Protection from Clients
-
Hi there,
Recently one client after building his campaign and ranking his site refused to pay... But now is to late for me because I already build all the links and is impossible to remove them. How I can protect my self from this kind of situations?
Thank you in advance
-
I say you SPAM the hack of out of their domain.. Just kidding of course! Try contacting BBB a lot of times they can resolve issues like these. Another more harsh option is to try to contact them and tell them that if they don't pay you will be forced to leave negative reviews of the way they do business on all major review sites that could possibly lower their rankings, etc...
I do IT consulting and sometimes I encounter these kind of issues with NEW clients, over time I learned to watch out for certain things when taking new clients that could possibly lead to a non payment. If I feel that the client will have issues with payments, I ask for money upfront.
During these hard times some companies can't pay on time which is acceptable as long as their honest about it and tell you, if they start hiding, running, or wasting time then in my case we simply flip the switch on of their servers or systems that we monitor, that usually gets us paid fairly quickly
-
In short, you can't.
You can have them sign contracts but even than it would be more of a hassle than what its worth to get your money if they decided not to pay.
Best bet: If you’re doing ongoing services, do a monthly retainer and have them pay for each month upfront (that’s what we do). Almost all of our clients are set on monthly retainers at the beginning of each month.
If you don’t do much on-going work, you can always ask for 50% upfront and 50% at the end or even the full amount upfront. The biggest thing to do is get to know your client first. If you get the gut feeling that it’s going to be hard to collect then (a) don’t even bring them on at a client or (b) get the money upfront.
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
-
Victim of negative SEO, but will this be believed if the client has not always been whiter than white?
A new client has come to me because they have found themselves in hot water with Google having received a manual spam action for unnatural inbound links. The sad case in this story is that I completely believe that the client has been a victim of an attack by a competitor. They finally made it onto page 1 in their competitive niche, and within a few days random links started appearing on spammy sites (often foreign language sites.) By the time the message came from Google about 2 weeks later several thousand of these links had been built. The first stage was to get the client to be very honest with me about anything he personally had done that might be considered manipulative. Unfortunately following some bad advice several months ago the client purchased one site-wide link (already in the process of removing it.) The same company that gave him this advice also built just under 100 links to his website (over the course of a couple of days) in early December. So - we know the client hasn't been whiter than white, and we are going to undo anything that he had responsibility for asap. We are also working to ensure that he is earning really high quality links in the right way (already have some great press coverage in the pipeline and are working on unique content.) My question is - given some past mistakes made by the client - is there any way that we credibly get across the fact that this recent huge volume of spam is absolutely nothing to do with him in a reconsideration request? Of course we can start work on removing these links and can disavow anything we can't remove - but my expectation is that should this be successful the same competitor is going to continue throwing spam links at my client. I appreciate that previous actions by the client would in themselves have been worthy of a manual spam action - but it seems far too much of a coincidence given the timing if this penalty was unrelated to the recent attack. I'd really appreciate any insights from the Moz community and will look forward to sharing our eventual success story as a YouMoz post! Tom
Link Building | | TomVolpe0 -
Creating Local Listings for Small Business Clients - Verifying if phone call is only verification option? Are directory submission services worth it?
I'm relatively new to local SEO --- I do a lot of local websites for small businesses (restaurants, bars, hotels, attorneys, dentists) in my area and thought it would make sense to include basic local SEO work with my websites. I have a couple of questions about adding my client's businesses to local business directories... I've started by adding each business to Google, Bing, and Yahoo business listings. I verified these listings with the postcard option which my clients then email to me. I've started adding them to additional directories but have found that many local directories require a phone call to the business to verify it (no other options). How do most SEO companies handle this? Do I ask them to forward their phone to mine for a night? Does it make sense to do local directory submission by hand? I created a spreadsheet for each company and keep track of each directory I submit to (the directory name, verification status, and username & password). I looked at services like Yext but doubt they are as thorough as doing it by hand? Any other advice on local business directory submission would greatly be appreciated. Thanks.
Link Building | | RustySmith0 -
How Many SEO Clients Do You Have?
Hello Mozzers, I'm wondering how many clients or SEO customers you all oversee? Do you execute on your own? Do you collaborate on every client or is one person responsible for their own. Thanks
Link Building | | TheOceanAgency1 -
Should my client stop their large-scale spammy link building immediately or taper off slowly?
I'm working with a company that that is doing a lot of black-hat link building, and they got hit by Penguin 2.0. Should they stop all spammy link building immediately or slowly, over time? Is it possible that stopping all the spammy link building immediately will hurt the site? Thank you for reading!
Link Building | | DA20130 -
Backlinks in client website footers - best strategy?
I work for a web design & development agency. We are looking to rank for 'web design' and 'web development'. Typically we have a credit in the footer of every site we build (below). We have a lot of backlinks (>60,000) this way. web design and development by We link 'web design and development' and '<our name="">' separately.
Link Building | | JeromeSavon
Does this strategy sound ok and can anyone suggest improvements?</our> Thanks0 -
Client Content Strategy (or lack of)
Hey everyone, I just finished pitching a client for some SEO work. He said he does not want to write any type of content. He also said his industry is so unique that he does not want anyone else writing content for him either. His site has about 25 pages of total content now. I am going to get all of his onpage seo good to go but what would you do? Just build links? I really prefer to have some sort of content strategy in place but find it can be challenging with clients.
Link Building | | BigStereo0 -
Anyone get this from clients? Any good solutions?
One of our account managers messaged me today. Click here to see the conversation: http://imgur.com/apZ9Z Does anyone have any tips for dealing with really ignorant clients?
Link Building | | MicahMMG1 -
Primary link building for new clients, where do you go first?
When starting out with a new client, where do you look first to build links for that client? I have a lot of close friends who have small businesses with not a very huge budget for SEO and I'm trying to wrap my head around how to do a significant amount of quality link building without breaking the bank. Any suggestions? My list so far is: Friends / Family of the client.
Link Building | | adriandg
Free (good quality) directories - Yellow pages, etc.
Content creation / Article publishing
Paid directories (BBB, etc) What i am wondering though is if anyone out there has some suggestions as to how to do some quality link building for a small client with a limited budget (lets say, $500).0