How to Explain Admin Access To Client Who Denies It to Anyone Inside or Outside?
-
Hi ,
I am on a new project for a great prospective client. After a company split the IT dept says, "Our IT Infrastructure team doesn’t provide admin access to anyone (internal or external) to any of our servers/sites for security, maintainability, and quality reasons. We would be more than happy to install and configure any software you would like and provide you read access to any output you might need."
I am not aware of any such software. Or what help "read only access" is to getting tasks accomplished. Tomorrow am I meet with four others on the project that I am to assign SEO tasks to. Everyone wonders how to accomplish marketing tasks, web redesign and SEO tasks efficiently? They are told to drop by new content on a backupn CD.
My contact has asked that I am permitted access... what can one do when IT says "no?"
-
Nice work! It's always great to hear success stories and gives us a little more inspiration to keep up the communication until we get what we want;-)
-
For a quick follow -up. After several meetings, I have been able to explain my efforts and how it will move their project forward. We seem to have built a new level of trust and the admin access has been granted. Lots of extra hours to get here, though. Thanks for all of your great advice.
-
Thanks! All your thoughts prepared me for a meeting with the business owner today and the head of IT. They have determined to set up a Dev site and give me access to it. Then they will move updates to the live site. Has anyone worked this way? Tips on how to best manage it?
-
Wow, that is really a bad situation and sounds like you are going to be very limited. When I mentioned limitation, I was referring to things such as Google Analytics Admin. Some of the platform sites have their Google Analytics account Admin, but will not give Admin and GWMT access to 3rd parties (marketing agencies). They package in Analytics with their platform monthly rates and set Analytics to mail a report to the client each month. I have had developers refuse to add a video sitemap. I have had some that gave me access to their site backend, but it was hosted on an IIS server and required them to do the manual 301 redirects, and they refused to do this. These are just a few examples of "limitations" I have seen.
Having said that, I really feel your pain here. In your initial question, you called this a "great prospective client," but it is not a great situation as there seems to be a bad breakup with residual bad internal politics. Without knowing your entire situation, here are my recommendations based on what you have mentioned so far:
Option 1 is to not accept the project as it might be too draining and time consuming because of the company politics.
Option 2 is to start by placing proper expectations with the person hiring you - sounds like you have established a good relationship with them. You have to let them know how important on-site optimization is and how the IT dept seem to be unreasonable. Without onsite optimization, your entire campaign is going to be inefficient - it will take a ton more work offsite in order to get results and it is not ideal. Even blogging sounds like a serious pain in that it has to go to a test server first, then you have to wait for an IT person who doesn't "get it" to approve. You should also consider raising your rates because of the situation. This is not typical, so your typical rates that you may have quoted may no longer apply now that you know the whole story.
Anyway, good luck with this. I hope it works. I would love to hear how it plays out.
-
It is good to learn that some of you work in this manners as my experience has been largely with having full admin access. Tim, what "are some limitations" you have found this way?
I have offered to train those with access by walking them through what they need to do verbally, including meeting with them initially in person as needed to ensure they understand how to complete the steps successfully. However, as I understand it after this new three-way company split, all the higher level and "cutting edge" IT are gone. The remaining staff is working hard to learn those positions and has no or little bandwidth for such training.
They use one path for all internal and external help who blog, add photos, redesign pages or any form of updates: all are done on a test site till approved by the IT staff, then placed on a CD, driven or mailed to their physical address, and IT uploads the new content into a "rolled back" version of Joomla (Joomla-253-released.html).
Therefore, unfortunately, I will be unable to use schema metadata, just one downside.
They seem unsure of time or budget for follow-up communication or documentation from IT. As I understand this is where the "installing software to give me read only access" is meant to give "output". I can audit already through many SEOmoz and other tools. Is there such a software? Would it work as a communicative documentation of completed tasks?
I agree with your "just work through it" and "no point in doing all the work". My concern is the project manager/my contact's take that IT in this case is like an "unnecessary barricade" and is asking me to proceed by way of "software solution discussions". They seem to be seeing SEO conclusively as something similar to a WordPress Yoast install for an old Joomla platform.
How do you suggest building trust with a "barricaded team"? They seem worn and now face competing with their former peers/lead staff who are all well ahead according to Site Explorer's comparison tools.
-
Yes, as Cesar stated, this is not uncommon, and you can push the tasks to them. Over half of our clients' sites are on platform based sites and their developers do not give us access. While there are some limitations, we provide them with a nice zip file with paint by numbers documentation of what we need them to do.
Just put together your strategy exactly the way you would if you were going in there to do it yourself. Spell each item out so that it cannot be misinterpreted. I always include a READ ME FIRST file that explains the content of the zip folder. Once you send the file, schedule at time to verbally go over it and confirm that they completely understand your instructions for them. A lot of the times, you will get a grumpy response as they just don't get why these things are so important to you. Just work through it. Find out what they may not be able to do and problem solve to find the work-around. Have them send you documentation once they have completed the tasks. Do an audit and make sure everything meets your satisfaction. Keep the paper trail (email trail) of everything saved, just in case...
-
Are you referring to making edits to their website for SEO purposes?
If so most companies will outline in a Doc what they need to do and you leave it up to them to get those tasks done.
No point in doing all the work
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
-
Getting client to spend the time writing article of authority
Hi, I've got an issue that I'm sure many of you are good at dealing with. I'm working with an authority in my client's industry. There is the president, who is definitely an authority. There is his wife, who has a name in the field, is an author in the field, but her name is not near as big as the president. I found a really, really good topic for content that is attracting links in the industry - one of the best content topics possible which really needed to be addressed on my client's website. I let them know that it needed to be an article of authority, but they had their assistant write it. It's good, she's talented - it's informative, interesting, has 2 embedded videos of the president talking, and is 1650 words. We haven't made the videos yet. The thing is, doesn't this need to be written by the authority - president. He's a slow writer with zero time, but I think it needs to be his voice with his name on it to attract links. He's super super busy though. Should I: 1. Suggest that the president do a thorough editing of the article and put his name on it. or 2. Have his wife (who has more time) do a thorough editing of the article and put her name on it. or 3. Leave it as is or 4. Have the president rewrite the entire article when he has time, which he would be resistant to. or 5. Have the president's wife rewrite the entire article, which she would be resistant to? What do you guys think with the little information I've given you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW1 -
Question about New Client with Manual Actions / Partial Matches in GWT
We just signed on a new client and are gaining access to their Analytics, GWT, etc... In GWT, we quickly went to "Manual Actions" as the client stated they've been slipping in rankings the past couple months from 1 to 4 to 8 and have been staying at around 7/8 for 15 of their main keywords. Without getting into the specifics of their keyword rankings, I'm curious to know when they may have received the Partial Matches Manual Action from Google. I checked Messages and saw nothing about the Manual Actions update. Can anyone lend some advice as we are most likely going to have to put together a Disavow text file and begin sending requests to take down links. Thank you in advance. Hope this was clear enough, but let me know if you need more info. Patrick uOGsyKh.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Https Homepage Redirect & Issue with Googlebot Access
Hi All, I have a question about Google correctly accessing a site that has a 301 redirect to https on the homepage. Here’s an overview of the situation and I’d really appreciate any insight from the community on what the issue might be: Background Info:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | G.Anderson
My homepage is set up as a 301 redirect to a https version of the homepage (some users log in so we need the SSL). Only 2 pages on the site are under SSL and the rest of the site is http. We switched to the SSL in July but have not seen any change in our rankings despite efforts increasing backlinks and out put of content. Even though Google has indexed the SSL page of the site, it appears that it is not linking up the SSL page with the rest of the site in its search and tracking. Why do we think this is the case? The Diagnosis: 1) When we do a Google Fetch on our http homepage, it appears that Google is only reading the 301 redirect instructions (as shown below) and is not finding its way over to the SSL page which has all the correct Page Title and meta information. <code>HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 17:26:24 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Location: https://mysite.com/ Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 242 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> # Moved Permanently The document has moved [here](https://mysite.com/). * * * <address>Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Server at mysite.com</address></code> 2) When we view a list of external backlinks to our homepage, it appears that the backlinks that have been built after we switched to the SSL homepage have been separated from the backlinks built before the SSL. Even on Open Site, we are only seeing the backlinks that were achieved before we switched to the SSL and not getting to track any backlinks that have been added after the SSL switch. This leads up to believe that the new links are not adding any value to our search rankings. 3) When viewing Google Webmaster, we are receiving no information about our homepage, only all the non-https pages. I added a https account to Google Webmaster and in that version we ONLY receive the information about our homepage (and the other ssl page on the site) What Is The Problem? My concern is that we need to do something specific with our sitemap or with the 301 redirect itself in order for Google to read the whole site as one entity and receive the reporting/backlinks as one site. Again, google is indexing all of our pages but it seems to be doing so in a disjointed way that is breaking down link juice and value being built up by our SSL homepage. Can anybody help? Thank you for any advice input you might be able to offer. -Greg0 -
KW density and idiot clients. HELP!!!!
I have a client who insists on using KW1 @ a 3% rate in a 600-word piece, aka 18 references to KW1 in a two page piece. I upped the KW1 count to 18, but in doing so, added 100 words of text, getting the piece to 700 words. Now the client wants 21 KW1 appearances to maintain that 3% density. If I add 3 more KW1's, I'll up the word count again, requiring more KW1's to hit the 3% mark. Any suggestions for solving the never-ending problem of KW density and idiot clients? Thanks in advance. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webwordslinger0 -
Does anyone have a BOTW.org promo code for november yet?
Does anyone have a best of the web directory promo code for november yet?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unitedfitness0 -
Local Searches done from outside of local area better than searches from within local area
Here's a strange one: I am working on a site for a local business and targeting local searches. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Various keyword position tools show the site ranking very well for searches like "Anytown Widget Store". Doing the same Google search from a browser in Anytown, the site shows up much lower. So I tried changing the location in Google to other cities, using a variety of browsers and it comes up much higher out of town than in town. I have seen plenty of geographic discrepancies before, but usually they went the other way - searches from the actual local area did slightly better than the same searches done elsewhere, which would make sense. Any thoughts on why this would happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Ker0 -
Anyone in the fitness industry?
I have a lot of websites and they are all fitness related. Some are affiliate sites and some are blogs. I've made some great relationships with some big players in the fitness space and it has worked out well for both of us. Is anyone here in the fitness industry? Are you open to building new relationships? Do you know other websites or blogs in the industry open to creating new relationships? I don't mean a simple link exchange, I mean a real relationship where sites try to help each other out more than an arbitrary link in a list on some resource page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
RSS feeds- What are the secrets to getting them, and the links inside then, indexed and counted for SEO purposes?
RSS feeds, at least on paper, should be a great way to build backlinks and boost rankings. They are also very seductive from a link-builder's point of view- free, easy to create, allows you to specifiy anchor text, etc. There are even several SEO articles, anda few products, extolling the virtues of RSS for SEO puposes. However, I hear anecdotedly that they are extremely ineffective in getting their internal links indexed. And my success rate has been abysmal- perhaps 15% have ever been indexed,and so far, I havenever seem Google show an RSS feed as a source for a backlink. I have even thrown some token backlinks against RSS feeds to see if that helped in getting them indexed, but even that has a very low success rate. I recently read a blog post saying that Google "hates aRSS feeds" and "rarely spiders perhaps the first link or two." Yet there are many SEO advocates who claim that RSS feeds are a great untapped resource for SEO. I am rather befuddled. Has anyone "crackedthe code" onhow to get them,and the links that they contain, indexed and helping rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tclendaniel0