REASONS CAUSING GOOD SEO BUSINESSES TO LOSE CLIENTS.
Even though I provide good SEO services, my SEO company in Perth still, occasionally loses clients. There’s a number of reasons outlined following why good SEO companies lose clients.
- Company resturcture/takeovers/mergers. When this happens parent companies or new company structures might already have and prefer to use their existing SEO resources.
- A 5-year logistics client in 2021 told me his mate does SEO. This is what happened to their site popularity when I stopped SEO work for them.
It’s nice to support family and friends with work but in all cases, you should always ask “what COMPETITIVE phrases has your SEO company achieved for your clients?” - Similarly when professional connections change. I used to do SEO for Richo Australia and got them number one on Google and other search engines for phrases like “photocopier australia” and “digital camera australia.” When Norman the general manager moved on, the new manager moved his favourite digital marketing agency in.
- A sexy sales pitch can get busy business people to forget why they went with a good SEO company in the first place.
- A client rightfully so wants to suspend monthly SEO because their web designer is going to upgrade their site, however, for unknown reasons to me, the upgrade drags on for months/years and maybe never happens and the client forgets to continue with SEO.
- Bad budgeting. I lost a small business SEO client in Brisbane. I’d only just started SEO on their Shopify site with good success. They then overreached their investment in stock so much that they didn’t have enough in their marketing budget to continue with marketing. It was a case of the cart before the horse. I’ve seen it with hotel investors. Spend all on capital investment into a nice hotel but end up with either total dependence on OTA’s and after commission and other expenses, little profit or no guests because of lack of hotel marketing.
- Victims of their own success. Some executives get so busy with successful SEO that they get caught up in too much working in their business instead of taking time to work on their business.
- In 2021 someone told a budget client that the WordPress theme and the way his site was built by his web designer adversely impacted his SEO. True but the answer is not to give up. The SEO solution is to invest in a lightweight theme and continue with monthly SEO. Just continuing with SEO to get more customers in would enable a business to afford to upgrade their website to a better money-making machine is worthwhile.
- Poor management of SEO client expectations. SEO clients can’t expect a one-off investment of a few hours of SEO to give a prolonged performance in search engines. Some clients forget the original brief/agreed target keyword phrases. A couple of years later they complain (instead of asking) about keyword gaps in an area of their business they moved into without consultation.
- Some clients think that once I got them to the top of SERPs they’ll stay there. What they didn’t understand is it takes constant work such as updates, adapting to search engine updates and link building to maintain the top spot for dynamic websites generated by CMS. (less for static web pages). I lost a client like that. His excuses for not investing in SEO included moving house and his dog died! When his pages drifted from the top of page one of SERPs to page 2 the client resumed my SEO services.
- Backstabbing: I had a Western Australian client for a few years. I’d asked many times for meetings with their Perth-based unprofessional marketing manager who I’d never met and who even fail to attend an appointment without notice, afterwards saying he was too busy. This combined with really bad, unreliable web hosting the company had organised without giving me web hosting login and therefore inability to backup their site in case needed for disaster recovery. This meant that when their site went down the backyard hosting guy and marketing manager engaged in blame-shifting reporting to the general manager based in Kalgoorlie Western Australia. As expected the general manager knew about subcontracting services to mining companies but didn’t have a clue about marketing or web servers.
- After a long period of interaction between a marketing manager and a web design company working on a site redevelopment, they hopefully become comfortable with each other. It’s then easy for a web designer to upsell SEO even if it’s not their area of expertise nor in the best interest of their client.
- Scope creep. Some clients think that because I’m an SEO expert that I’m an expert at everything computing. Resentment sets in when I say no to tasks beyond the scope of SEO. For example, I’ve had people ask if I could fix their computer, redesign their website or logo (I could but don’t). Install an SSL certificate or set up an e-commerce site. When SEO companies say no then without proper client expectation management they can lose clients.
SELECTION CRITERIA FOR EMPLOYING SEO SERVICES
I ran this limited by Linkedin, 4 options poll. Keep demonstrable SEO achievement in mind for the selection criteria process of switching/hiring SEO services.
If your SEO business lost an SEO client for another reason then without spam let us know in the comments section below.
How Good SEO Companies Lose Clients