Yes, I’m 100% not joking, I was literally just fired after producing the largest growth of organic traffic my client has ever seen not with any blackhat methods but rather pure white hate optimizations. Here’s how it went down…
My client ran a fencing business that he was looking to grow and after seeing one of my most recent posts about results I had for a different client he decided to shoot me a message. Long story short things went well and we agreed on a deal for monthly SEO services. Now, normally when onboarding a client I try to gauge how comfortable people are with SEO since many of them like the idea of growth but can get a little stingy when it comes to changing their website design even if it’s the smallest of details and this client straight up told me “You’re the expert do whatever you think is best” to which always sounds good to me right? Well, keep that in mind as you read this because I suggested to the client lets make some additional location pages right maybe 4 or 5 to generate some traction in the surrounding area to which they agreed and overnight I woke up to 100 different location pages….. Not just any location pages but almost exact duplicates of each page with only the location word changed out, making it 100% duplicate content that would not be registered by Google. Now, this wouldn’t be as big of a deal, but for some reason when explaining this to my client they were stuck on this idea that they liked how the content read and didn’t want to change it even just to rephrase it. even if it wouldn’t be indexed defeating the original purpose of why we did them. I eventually stopped pursuing this yet I could tell this conversation wasn’t over.
I sent over my monthly report explaining how traffic was booming and we really made some huge growth of over 135% just within two months which is something that normally doesn’t happen that fast, especially with organic growth. I even double-checked the sources and dates to ensure it was legitimate growth and not someone sending us spam. Now at the bottom of the report I put a little summary and part of that is explaining some potential ideas we should touch on, one of which was about duplicate content in which I told them that according to Google Search Console, many of the pages had not been indexed properly or at all and that rephrasing could really help. They sent me back an email later that day saying they appreciate my work but they just had different ideas of how SEO should be carried out for the website and judging by how we had no problems prior to the duplicate content I could tell that’s what really broke the owner but they hired me as the specialist and I can only do and advise them to what I think is best; however, it does suck to lose a client with so much potential.
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