful. I could never get them to appropriately understand that "if you want to rank for it, you have to actually talk about it."
My second favorite was a company I never actually did work for. It was during a setup phase. They refused to believe that a "competitor" was a website that could take traffic and business from them online. A competitor was NOT the people next door without a website even though they did the same thing. They terminated the contract because I suggested we look at people with successful and relevant websites as competitors to evaluate what they are doing to help with their new website. "I've never heard of this company. I know the guy next door." "He doesn't have a website. That's setting the bar pretty low. This person ranks 1 - 5 for everything you want to do well with." "But I have never heard of them. We need to re-evaluate the contract."
They haven't really done much since then other than ask us why we didn't do anything with the contract they cancelled.
Not really a GIG but since it feels related enough, here is the toughest hurdle I am having right now.....
I am not able to know what prompted a filter on a specific keyword phrase and/or a page. Company ranked on top 3 for many competitive phrases except a specific page for a certain phrase.
- Checked all websites that linked to that specific page: no links from shady sites (farms, etc)
- Checked neighbourhood of all those linking sites - again, nothing really dodgy
- Check anchors of those links, nothing overly repeated or anything.
Acquired high quality/editorial backlinks (white hat) but its been over 8 months now and rankings for this phrase and page does NOT budge at all from the current 17th position. Inquired with 2 very well known SEOs (1 is consultant). One could not find any explanation for this and the other is currently doing a review. Its almost like Google permanently froze that page and phrase in that position......
A lady running a DMO that was completely computer illiterate. Like couldn't email illiterate. Her "internet girl" told her that the site had "1.5 million hits last year" (based on server logs, of course) and she wanted TWO MILLION "HITS"! Our business development guy says "Sure, crazy old lady who has no idea what I'm talking about, no problem."
We install analytics on her site. She's averaging about 10,000 visits a month. She doesn't understand it. I explain it to her. The business development guy explains it to her. She's enraged. Drops us.
I no longer work for that agency. It was a nightmare.
After reading the comments above, I have come to the conclusion, that most clients are not just demanding but stubborn :)
Most of the comments above are just duplicate contents but different keyword research strategy. SEO is a chanllenging task/job, and would remain so as long as we don't have a general standard across the industry.
Overall, I just love it when you can prove to a client that they can't progress to the next level without a seasoned SEO expert (in-house or SEO Agency)
I worked as in-house internet marketing guy for a music instrument retailer (UK based). It wasn't my only role in the company as it was small and had few employees. The main difficulties that occurred on a regular basis concerned new products, and no communication to me about the product, when it was coming in etc, but with the expectation to deliver results far quicker than is possible with my white hat on. It wouldn't have been unusual to hear something like "Alex, we've got 5 of new Roland digital pianos coming in next week - can you do the SEO on that, I'm expecting them to sell very quickly!"
It was a constant battle to manage expectations. I learnt a lot about communication, and trying the spot the potential issues and making sure to communicate as much as I could, and always confirmed by email, with specific requests to ask if they understood. There's always going to be a blind spot somewhere along the line, its just how you deal with it at the time.
I currently work with small companies now, and I've got to say I love the challenges that I face. Yes there are frustrating times, but I'm very lucky that I am genuinely interested in the companies I'm helping, and more importantly the people as well. I can always walk away if things don't work, cause sometimes things just don't work, they are broken.
The most difficult SEO project I have worked on and still am, is for keywords related to medical conditions. It is very difficult to out rank .gov sites and wikipedia but I am slowly making progress.
Great post, Rand. It's is great reading over the ups and downs of the MOZ community. I know I have experienced the hills of this roller caoster ride we call SEO.
One of the most difficult task I have experienced was working with a company that actually built websites. I provided them with a ton of recommendations on how to re-structure their site, and provide valuable content. They implemented about 25% of my recommendations and then came back to me and asked why they weren't ranking. I told them they had not followed through on what I had recommended. They disagreed (why? I have no idea. The recs were in black and white on paper), but it's clients like that, that make our jobs difficult.
I had a freelance client last year who had just had a new website developed for them that they wanted to promote. At least, that was the start of the story.
I later learnt that they had fallen out with the company that developed the site and it was not possible to make changes to the sites structure unless I could do them myself through the cms. The homepage was badly designed and was a 1.5mb download once you counted the huge transparent pngs.
I managed to get it down to 400kb but found that to make any changes was a nightmare. In the end I decided to focus on other things and I recommended they employed someone full time to look after their needs. They did, happy days.
Getting the client to respond to proposed suggestions and implementations to improve their SEO performances.
PS! "Please send me proper content and not just links to websites with rubbish content on it. Thank you!" OH for heaven sakes, my blind puppy responds better than most clients!
I'm relatively new to the world of SEO but was recommended to a friend of a friend to do SEO for their ecommerce site. The site had no SEO at all so was a great learning experience as it was in a dreadful state. I loved the work and started making a real difference however I got to the point I was banging my head against the proverbial brick wall as they listened to nothing I said. I was told the design of the site was the most important thing and they would not change anything (loads of images, little text), that 90% of the traffic from the SE was people searching for the brand name which was a good thing (!), and then I was told I was only allowed to do what they said I could. I jumped ship. Possibly not the best experience to start my SEO career and annoying because I was hoping to use it to move on to other things but there we go!
You will always run into these clients from time to time on the SEO trail. What you should focus on is being able to (pardon the expression) dumb things down to the point where it makes sense. We are only as successful as our clients feel we are. Sometimes to make that happen you have to figure out the best way to get them to understand the principles. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard, and sometimes you have to psycologically disect them so that you can suggest it to them while all the while letting them think it was their idea to begin with. You have to rememeber that an SEO is not effective unless they properly educate. It cultivates trust, ownership, and "added value". It also ads a new challenge to the day. Good luck in the world of SEO and remember, have fun with it.
The toughest one I'm working on is a current client. Establishing a UK business in a large UK city as a letting agency and not understanding the highly competitive nature of his area, almost expecting miracles straight away. On top of that this is the first client where we've had a sudden drop-out of the rankings despite doing everything SEO above board etc so now we're left wondering if a penalty has been applied - I'm curious as to why if that's the case. But still this is tough because in such a highly competitive area I know it's going to take time, but keeping client's expectations accurate is proving difficult.
Regarding sudden drop; 2 things to look at :
Any duplicate content, even a paragraph or two whch may have been missed?
Any server downtime recently?
Had this recently for a well established client, went from Top 5 Google to page 10 in space of a week!!
Removed rouge duplicate content, used some social bookmark submissions and in context blog posts and fortunately regained rank in space of a few weeks :-)
However could also be a search engine error, recently had a strange case where Google had been adding keywords, which were not found in page content anywhere, to title in search results! Hence ranked Top 10 for that keyword, recently re optimised browser title, actually adding keywords to title and dropped to page 2!
please fix the text box so that bold underline and italics work
Doing any work for another SEO consultant's side projects... still dread some of those projects even though one or two performed well above expectations and promises... but one did struggle more than i expected!
Remember it's their baby and you probably will never do enough to meet expectations!
Great post! I love reading about the more challenging tasks people have been through in internet marketing, so that I can mentally prepare for them at the very least.
I think the toughest gig I had, was a client who had a Ripoff report ranking #2 for their brand name. We were able to get it down to #6 or #7, but we never got it off the first page.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for sharing your valuable knowledge to us, but whenever i faced new problems related to SEO. I always learned by your newsletter which i have subscribed.
Thank you for sharing this post. Sometimes when I watch the streams and read the blogs I feel like the people who post the material have it so easy, and when I read things like this I realize they have it just as hard.
I would have to say this job at the moment is my hardest one since it is my first one, and I was just told to make the website show up on page one with no experience in SEO. It is beyond a challenge trying to learn and then realize what I did so I can show my boss what I am doing.
Hello Rand,
Great post indeed.
Well... I am at the start of my SEO career compared to you. Been in the business for 2 years now.
I had a client a few months ago who wanted to get on the top of rankings in 3 months. Before I closed the deal on Elance I ensured he understood that no one could assure top google rankings... certainly not in that little amount of time. My pitch was good, he showed understanding and we began the project for SEO and Website Consultation.
I give my clients a general plan for the month at the begining of the month, no dates, just what we aimed to achieve in the month (things like, keyword and competitive research, meta data for the pages, a few blogs etc etc etc). All was good and silent for 15 days and then he wanted to see what was happening.
I showed him research and asked him to get a few basic design things done on the home page. NO was the answer and before that... "Is that it??? you have just crunched some keywords from adwords??? I am paying you so much and this is what uve done so far"
I asked him for a budget for content but he said it was part of the deal (it was not!!!). Then he started pushing me to add jquerries to show content clearly, get twitter feeds and facebook friends on his wp blog sidebar... I told him a straight NO and that all this would be charged and it infuriated him... he was paying $150/month and till today I cannot understand what went wrong in my initial bid that he misunderstood everything to such a great deal.
I had to refund all the money.
Regards,
Talha
Hey Rand
I think this is a very honest post and one to be applauded. All to often in business we can take on projects hoping to help the client but being pushed into unrealistic expectations but these are the lessons that we learn and keep moving forwards.
I can't remember the board but I spoke openly about a project we made a mess of in the early days and was criticised for it. We took it on with good intentions though and worked ferociously, we did not charge in the end and the client only took a hit for a few months of time (not working time) but what they wanted to do was just not going to work. We took the hit and those hard lessons are the best ones of all.
No one is perfect and the mistakes I make tend to be because I want to help people too much and will sometimes tackle something that ends up not making sense.
When we moved from a web/design/seo company to a pure seo and inbound marketing focus a year or so ago we had learned many of the hard lessons already (I was doing SEO in 1999 but as a sideline for sites I was developing).
We will now put some time on the clock and properly review the clients requirements and it feels good to sometimes tell a client that what they want to do is just not viable via search, the numbers are simply not there and if they are pushy to turn the work down.
No mistakes people, only lessons but if you f**k up, don't bill the client :)
Marcus
Great post, Rand.
My toughest SEO gig so far is the one I'm in right now: starting a career in SEO. The idea in my head is about five months old but acutally doing it is just under one month old. I'm an advertising major so I have a good understanding of SEO's purpose but right now I'm just learning as much as I can from reading SEO sites and working on my blog/SEO guinea pig. I've found some people who want me to help SEO their Web sites, which are great opportunities for me to improve them so I'll be ready to have a career in SEO in a matter of no time.
Keep up the good work.
Yes thank you, found a few people that I would never hire in this thread:)
Hi, Thanks for informative articles... I Think its very dificult to give 10 PR in Google
For Me linkbaitng is difficult specially when you work on B2B and B2C business. but i use different way because Linkbaiting is sometimes perceived in a negative light, perhaps because some linkbaiting techniques intentionally polarise opinion. But mainly linkbait is simply a case of creating great content. Hardly controversial.I try to create compelling content in order to drive traffic, recommendations and links. Broadly speaking, the more links you attract, the higher your Google positions are going to be, though nowadays there’s a little bit more to linkbait than SEO.Some common link baiting techniquesTalk about a specific community. Give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important. Take recent events and scale them out to others in your community. Be provocative or controversial. Be a contrarian. Be thorough.
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