SEO isn’t Magic

Once again, I spent the morning in a fruitless argument with a client, and ended up turning down his project and his money. What really ticked me off? I had to hear al about how he wasn’t really sure he could trust what I said, since he got burned by his last SEO guy and he’s starting to wonder if any of us are honest.

The fact that I was being completely honest with him didn’t matter since I wasn’t saying what he wanted to hear! He wants to rank in the #1 slot for his targeted phrase (which IS NOT long tail and IS very competitive) within two months.

Excuse me? Yeah, right. For a specialized niche, MAYBE, and some non-competitive phrases. Two months is still shorter than the absolute minimum I work with, which is 3-4 months. Thing is, the last SEO he had told him one month, ripped him off and took his money, and left me to clean up the mess – which apparently includes subtracting the time already wasted from my estimate.

“I’ve already had my site up for a month’ the client says. ‘so that means it should only take you two to finish getting the rankings since a lot of the work is already done.’

Say WHAT? Sure, and I’ll be puling a rabbit out of my unmentionables, too. It drives me mad when the client thinks they know the score. Nine times out of ten they are already disgruntled by the time they get to me, having been to one of the firms that advertise instantaneous results and having been enormously disappointed.

‘So,’ I said, ‘Let me get this straight. Your last guy said he would get you rankings in a month? And it didn’t happen? So you no longer trust SEOs, but you come here and ask me to work on your site, but you expect me to do it in two since I told you it would take at least three?’

Yup, that’s about it. I kindly told him I couldn’t help him, and he said that another firm he had been interviewing said they could, and I wished him well. Off he went to let someone else tell him what he wanted to hear. What odds he’s back in two months, telling me that all he needs now is a little tweak to get results in a week? (Since all the work is already DONE!)

SEO isn’t magic, and the SEOs who pretend it is give the rest of us a bad name.