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Three SEO solutions for impossible clients

Posted by admin on January 16, 2007 in SEO Theory

Intransigence is the leading cause of search engine invisibility. Anyone who has been helping other people optimize their sites for at least a year has probably run into at least one good-hearted soul who doesn’t want the optimizer to change a thing on their beautiful Web site. This could be a good friend, your biggest customer, or someone who just contacted you with a long and whining post about their Google woes.

There are many excuses for not allowing an SEO to touch a Web site. The problem is that all the sob stories in the world won’t change the fact that someone has no search engine visibility and no conversions simply and solely because their Web site sucks.

I’ve all but said, “Dude, your Web site sucks” and still gotten nothing but a blank stare in return. People who need help have two disadvantages: first, they don’t know why their sites aren’t bringing in lots of traffic. Second, they don’t know enough about search engines, Internet marketing, and Web site optimization to understand why their sites suck even if you have the nerve to tell them.

When you take on an impossible client, you may feel like you have few options, but that’s not really true. Remember that SEOs have been dealing with impossible clients for years. They’ve come up with all manner of strategies. Some of the more obvious strategies include:

• Doorway pages. This is about as unimaginative as you can get but they are cheap and easy to produce.
• Cloaking. More imaginative but it requires a lot of monitoring or a lot of trust in your sources for spider IP addresses.
• Directory listings. I’m not a big fan of letting directories control my online fate.
• Ranking through links. This is brutal, ugly, inefficient, time-consuming, and often costly.
• Using mirror or “shadow” sites — often with subtle redirection.

I don’t really like any of these solutions.

If the client refuses to let you redesign a badly designed site, your most cost-effective approach is to create one or more other sites that simply drive traffic directly to the client (not to their site, but to the client). Will that satisfy every client? No. After all, these are usually people who think you can wave your magic wand and send traffic to their sites.

Exclusive Content

It is possible to drive a lot of traffic to a third-party site with well-placed content. I’m not talking about submitting articles and press releases to distribution services. I’m not talking about buying links, banner ads, or doing any of that other cheesy stuff you’ve been doing for your regular clients. I’m talking about creating referral sources or referral content. Think of a positive review on a large content mega news site that ends with, “For more information, visit this exclusive link.”

Now, do you need to pursue such articles on CNN, MSNBC, Time, USA Today, etc.? Of course not. You can create them anywhere, on any site. You’re an SEO. You should be able to place good content with an exclusive referral on useful resources. Get your mind out of the free article directory gutter and concentrate on high quality Web sites you can exclusively or almost exclusively provide content for.

If you don’t have at least 10-20 sites in your portfolio, get them. Come back and finish reading this article after you have them.

There is power in exclusive content. It creates visibility. It builds credibility. It can be optimized to rank highly for popular search expressions. And the neat thing about it is that it’s like air: you can create as much exclusive content as you need to. It’s unique, it’s informative, it’s extremely useful to any Web site lucky enough to use it.

You cannot take an exclusive article and rewrite it for five Web sites. If that is what you do, you don’t create exclusive content. It’s exclusive. Only one site gets to use it. And if you’re thinking: “That takes a lot of time and I don’t have the resources to do that for every client” then you need to stop thinking about every client.

I’ve used exclusive content to drive lots of traffic to Web sites that otherwise would not see any.

One-upmanship Content

But our impossible client probably won’t be satisfied with one or a dozen exclusive referral articles. Yes, they create visibility and buzz, but they do take time to write and place. Impossible clients also tend to be impatient. So while you’re out there buying links for Mr. I-know-all-you-have-to-do-is-get-me-links, keep your eyes open for Web sites that distract you. Let your mind wander and drift. Keep your heart open for ideas that might just complement the impossible site’s content. You never know, you may find something that the impossible client absolutely loves.

And keeping your mind open to new ideas helps you appreciate the fact that you probably could design a much more effective site than the client. So why not do just that? Now, some clients are impossible because they are showcasing their work. Take photographers, for example. For some inexplicabe reason, many photographers believe their HTML pages should be like pages in a picture book. In fact, most if not all photographers believe their work should be showcased in picture books that sit on everyone’s coffee table.

If you can get permission to reuse the images your impossible client is married to, do so. Otherwise, think about alternative methods of showcasing their talent. The best strategy is one that strokes the impossible client’s vanity. If you can, then show them a better way to present their work (that is, a way where they immediately say, without your telling them so, “Hey! This is a better way to show off my work!”).

Impossible clients often focus too much on presentation with little to no concern for visibility and conversion. If you want to provide your client with superior visibility and conversion, it is imperative that you offer superior presentation. Otherwise you are arguing with the priority closest to their heart. Your best chance of changing their site is to show them how to build bigger, gaudier neon signs that also just happen to accomplish what you need to do on your side.

Creating a competitive site can do the trick for you, but only if you can out-present, out-showcase Mr. Showcase. You may have to get your hands dirty in Flash and/or Javascript to pull this off. Make sure the money is enough to cover your expenses and time.

Build a foundation network

If you don’t have those 10-20 high-traffic sites that will accept your exclusive content, and if you cannot showcase your client’s work better than he does, you can still create a community of long-tail Web sites that use unique content to establish visibility for related topics and point their visitors to the client site.

This is not a project for the faint-hearted. Nor is it something you want to turn a group of scraper bots loose on. There are no short-cuts to creating 5-10 unique content sites that gain their own position for related topics. You’re going to use these sites to link to your impossible client’s site, to refer people to it, and to talk up the client’s products or services.

It’s the mediocre solution because your client won’t wait for you to build a network of high profile sites that drive tons of traffic. Satellite sites rarely perform as effectively as one single site can. Matt Cutts made the point last year that if you’re managing 50 sites, you’re probably not going to do as well as if you just manage a few.

And when you think “network”, don’t think in terms of “they should all look alike” or “they all need to link to each other”. These sites need to stand on their own. They need to gain visibility and traffic on their own.

Does it take time and resources to build such a network? Yup. Is it a risky proposition with respect to the search engines? Only if you take shortcuts. The search engines have no objection to indexing unique, useful content that their visitors would like to find. You can use your network to promote the client site.

To be honest, I don’t think most SEOs would want to build a network for each impossible client. Maybe you have 10,000 trusted domains and you can point links to your impossible client’s page. If that’s the case, you really don’t have impossible clients, do you?

The bottom line, for those of you who don’t control vast networks of linking sources, is that if you’ve been denied the freedom to work directly on the client’s page, you have many options available to you. Some of them are well documented. But those well documented options are only the tip of the iceberg. Your objective should be to efficiently deal with the client’s priorities, not to become entangled in angst and agony over your client’s intransigence.

You are the professional optimizer. If you can’t do this more than one way, then either you just need to be more careful about which clients you take on or else you need to find another line of work.