Im a big fan of niche web develop/seo companies. I was wondering how many clients can you ethically take on in the same field, located in the same city
-
How do niche web development companies justify having multiple clients in the same field in the same cities. I would love an explanation on how to justify this, and how many clients in the same field/same city is acceptable. A good example would be an seo company for auto dealers or hotels.
Thanks
-
Hi Aholyman,
I think it's very good that you're giving this such careful thought. So, if the keywords are identical, then yes, this might be seen as an unethical arrangement, though not a forbidden one (without a contract stating so). I'd take it case by case. Good job giving this such a thorough examination.
-
Miriam thank you for your response. I do agree with you, but I don't know if clients will get it, as there are no real variations in keywords. That is to say they offer the exact same thing, however one location could be a vineyard and the other a beach (wedding locations) and that could work arguing that the said client knows where she would like to get married.But would take some explaining to the client.
Thank you
-
Hi AHolyman,
I'm going to rock the boat a little here. Unless you are in a non-compete contract with a client that excludes taking on same industry clients in the same city, there is no reason you can't work with more than one. Each client is likely to have different strengths, budgets, goals and attributes, even if they are in the same city. For example, dentist A may specialize in sleep dentistry, while dentist B is excellent with children. Unless you're under an exclusivity contract, I don't see anything unethical about helping them both.
-
Kevin I just wanted to personally thank you as well for taking the time to respond. Your points were spot on and everyone has helped me to reevaluate my idea.
-
Dave thanks for taking the time to respond, all of you guys have saved me a ton of time and I am very clear that my idea for a niche SEO business would not work how I imagined. The market is just too small which is why it has not bee done before.
-
I never would have thought about number #2, but you are absolutely right. Its been so helpful to get everyone's responses that it has saved me a ton of time, and potentially money.
Thank you
-
We are heavily involved in the Automotive industry. I can speak from that vertical.
Very rarely (we have never) would you find same brand in same market but you will find competing brands. This is never an issue with us as we usually qualify search with product ("Toyota Camry service" vs "Honda Accord service) and geo.
In cases where the clients wants to focus on generic terms such as "new car" we would advise against that as its too broad a term - which helps us to avoid your valid concern. Our clients get much better results when they focus on their Primary Market Area
If I did run across your described scenario, ethically the only option is to only service the one client unless they were very specific in their focus areas (branding, non-local etc)
-
SEO Experts should only have one client in an industry sector.
Unless the client is focused in one Geo location, when you may want to allow 2 or more.
For instance if I search Hotel in Chesterfield, it would be OK to work with a client site to make them #1 in Chesterfield for the search term "Chesterfield Hotels"
However if it's a term like "Spa Hotels" then they may want to be #1 in the UK or even the world.
It all depends on their requirements, however as Matthew says you don't want to be conflicting interests.
-
Personally I think it's unethical to take on more than one client in the same niche in the same area for two reasons.
- If your clients are in the same niche the same keywords are valuable to them which puts you in a position where you have to compete with yourself. This means that you're never going to be able to give your clients the best possible service as you're always going to have to make a tradeoff on which keywords you rank.
- If one of your clients in the same niche leaves, the client that remains has an unfair competitive advantage as you already know exactly what strategies have been employed on the site that is no longer under your control.
What makes this industry interesting is the amount of diversity and new challenges we face on a daily basis. If I were you I'd try to find clients that make your job as interesting as possible.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
From traction to non existent! What happened to my Photography site and what can I do to fix it?
Aloha guys, To start as I always do with the (awesome) Moz community I wanted to say thanks for the insight! This has to be one of the best online communities and help resource with great positive and concise help that really makes a difference, so many thanks everyone! PS I also do my best to relay what I learn here to fellow business owners and point them to SEO boosting avenues to help support the community as much as possible. Anyways... **My Photo website ** **Current top wedding website (I do enjoy her work!!!) ** Attached below is a link to some stats/graphs! The Problem! After the recent Google update last month I've had a drop in my site visibility from 5.8% and some change to now .7% of search volume.. Painful for my photo & video business here on Kauai to say the least. A few images are attached, is there also any correlations you guys can see or think may help to get my site up to the first page? I know we deliver some of the very best work here on the island and deliver great service too, its a bummer that we cant do more for folks visiting here that dont even know we exist! The question! Do you guys have any ideas on what can be done to get my page to gaining organic traction and doing great again? My goal is to have our business rank for Kauai Wedding Videographer, Kauai Wedding Photographer, and Kauai Family Photographer! My moz dashboard is still saying we're on the way for that but that my search visibility is way way down. Any clarity or ideas are greatly appreciated you guys! I would love to relay this to the wedding community as well! Warmest aloha from Kauai everybody and have a great day! NjELT NjELT
Local SEO | | Trey30 -
What is the best SEO tool for tracking local rankings
Hi Can anyone recommend what they think the best tool is to track local rankings. I want to manage several small businesses' visibility and I am not sure which one is the best. I have been told that "Bright local" and "SEO PowerSuite" are the best in the business. Is that true? or is there something better out there Thanks
Local SEO | | coolhandluc0 -
Best approach for international multi country SEO
Hi all We're working with a client that is in the travel industry and they already have a relatively new site (setup in September 2014) which is on a .com domain We've completed a digital strategy for them and have identified 12 key markets within Europe, North America, South America and the Asia Pacific region. We have suggested an approach of setting up individual local websites for these countries and for countries in the same region sharing a common language (like USA & Canada) we're thinking to use a subdomain on the existing .com (eg. amaricas.clientdomain.com) Does this sound like a solid approach? thanks
Local SEO | | seobackbone0 -
What happens with SEO when a site is served via CloudFlare CDN?
Hello, With regards to hosting, it is my understanding that one of the search engine ranking factors for a particular geographic location (city/country) is where a site is hosted physically geographically. For example, if a site was developed for New York users primarily AND it was hosted on a server physically located within New York (IP address) then it would rank better in New York ... that is, given all other SEO ranking factors were equal? Is this true? My worry is that once a site is served via CloudFlare via their 64 global cached locations, then do the search engines effectively lose all context as to its origin hosting and therefore hosting in New York (in the example above) would have no different effect than if the site was hosted on Mars (after the site had been cached, that is). Many thanks,
Local SEO | | uworlds
Mark 🙂0 -
What can I do to rank higher than low-quality low-content sites?
We lost our site in an actual meltdown at our hosting provider in January, and decided to do a new site instead of bring back a dated backup. So we've only been "active" at our URL since about May. That said, I have not seen any irregular or unexpected penalties. Not showing up is natural if you have literally nothing to show. We have had a site since then, though, and while it isn't going to win any award, we've built it with best practices using sites like this, trying to use natural, helpful, actual language to convey what we do and why we do it (we're web developers for small business making WordPress sites). Paying attention to titles, keyword frequency and variability, alt tags, etc. Always erring on the conservative side. While we build sites for people across the country (and a few in places like the UK), we just moved into an actual office space in our hometown so it's never been more important to push our visibility locally. We've just come back on the scene, in relative terms, so there's no expectation we'll crack the top five or ten; they all have teams of people and bags of capital and have been around many, many years, plus they link to the dozens upon dozens of sites they have done and promote their appearances in press releases and such. Their content is not bad, and most of it is good and not spammy. They are being genuine. That said, we're in the late 40s to late 50s right now. Happy to show up at all, but after that first group of legitimate sites, there are automatically generated webpages (which I thought couldn't even be listed...one is an MP3 download site that mentions one of the top companies in the page title, and just has a random video on the page) local companies touting themselves as SEO "experts" that say things like "Here at Company X, we work hard to bring you the best Rochester, NY web design in the hopes that when you make your Rochester, NY web design decisions, you'll think of us first Rochester, NY web design." I changed the company name and the location, but that's an actual line from their site job listings from places like Craigslist and Indeed hair stylists dentists (?!) Our code validates, we've incorporated Schema for our addresses, our site is usually fast (650ms to 1.3s in Pingdom from Dallas). We don't do any redirecting, our metas likes everyone else's don't count for ranking but are thoughtfully produced, we pay attention to using concise and accurate URLs without stop words, etc. There are also very very few resources loaded on a given page. That said, there's not a lot on the blog that's new and all told we have I think 13 total pages including a few posts. Is it even possible to get close to the actual pack if we, for example, posted more regularly? I was just reading here about how we shouldn't put our links in the site footers of our clients (which we don't always anyway), so I have them only as branded links, only on the homepages, and only on sites that, when crawled, didn't have nonzero spam scores (everyone else has a nofollow link in our portfolio). I realize this is a super generic question but I wasn't quite sure how to search out this particular use case given that our aspirations are so basic...just trying to figure out if there's something obvious we're missing and shooting ourselves in the foot over. A thousand pledges of gratitude! (if this is too common and I just didn't see a duplicate, let me know and I will delete it or ask for it to be deleted....also, I don't want to appear spammy so I am not linking to my site unless it's absolutely necessary...not sure what protocol is...I'm pretty self-aware so I do believe everything I've said above is true).
Local SEO | | eaglenestmedia1 -
Showing a preferred Google location in branded search for a multi-location business?
Background: A business has 5 brick and mortar locations, in 5 different states, with 5 separate Google+ profiles. The corporate headquarters are in Michigan. The Michigan Google+ Local profile is the one that should be most closely associated with the brand. Problem: We want the Michigan Google + Local page to show up for branded searches nationwide: right now, it only shows up on geolocated searches in Michigan. Of course, it totally makes sense that the other 4 Google+ local pages will appear for users searching with IP locations (or logged in locations) near those states. But for other states - is there a way to help Google understand or give preference to the main corporate location? What we're trying to prevent is someone in New York City searching for "company name", and then seeing a lesser location appear in SERPs associated with the brand, instead of our favored Michican location. Ideas so far: Continue to enhance out the Michigan location's Google+ page (check categories, photos, description, share content frequently, expand circles, get reviews, yada yada yada - we've already done much of this). _Maybe give this page more attention and content than other locations if we have to? _ Build links into Michigan Google+ page? Ensure general citations are up to date - use localeze/moz local etc. Website - We have a page for each location. While Michigan is featured, we also do promote our other offices as well - all kinda promoted equally on site in terms of metadata, content, etc. Any other brainstorming advice or out-of-the-box (oh no, did I just say "out-of-the-box"?) ideas to help Google associate the Michigan location as our "primary" one we want shown on more generic branded searches, even though of course the other 4 are impt too? Tricky...
Local SEO | | mirabile0 -
Dynamic websites & SEO
Hello Mozzers, I would love some advise from some seasoned SEO people PLEASE. The company I work for are replacing their static website for a new dynamic website which affectedly serves blocks of generic content based on the users activity. Currently we rank really well, especially for local long tail terms - however I am very unsure and apprehensive as to how this new approach will affect our rankings. Can Google index content pulled together on the "fly"? Can anyone recommend an article, website, white paper - explaining how to limit the change to SEO? Kind regards Ben
Local SEO | | Bendall0 -
Ranking http://www when its forwarded to https://www
Hello, I have a question about the best practices for assigning "https" and "http" versions. We have added https://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and was ranking. However I noticed with my other tools, that http://www.mysite.com version had better anchor text distribution and also had better Trust Flow were as the https://www.mysite.com version had no trust flow at all. Can I assign http://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and still have it do a 301 Redirect to https://www.mysite.com. This way I can capitalize on the better anchor text profile and trust flow, and still rank properly? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks
Local SEO | | EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT0