SERP drops! The client is leaving

It's pointless cutting yourself short for the extra work you may or may not put into their websites. Tell them what you want, and don't be shy, im sure if they want to see good results they can always goto an other company and be charged loads more..

 

PM me what you were doing for them and I may hire you myself. A good client pays for time spent, not results. If I feel you are doing the kind of time intensive work I need, I wouldn't mind hiring you.

 

See if you could possibly get a little bit more money from the client each month to buy permenant links in addition to your on-going efforts. Sorry, thats not a very original thought~ but it might be effective.

 

Don't forget to make sure when they dump you that their sites get somhow dumped too. Then they will come back and have to pay you even more.

They need perhaps this lesson.

 

To be honest I wouldn't hire anyone that did that type of thing to a past client. Its not worth ruining your name

Remember, they did pay you for a long time and its completely in their rights to terminate the contract

 

Personally its not my style either.
I do observe this from people who stay successful in business though, especially in Asia.

 

Sometimes clients need education. They may lack the knowledge to appreciate the quality of your work. If they drop you and hire someone else they may get an unexpected "tutorial" in marketplace reality. In a few months they may appreciate your services more and become much easier to work with.

 

You might want to inform your client that the dirty business of SEO is an ever changing thing. Tell your clients that they are lucky to be averaging somewhere in the top 20, top 10 is best but it is a constant battle.

 

Exactly. So the client is paying for a certain level of expertise, as well as results. Results can never be guaranteed anyway, because the search engines always throw up something totally unexpected on an algorithm change, and you can never predict how many competitors will be in the market next month, or just how much they will be spending.

 

I think something other people haven't covered is that you're competing with governmental websites. They get .gov links, which are rated best. Explain that to the client, and see if they have any governmental connections that can get some links.

Besides that, conduct a site review of the top 5 sites to see why they're ranking higher. You can probably copy much of their strategy, and add some improvements too.

The long tail tip is good too. You can do that with content, mainly. Tell them to hire a content writer. These are usually cheap, and can be found freelance. I heard it's 5-10$ for 600 words... You can easy go for 2-3 long tail phrases per text, so...

 

then why did you suggest that?

also, mind giving a few examples?

 

Well, maybe you could tell us what the decision was and why you have chosen to do so (without naming the client and the websites, of course)?

And yes, educating clients in any web related industry is one of things to do to either keep them or understand you don't need them and get another.

 

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Arnie. they are nice people and we used to work together happily. I won't do that to them. They just have too high expectation and they know little about seo.

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Yes. Some of their competitors hires some seo who is copying my techniques, even pages. I don't think they would like to hire such people.

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The most diffecult thing for me is to let them believe top 20 is not bad. Top 10 or even 5 is the target.

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Thanks for the suggestion. I suggested them to put on some unique content. They hired some content writer who produced noly plagiary and rewritten content, not unique.

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I will have a serious discussion trying to educate them. Let them know their ranking are good, just not what they expect. I have to spend much more time and expense to fight those gov and branded websites. If they still choose to leave, I will feel sorry, but won' t be unhappy.

 

And your decisions is?

 

See above reply.

 

I wouldn't give someone the pleasure of getting on the 1st page in google unless they were non-competitive phrases you were getting. We have a client that has paid us $250 per month (which is a really, really small amount) to get ranked for the term Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Not very competitive and we told him it would take around 1 year to get them on the first page. This month marked 1 year and 1 month and they're no 8th in google for that term which get's searched around 15,000 times per month. However for more competitive terms and large all around campaigns, I wouldn't touch them for less than $1,000 per month. SEO takes time and page 1 rankings in yahoo and google is some of the most valuable advertising real estate in the world so don't give it away cheap.

 

I would remove your customers keywords from your post if I was you or this thread will outrank them