I recently spent 30 hours designing and building a site for a client who was in a business genre that was ripe for SEO domination. None of the other top sites in the entire genre were optimized. There wasn’t a single decent SEO working any of the top 10 sites. This was like stumbling into a hidden valley – lost in time – where SEO Big Game was there waiting for me to just take it. My site went to # 1 for it’s primary keyword phrase on Google and Yahoo in 2 weeks flat using all white hat techniques and only a handful of backlinks with PR.
But the client I made this for had done millions of dollars in business a year just based on word of mouth, and despite my telling him over and over again about how much business this could generate, he was unimpressed. He just didn’t get it. He tried to low ball me twice on the price. Overnight I was taking the lion’s share of 6,000 potential hits a month on Google. Figuring my development time at the same rate my company bills me out at ($150 per hour), this speculative deal cost me $4,500 bucks in my time, and $200 bucks in images from Dreamstime. I fired him and took the loss while it was still below nightmare levels. Being liable to a client like that for anything could kill your SEO business. He’s a typical “mom and pop” who in this case happened to be leasing a warehouse you could fit a Home Depot in.
Lesson learned from this story: there are thousands of business genres out there that are prime targets for a good SEO to stroll in and take over. But after you’ve been at it for a while and you’ve been burnt by too many clients with a “mom and pop mentality”, don’t go near them. Drop them like a hot rock (as politely as you can) before you get burned.
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