The biggest problem I’ve ever had with SEO and clients is this: it’s hard to get things done with clients… It just is. I think many SEO people share this problem, and as a result, people get ripped off with nonsense SEO plans that don’t require anything from business owners (except a lot of money). This gave scammers room to come up with schemes like having a human or AI write hundreds of spam blog posts, buying links, submitting to spam directories automated, creating a page for every area you serve with copy and paste content etc etc.
One of the most accepted things “experts” do is a long-haul scam called “SEO plans.” The truth is, it’s not always meant to be a scam, but it still is (or can be).
Am I against all SEO plans? No. But most are run by people who don’t know how SEO works and they rarely help clients get real results. Here’s what most “experts” do:
The result? A lose-lose situation for the client.
Assuming the client isn’t spending their entire SEO budget on reports, the biggest flaws in the above mentioned SEO plan (even well-meaning ones) is that they rely on clients to understand and act on the stats. Most business owners don’t have the time or SEO knowledge to make sense of these numbers, and many plans end up being a waste of money.
NOTE: Many people who run this way are simply salesmen or “CEO’s” who outsource SEO and have no idea what good SEO looks like.
Clients are expected to understand complex SEO data and make a decision.
A disproportionate amount of money is spent on massive amounts of raw stats and charts.
Business owners don’t have time to analyze SEO reports and implement an effective plan themselves.
SEO “experts” pay for expensive tools to generate large volumes of stats across multiple sites. To cover those costs, they resell these services. Let’s estimate they make $1,000 a month per client selling automated reports (minus costs of the program they use). That’s $1,000 (minus costs) for roughly zero hours of work per month. That gives them very little incentive to do work! They make money whether you need them to do work or not. Many clients spend so much on these reports, they can’t afford to take any meaningful or consistent steps forwards.
I could never bring myself to do this. At the end of the day, I knew the client was spending money that would go nowhere.
Were the stats valid? YES
Were they potentially useful? YES
Would they ever get used? NO
If you truly care about your client, you have to understand two things: they’re busy, and SEO is not their day to day priority. Whether they’re a neurologist, an engineer, or Einstein himself, they simply don’t have the time or mental space to analyze SEO stats. Sometimes they know the newest hot trend or buzzword though 🙂
With limited time and resources, what can you do???
The best solution we found was to outline ALL possible SEO improvements and identify the single most important one and the single action that can be taken to move the needle forward, and focus on that for about a year and follow up like crazy! The results have been far better than anything we tried before!
Problem:
The solution:
We work closely with clients to map a precise, results-driven path forward—and make sure it gets done! We follow up far more than any competitor. We focus intensely on performing and perfecting the single most important thing you can do for your SEO for a year, and when budget allows, we also optimize the website as much as possible.
The inspiration for this approach didn’t come from the online world—it came from the business world.
Last year I met with a local serial CEO, a very successful guy I’d actually known for years. At the time my business was busy, my team was busy, but real progress wasn’t being made. Sound familiar?
So many things to do. So many options. But realistically, there was only one way forward.
He gave me advice that immediately made sense. He graciously coached me, met with me regularly and responded to all my emails to make sure I understood and implemented this new method of focusing on the single most important action I can take (relative to my goals). I applied his advice “to find the most important thing” and focus on the one thing that will influence it the most and almost right away it began to pay off@ I’ll admit, I didn’t wait until I perfected it to begin implementing with clients, but regardless, it paid off big for my clients.
I didn’t arrive at this approach by accident. I’ve personally done SEO work on hundreds of websites and thousands of individual pages, starting long before SEO was packaged and resold. I began this business by writing content and building my own sites by hand using HTML, CSS, and PHP, and over the years I’ve grown and have worked with best-selling authors, social media influencers, multi-million-dollar companies, and international businesses and ministries. This perspective comes from doing the work, not reselling reports 😉
