When You Have to Fire an SEO Client

If you are in business and providing services, you have problem clients for one reason or another.  SEM Companies who are serious about what they do and what they need from their clients are no exception.

This is not about a slow payer, non-payer or delinquent accounts receivable.  It is not about someone who is nasty or abusive.

It is about commitment.

We started providing service within the past year for a client involving some website and e-commerce redesign and full blown Search Engine Optimization to generate high organic rankings.  The website and shopping cart redesign all went well and the newly updated site was launched on time with all functionality intact.  The SEO proceeded well too and we achieved some great rankings.

However, problems became apparent, particularly in the area of the client’s contractual commitment to supply regular (weekly) content to save money vs. hiring us or another 3rd party to provide SEO copywriting.  The content just didn’t come on time, if at all … AND the content represented only a faint half-hearted attempt to comply.  The content came late, often had fewer than 300 words … clearly insufficient based on the requirements of the project and the agreement.

We attempted several times to reason with the client, however, the bottom line was the content had to come from somewhere.  The client refused to pay us or anybody else to provide the necessary content and he was unwilling, unable or otherwise to provide the content himself.  With no content, we don’t have the raw material needed to generate backlinks as well as to add to the number of relevant indexed pages … essential to any search engine visibility strategy.

Having exhausted our efforts, I had no choice but to terminate our service to the client as we no longer had the tools to achieve the results we had mutually contracted for.

Arthur Cooper

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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4. Google Rankings and Reality
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