There was a guy named Ralph, now me and him had spoken for probably two years on and off about the fencing company he ran. Now I’ll be honest when I first spoke to Ralph it was to sell him on my SEO services; however, at the time he was interested but things just weren’t aligning timing-wise as he was struggling with a variety of different problems such as budgeting, staffing, and other growth related issues. Did I want to make a sale? Yeah, probably but I’ll be honest I’m not a very sales heavy person so I just told him “Look man no problem, if you’re not ready now that’s fine I’m always here to help if you have any questions” and boom that was my first interactions with Ralph.
Why does any of this matter you may ask? Well unlike many others, Ralph is someone who actually took me up on that offer and every now and then would check in with me to see if I could help him understand something about SEO, website design, or just ask me my thoughts on marketing related topics. One day he decides to come clean to me and told me he’s been working with an SEO agency who offered him a really solid deal and things were going well but lately he’s had his suspicions and wanted to see if I could audit his site for him. So I agree and I begin to run through the site. Almost immediately I notice some red flags, these were simple things like a lack of keyword volume, title tags weren’t not being optimized, heading tag structures out of whack, and the list goes on. So I finish my video audit and I send it over to him which he replies thank you to.
No more than 2 days later I receive an email from a random marketing agency asking if I’m such and such person. I guess they found me through the audit since I said “Hey Ralph it’s (insert name)” To which I reply yes, and almost immediately the guy starts going off saying things like “How can I lie in my report” and “Who do you think you are trying to steal my client”. I was confused because I honestly had no intention of signing him as a client after the audit and I tried to clear things up with him explaining my situation on how he came to me, but he essentially just said I should be ashamed of myself for trying to ruin it for other small business owners especially since I’m a one man agency. I felt bad and stopped responding, but then another side of me said F that guy he should be doing his job right the first time. Was I wrong here?
We had a client, and a one person shop do something just like this.
Our work was performing, and we increased the clients sales by a considerable amount. They had a “feeling” we weren’t doing this right because our approach didn’t appear similar enough from other agencies that were more appearance drive in their approach.
They had some agent that they had a hard on for, review our work, and they dogged it out and it caused lots of problems between us in the client and eventually they parted ways with us and hired this other individual.
They came crawling and begging back in about 6 months.
The other agent had no idea what our actual scope of work was, or tangible objectives. They also didn’t know this client was trying to make up for poor financial management and decisions with increased sales, and was ignoring a list of things we advised them to correct and do.
Losing them didn’t hurt, it relieved a lot of headache but took away revenue from a long term client.
We hiked our rate for them, and after a few months our partnership ended by their choice as they just couldn’t recover financially and then they scaled down their operation to pretty much hobby status.
I absolutely hate clients like this, and Ralph, and agents like yourself.
Like this guy that reached out to you, we tossed around the idea of confronting them, but that’s not good practice so we didn’t do it, despite the strife it caused between us and our client. They’re just another person who thinks saying they can do something better means they will.