Bad SEOs? What About Bad SEO Clients?

Why Bad SEO Clients Keep Bad SEOs in Business

Bad SEOs get talked about constantly: worthless services, unfulfilled promises, tactics that pollute search results for everyone. Far less gets said about their counterpart — the bad SEO client. Working on the agency side of the table makes this imbalance obvious. Despite consistently positioning as an ethical, results-oriented, white-hat provider, an SEO consultant will still field a steady stream of inquiries from prospects who are, frankly, bad fits for legitimate work. No one who gets cheated is entirely to blame, and plenty of cheated businesses are genuinely blameless. But bad SEOs would have too small a market to survive if it weren't for a supply of almost-as-bad clients.

What Actually Makes an SEO "Bad"

A bad SEO is bad for one of two reasons: they use unethical tactics to get results, such as spamming comments or trying to get competing sites de-indexed, or they consistently fail to deliver results at all. A good SEO delivers results without trampling other people's rights along the way. A bad SEO client, by contrast, is someone who will only ever be satisfied — even temporarily — by working with a bad SEO. By refusing to consider ethical consultants or sound strategy, these clients effectively create the market that shady operators depend on. There are two broad types worth understanding: the ethically challenged and the judgmentally challenged.

The Ethically Challenged Client

This group is smaller but still real. It includes prospects who ask directly for unethical services — automated comment spamming software or other shady tactics. One especially memorable example: a colleague was asked whether he'd considered scanning a book from the library and using it as web content, since it might be "lower risk." The sheer volume of comment spam and SEO-motivated hacking across the web suggests there's steady demand for this kind of service, even if most legitimate SEOs won't touch it.

The Judgmentally Challenged Client

This is the larger and more interesting group: people who unknowingly put themselves in the path of fraud. The comparison isn't unfair — someone who goes looking for a suspiciously cheap gold watch can't be too surprised if it turns out to be fake. Most of these prospects are private individuals running business-in-a-kit style ventures, though representatives of otherwise legitimate companies show up too. Established businesspeople tend to let go of their misconceptions faster, mostly because they can afford real alternatives, but not always.

The Something-for-Nothing Client

This type shows up in two flavors. The first is the ambitious-but-cheap client who wants to rank for a highly competitive keyword capable of driving six figures in monthly revenue, while offering a budget that wouldn't cover a fraction of the work required. The second is the client whose entire business plan is display advertising revenue — no plan for repeat traffic, no content strategy to support the SEO effort, just a bet that ad clicks alone will cover the cost of the campaign and then some. Buying promotional services in order to make money purely from on-site advertising rarely works out, since most SEOs run their own advertising-monetized project sites and know exactly how thin those margins are. That baseline is one reason legitimate SEO clients are typically businesses selling goods or services at a profit margin many times higher than what ad revenue alone could generate.

The SEO-Starry-Eyed Client

This client overestimates how much organic search traffic can realistically do for a hyper-niche, hyper-local business — the classic example being someone convinced that search rankings alone will bring in enough clients for a pet-sitting business in a tiny, remote town.

The Little-Knowledge-Is-a-Dangerous-Thing Client

This client insists on skipping the fundamentals — keyword research, content strategy, natural link building — in favor of chasing a single metric or the current buzzword, whatever ranking signal happens to be trending at the moment. Focusing on one number instead of a coherent strategy is a shortcut that rarely holds up.

The Gullible-and-Not-Letting-Go Client

This client has already been sold on a cheap, mass "submit your site to thousands of search engines" package and won't be talked out of it, no matter how clearly it's explained that such services provide little to no real value.

The Trust-No-One-But-Still-Falls-For-It Client

This client's position is that no one can guarantee a good ranking, so serious SEO work is pointless — and then turns around and buys the cheapest, least credible submission package available anyway, reasoning that at least it's inexpensive.

How to Avoid Becoming a Bad SEO Client

The pattern across every one of these types is the same: unrealistic expectations paired with unwillingness to learn even the basics. Avoiding bad SEO outcomes comes down to three things: realistic expectations about what search marketing can and can't do, a realistic budget that matches the competitiveness of the goal, and a willingness to do a little reading before committing. Businesses that meet those three conditions are far less likely to fall victim to bad SEOs — and far more likely to get real value from the ones who do good work.

Ready to build a digital growth system for your business? Get a free business analysis from SocialStardom — written report delivered within 48 hours. No sales call, no commitment.