Dealing with clients having very high expectations that are hard to meet is not an uncommon thing for search engine optimization (SEO) providers. Since SEO is an always changing industry, and techniques and methods get outdated very soon, lots of misconceptions take birth in the mind of potential clients which eventually gets transformed into unrealistic expectations. So, it becomes very important for every SEO provider to clear all kinds of misconceptions a client may have before taking on optimization projects.

Here, we’ll cover the most common unrealistic SEO expectations clients usually have and how they should be addressed.

1. Speed of ranking improvement – Normally clients have a misconception that the amount of time required to take a website from page 2 to page 1 is the same as the amount of time it takes to bring a website from page 3 to page 2 of search results. Ranking of a website depends on many factors (links, domain age, content, onsite factors, etc.,  and the amount of effort and time required increases exponentially when one has to compete with websites on page 1 as compared to time and effort required when competing with websites on page 3 and so on.
2. You can’t rank for everything – The other unrealistic expectation clients usually have is the desire to rank for all the keywords in their niche.  Only the most relevant pages can rank at the top for a keyword, and one can’t make a website highly relevant to all important keywords. Also, since most SEO’s work on a fixed monthly budget, increasing the number of keywords will dilute the overall impact for each keyword. So either they have to increase their budgets or limit themselves to specific set of keywords. (more…)