Showing posts with label project management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label project management. Show all posts

Friday, May 17, 2013

Bad SEO Clients - Are You Scolding Me?!

"Are you scolding me?! If you are, that is totally inappropriate!", she said to me via email. Oh G0d, another epic bad SEO client.



Here was another project setup to fail. More bad clients that don't know a thing about the "internets". A typical day in the office.

We were managing this client's PPC accounts. We met the wife at a conference and she has no idea what to do with her website. It was getting redesigned, they were almost finished and she was thinking about dumping them. She felt like she knew more about the design of the site than they did. She decided to give us a try with PPC first, which is not our specialty especially when the quality of a site becomes a big issue with PPC campaigns.

So I'm assigned the project with an SEM analyst. She was very needy and every day wanted a phone call and wanted to adjust her campaigns. We went through 2 months of constant calls, emails and adjustments.

The analyst did everything he could to make their campaigns the best they could be, but they just weren't converting. They weren't converting because they had no quality PPC landing pages, they had no quality content, and they had no quality calls-to-action.

The short story: their redesign was basically a miserable failure.

So one day after about 2 months of this back and forth, I tell her via email that we're using up a lot of their time, and she needs to keep me in the loop of all the extra phone calls she's making directly the analyst.

And then she said, "Are you scolding me?! If you are, that is totally inappropriate! I have told you how important it is for us to stay in constant communication as our campaigns are not performing!"

Sorry lady, but your baby is ugly. You need more help than optimizing your PPC campaigns. You just redesigned and guess what? You need another redesign.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Bad SEO Clients - You're Mean!

"She's just....mean", he said to the President's assistant. Another typical bad SEO client, that just does not like to hear about what he's contracted to get.

mean frog
That's me: the mean project manager
 What I can't figure out is why he's so upset with me when I am just the messenger....wait - I think I just answered my own question. He must blame me because I'm the main point of contact, yet not the analyst. Unfortunately, I cannot control how and when the analyst does their job.

He has one of the smallest projects we offer, he basically gets nothing for a couple thousand dollars a month by contract. However, he got 3x as much work for no extra cost. The problem was the analyst did whatever he thought he needed, and not exactly what the client wanted OR what the contract stated. So I'm always the bearer of bad news.

He got project plans and status updates from me. What he also heard was that his time was up and he would have to wait another week or so until we do more work. He wanted more work in less time. Why would we sell such a shit project, you ask? I really don't know. I guess the President wanted to do the small business a favor and keep the money coming in. This was not the first time we've had this kind of project, and ALL of which have ended terribly. I guess the big honch thought this one would be different

At this point in time we did not know he had a terrible linking problem, because well....he is supposed to get 6 to 8 hours of our time a month and that really only leaves us with enough time to DO things, not research a lot.

So his rankings are not moving and we continue to do work and he continues to pay and whine about paying. He gets project updates from me and does not like what he's hearing. He calls to complain like a typical bad SEO client and gets the President's assistant. Apparently, I'm mean.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

A Bad SEO Client Jingle from SEO Project Managers

Sometimes not all clients are bad SEO clients, but it's our internal struggles that make us want to bash in our brains.

Today we couldn't get the Three's Company jingle out of our heads so decided to have a little fun and let out our frustrations....again....

Three’s Company – Project Management Version 

Come and walk in our cube… 
We’ve been avoiding you 
Where the meeting notes are hers and hers and his 
Three’s company too. 

Come and ruin our day… 
Deliver something’s that due 
It’s a stressful space you need to be put in your place 
Three’s company too. 

You’ll see that failure is chronic and clients are calling for you… 
Get in the conference room 
Three’s company too!!!