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
-
Location based landing pages best practices
Hello, I am looking for the communities thoughts on location-based landing pages. That is, writing out dozens, sometimes hundreds of landing pages in the format of domain.com/[keyword]-[location] and recycling the same content over and over to localize organic search engine results. i have done it with multiple websites and seen tremendous success, however, i am considering getting rid of these pages and having all of the spammy location based pages 301 redirect to my main page domain.com/[keyword] I am considering this because the above practice seems to be a bit black-hat / spammy and those pages do not offer any unique or valuable content. While i have seen great results from this practice, i feel like Google will eventually penalize this or may already be penalizing me without me knowing it. At the same time, i am hesitant to because these pages are ranking. i.e. domain.com/[keyword-houston] is ranking but domain.com/[keyword] is not ranking Thoughts?
Local SEO | | RyanMeighan0 -
Building Press Release/News Distribution Lists
I'm currently setting up projects in Buzz Stream so that I can send out news tips and press releases to local news stations. Has anyone been able to do this successfully without signing up for an expensive press release distribution company like Newswire? If so... I would appreciate it if you could share an email template you use to send out your news tips and press releases to the local news stations. Thank you!!!
Local SEO | | LindsayE1 -
Spaces between Letters and Numbers SEO question
This is a fun one - Example: Mercedes Benz is pushing to have all of there vehicle models to coincide with the world branding such as the "C300" is supposed to be "C 300" and the "E300" is supposed to be "E 300"... I have a few issues here as when I use Voice Search for "Mercedes Benz C 300" there is no way (that I know of) to add a space between the number and letter. In addition, when searching for the "C 300 for sale" Google corrects the text with "Did you mean: C300 for sale". I am seeking a way to accommodate both versions of the models WITHOUT adding the both C300 and C 300...etc. to the text on web pages. OR will Google eventually change the model names over time as Mercedes-Benz regulates the new U.S. naming convention. Tough question - any thoughts? Thank you for your help -
Local SEO | | MBS-MBA0 -
Community Discussion: Miriam's 2017 Local SEO Predictions ... And Yours?
I want to start this thread by thanking everyone in our community who has started and contributed to great threads this past year. You guys are an inspiration! I want to offer up a few predictions for the Local SEO industry in 2017 and ask you to contribute your own: Attribution will be big in 2017. Google will roll out a more thorough set of attributes in the GMB dashboard as we move forward through the new year. We'll see further rollout out of paid packs in service industries in which Google can play the middle man role. Free-packs won't be gone by the end of the year, but there will be fewer of them. Even SMB local businesses will have to start to tackle the ramifications of voice search. Local SEO will continue to merge with traditional, offline marketing. Local business websites will still matter, but Google will continue to do all it can to keep users within layers of its own local product, and some people will find this maze a bit bewildering. Reviews will finally be recognized as an integral facet of citations, rather than as something separate from them. Now, please, look into your own crystal ball and share your predictions with the community. What are your predictions for Local SEO in 2017? I'd love to know. And, while I'm at it, please let me wish each of you a busy and profitable new year in our exciting industry!
Local SEO | | MiriamEllis4 -
Local SEO Website Structure.
Hi everyone, This might be quite a long post so please bear with me. I am currently rebuilding my website. My previous website was built by a web designer and was very basic. 5 page html site consisting of home, services, gallery, testimonials, contact pages. None of them were great - thin content, not optimised as well as could be - no h1's etc. To be fair I knew nothing about websites and didn't bother much with the site. As a new business I used it simply as a place for people to visit for more information after receiving a leaflet and never bothered much about driving traffic to the site. A few years down the line and I have realised I need the website to be working for me as opposed to alongside me. I am building it myself via wordpress as web designer didn't want to work in wordpress. I have done my keyword research and I'm working on pages as we speak. Previously my homepage - around 80% of visitors landed here for my main keyword (driveway cleaning glasgow) as it was number 6 in the organic listing. With my services page appearing directly underneath in 7 for the same keyword. I have starting building a new page for that keyword which contains (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) in the url. I have 301'd my previous services page to this url. Now for my questions...
Local SEO | | sfrediktru8
My 2nd keyword based on volume is driveway cleaning. How do I optimise for this or will the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page rank for this also as the words are contained within this page? I plan on having the same structure for the remaining services - pressure-washing-glasgow, monoblock-cleaning-glasgow etc, etc. As I am building new pages for each service with location built in, where does this leave my homepage? Should I be targeting keywords for this page? It is still my strongest page and apart from the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page which will get some help from the 301 these are all new pages so I would expect perhaps initially to lose some traffic. But as I am not ranking well for anything other than the main 2 keywords mentioned above it can only be beneficial long term when google recognises the specific pages for each service. And when I start using Adwords I will have a specific landing page for each service. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks0 -
Any Recommendations For a Backlinking Company?
I am looking for a good backlinker or backlinking company to hire. I just have too many marketing tasks to do it myself. I am not looking for quantity but quality. Any recommendations would be appreciated. Sincerely, Garret
Local SEO | | eWebify0 -
Local SEO Best Practices for 2,000+ 'location' service area business
Hi Moz Community! We operate a business where we have a network of 2,000+ technicians around the country who help people repair their mobile phones. These techs do the fixing at the customer's location, making them service area businesses. Even after scouring all of the go-to places on local SEO, I'm struggling to find best practices for this type of situation - the fact that our techs are operating in service areas presents a number of challenges. The biggest one, it seems, is that inevitably service areas are going to overlap. When I talked to a Google rep on this he said this "might" cause our locations to get de-listed and we'd just have to test and find out. Other challenges include the fact that we cannot bulk upload the service areas of our techs, and we cannot bulk verify - meaning there is a ton of work to do at our scale. Any suggestions on where to go to find resources on this specific topic, or an example of someone doing this well we can model? Thanks everyone!
Local SEO | | JohnGroves1 -
Have you heard of any white hat methods for influencing Google's auto suggest/auto complete?
We have a client who has a "friend" who says he can get keyword phrases that include their business name to show up in Google's auto suggest when doing a search. We have not heard much about this and are skeptical to these claims as we know how Google comes up with these suggested keyword phrases. Wondering if anyone in the community heard much about tactics to influence auto suggest/auto complete and would like to know your opinion about it.
Local SEO | | CraigSDM0