When Clients Ignore My SEO Advice: Their Rankings Drop

• When A Client Shuts Their Eyes To Sound Principles •
• Bare Bones SEO Can Indeed Make A Difference  •

It is sooooo frustrating! I have proven to this particular client over the past year that search engine optimization WORKS! That is if the ‘bare essentials’ (Title tag, Description META tag and content) are properly optimized.  Then there is a darn good chance that great organic rankings will follow.

Before I get challenged on the above statement, yes … certain niches are extremely competitive and the most basic of optimization techniques won’t always be enough to rocket the site to the top-ten, but for the client I am referring to, they certainly could rule the roost with attention to basic SEO

I hope that you gain a valuable morsel of SEO fact by reading this article. If you are new to learning about optimizing your site, then please listen up.

You have a fighting chance of having good search engine rankings if you PAY ATTENTION to the optimization of your Title tag, the Description META tag, and to the use of your keyword phrase (with a few modifiers) in your content. It sounds too simple doesn’t it?

But this client was doing pretty well for the past year with their rankings.  They could have done a better job in composing the tags.  It was obvious to me they hadn’t paid close attention to my pleadings to not exceed 70-characters with spaces for the Title tag; and not to exceed 150 characters with spaces for the Description META tag.  (Guidelines for Google that I closely adhere to.)

However, in spite of so-so Titles and Descriptions, they were never-the-less seeing nice rankings for many of their targeted keyword phrases and nice traffic was coming to their site.  They loved it when they were out-ranking the “big-boys” in their niche.

Then, the client came to me for a website redesign. It was time, as the existing site was very amateurish looking. After careful consideration of what they wished to achieve via the site, I recommended they utilize a blog format because of the built-in CMS capabilities. We choose WordPress for the blog platform.

Everything went fine. It was up to my client to place the old web pages of content into new posts on the blog. I even made sure the All-In-One SEO plugin was installed. I explained how IMPORTANT it was to copy and paste the respective Title and Description tags from the old pages into each post.

I told the client they had great rankings before, and one reason was that their web pages were nicely SEO’d whereas almost all their competition ignored SEO techniques.

Guess what? The client was uploading the old pages, but also taking time to write new posts. That’s fine, that’s great. But, they ignored my gentle reminders to stop writing new posts until they had tended to the SEO tags. They evidently didn’t hear me. I gently reminded them over the course of about two weeks.

And Then I Received An Email Last Night …

I am chuckling some, as I awoke this morning to find an email from the client, all bent out of shape, asking me why a one page (under construction it says) website was ranking #2 for an important traffic-generating keyword that my client used to rank in the top 5 for.

So … I took a look. Yes, I too wonder why Google would rank this site—if you can call it that—number 2. I know it will drop out of sight in the very near future, but it is one of the things that sometimes makes you scratch your head in wonderment about rankings!

My client’s post, which they had neglected to optimize, was #19 for the keyword in question. I know why it dropped that far, and understand that the transition from traditional website to blog caused a bit of downtime, and then the client didn’t start getting the old pages back up for about two weeks, so a drop in ranking was inevitable. I am very sure they be ranked highly again in the near future.

Anyhoo … we’ve had a long talk this morning, and I politely told my client that I just don’t know how to say it any other way … attention to the ‘bare essentials’ of optimization WORKS. And if you ignore that, then please don’t even wonder why any other site is out-ranking you, even if the other site STINKS royally.

So, please heed my words of advice: Don’t under-estimate the power of the basic SEO techniques!