I have recently exchanged a dozen or so emails with a potential client and the crux of our conversation has been her asking what she needs to do SEO-wise to help her brand new site rank high so she can bring in new clients (she is a real estate agent) and I am trying to tell her in ‘as nice a way’ as possible that her website is horrible and no matter how much SEO we did and no matter how high she ranked her chances of getting conversions were extremely low.
Finally I decided to lay-it-on-the-line because I could no longer think of any ‘nice’ ways to convince her that a site redesign was really imperative – so I broke out the truth stick!
“I just spent 2 months designing this site”
To put it bluntly I guess that is why you are a real estate agent and not a web designer, but fret not because I could not do much better. We should all stick to what we are good at and pay the pros to do what we don’t understand. When I have plumbing problems I call a plumber. I could go to Home Depot and talk with them for 2 hours and then buy all the parts and try and fix it myself but more than likely I will make it worse. So instead of spending lots of my own time and money on something I don’t know how to do I call my plumber and pay him $65 an hour to fix my problems quickly and correctly. It really is the same with SEO (or web design), you can spend 100’s of hours learning SEO strategies of your own and then go out and give it your best try but you might just get your site banned from the search engines and then all the time would have been wasted.
Did I go too far, will she be angry or shocked into facing the truth. I don’t feel I crossed the line, just came close to it. What do you think?