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Selling SEO: How I Lost a Big Potential Client
February 16, 2007
To the potential client with whom I recently talked, who said that organic SEO will be critical to the success of his yet-to-launch web site, who needed specific tips about how to optimize for long-tail phrases in an ultra-Flash-heavy environment, I have something to say.
I am sorry.
I am sorry that I offended you when I asked what your site was going to be about. I am sorry that I asked what industry you were going to target. I am sorry that I asked about your intended audience. I am sorry for all those things, even for volunteering to sign an NDA; the login on the home page should have warned me that the contents are super-secret -- too secret to be exposed, even with a contractual obligation to keep my mouth shut.
Maybe you've been burned before. Who hasn't? But let me tell you what I won't do with any information a potential client gives me:
- I won't tell anyone outside my company.
- I won't steal your idea.
- I won't start a competing web site.
- I won't call your competitors and tell them what you're up to.
- I won't tell you you're stupid or that your idea sucks.
Now, let me tell you what I will do with the information you give me:
- I will do some preliminary keyword research on your topic, so that I can discuss -- intelligently -- what your target audience is searching for, and how they're phrasing it.
- I will see how other sites in your market are building their sites to see how -- or whether -- they are integrating best-practices SEO into their sites, and how the engines are reacting to it.
- I will see who links to sites like yours to get an idea of how your future site can compete out of the gate.
- I will take a look at what you've developed so far to let you know if you've done anything that will cause grave harm to your organic efforts.
- I will tell you, honestly, whether I think we can help you.
So again, please accept my apologies. I wish you the best of luck in finding that SEO company who will give you the exact advice you need without having even the slightest notion of what you do.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at February 16, 2007 04:20 PM
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Comments
Bravo!
I will bet you $1 that their home page is four or five levels from the root and their robots.txt file looks like this:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
Posted by: Doug at February 19, 2007 11:28 AM
Some companies are a little niave, its our job to help them understand but seems this company were too difficult.
Posted by: kelvin newman at February 20, 2007 09:58 AM