Bill Marshall’s comment:

“We know exactly what keywords we want, there’s no need to research them”

Reminds me of a client I’m dealing with right now. I’d done some non-SEM work for them in the past and I was glad they came to me now that they are revamping their existing site and building two others simultaneously.

First they asked what needed to be done for SEO on their sites, starting with their corporate site. I gave them a list of tasks required for the initial phase – including keyword research and competitive ranknig analysis. They feel they are market movers in their industry, so the response I got was that keyword research probably isn’t necessary – let’s just use the terms they think they want to be identified with – mostly proprietary names and terms they’ve coined that no one’s ever heard of yet. After that, I got “We’ve done a lot of market research and feel we know our competition well enough that we don’t need competitive analysis”. My argument that competitive analysis for my purposes wasn’t the same as the research they did fell on deaf ears.

They wanted a proposal for the intiial phase of the SEO work on the corporate site. I gave it to them at the lowest price I felt I could afford to charge based on our past relationship. Then they come back and say they now want to optimize all 3 sites at once, so it will be a few weeks until they’re “ready”.

I’m now beginning to think I should run – despite our past business relationship – as this is beginning to look like the project from hell that will be micro managed from day 1 – if it ever gets off the ground at all.

It would be different (and was when we were starting out) if there weren’t a lot of inquiries for our services, but that is not the case.

Of course, there are other things that clients in all industries share, such as just being annoying and such.

Cre8asite has a thread about hiring and firing the right clients. And also there’s this article on 11 clients you need to fire.

P.S. The shaking-hands.jpg img in this post doesn’t load for me.

“We need top 5 results in three months time or it’s all off”
(Usually with a brand new site)

“We know exactly what keywords we want, there’s no need to research them”

Suggestions that we’re much more expensive than the guy who promised him top ranking in Google within 2 months.

“We need to know exactly how much it’ll cost and a get quotation to us by tomorrow morning” (I usually put the phone down on that one)

“We have a new site on finance…” (sound of phone being thrown through window)

David, those are great points – worthy of a poll I think I will be sure to check out your post!

I look for the following scenarios:

They want a free education
They waste your most precious commodity – time
They have a business plan doomed for failure
They want a special deal or discount
Their goals are unrealistic

All of which have led me to believe there is no “typical SEO client” only good, average and very bad ones.

Possibly the funniest question I have been asked was “if I buy AAPlumberUK.com as a domain name, will I go ahead of the competition, like in the Yellow Pages” – this guy was being serious and completely misunderstood SEO (this being said I cant fix water leaks!) Ultimately this guy was trying to understand the process – I prefer this.

I work with several understanding SEO clients with an excellent grasp of my task and give plenty of support to my ideas – I think this is key.

All in all I find a highly inquisitive potential client ultimately more rewarding than one who is totally uninterested in the concept but know they need to do it.

In a nutshell my perfect SEO client:

Interested in SEO, understands the long term power of search, Has too much time to do SEO themselves but will help with ideas when necessary.