client says he will help with seo

i have a client who was referred to me by someone. we just started this past week and he is already pissing me off. he says "what keywords are you targeting? my daughter also does seo and she can help you"
fucking if your daughter does seo, why did you hire me??

what should i say to him?

Act professional. Decide if you need the client.

I had an SEO and Web Design client do something similar to me once, except she was insisting that she could do all of the work herself. I let her know that while she could alter her website, it would be best if she would let me continue designing and optimising her site (you know, the things she hired me to do) before she made any changes. She ignored my warning and told me that she's more "artistic" than I am, so designing the website and making it appear in the search engine shouldn't be too hard. After she told me this, I knew what was about to happen, so I created a backup of the entire website, grabbed some popcorn, and waited for the panicked phone call.


In case you're wondering what happened to her website, let's just say she discovered that the "design" part was mostly coding and the SEO part had nothing to do with failing to insert text into the code of her website. Luckily for her, all I had to do was restore the files and the website was back to normal.

As for your client, you can either be assertive with the client and explain to him or her that you are going to do the work, or you can let his daughter sabotage your work and sully your reputation with her possibly subpar SEO skills. Additionally, if you let your client push you around and give them too much control over your work, you're just reinforcing their fanciful notion that they can continue doing it and get away with it.

Communicate with your client; tell them what's on your mind.

@Zwielicht I laughed for a good minute. Thanks man.

@nonai just let them know you have worked on numerous sites and you have a system in place that you cannot allow others to interfere with or the optimization will not work.

i would charge more

nonai said:

i have a client who was referred to me by someone. we just started this past week and he is already pissing me off. he says "what keywords are you targeting? my daughter also does seo and she can help you"
fucking if your daughter does seo, why did you hire me??

what should i say to him?

Click to expand...

Tell her straight up. Say "if you want me to work on your website, I'd love to, but if you insist on helping me I'm going to have to decline."

Allot of clients don't understand ho series they should take the work, but the clients worth having will leave you with it if they trust you.

Its better to keep calm and do your work. Thats all I think and charge him what you want. He is trying this to show you that he or his daughter knows all the stuff to reduce your charges

Just tell him straight up that while you appreciate the offer he's made you would rather work on the site alone and if he's not up for that then he can find someone else.

If you take shit from him now then he's going to give you shit forever. Believe me, I say this from experience. Don't let him push you around unless you're in terrible need of his money.

Can you refer that client to me ?

"what keywords are you targeting? my daughter also does seo and she can help you"

If his daughter might be good @ seo then won't have contacted you. Just accept that offer and ask his daughter to write one blog post per week on site and write a article every day on ezine articles.

I really love when my client tries to be over smart, i ask them to the work which i should have out sourced to a va.

He's either trying to get you to show his daughter what you do, or, trying to genuinely be helpful.

In either case, a simple "sorry, I only work alone" will suffice.

That's it. End of story.

He either bails as a client (in which case - great), or he understands the lay of the land.

you could always charge more money.

Some car repair shop here had funny "note" or w/e in their shop. It said like
"customer wants to oversee the repair 100$/h"
"customer wants to advice the mechanic 200$/h"
"customer wants to help the mechanic 300$/h"

Even if its joke i guess it makes the point very clear to some people.

i'd say this is a joke like 90% of the time

antsaoo said:

you could always charge more money.

Some car repair shop here had funny "note" or w/e in their shop. It said like
"customer wants to oversee the repair 100$/h"
"customer wants to advice the mechanic 200$/h"
"customer wants to help the mechanic 300$/h"

Even if its joke i guess it makes the point very clear to some people.

Click to expand...

This gave me an idea!

Nonai, here's another option for you: let his daughter work with you. Now, you might be thinking

but what if you explained to your client that because you have a specific and very intricate system in place, you would have to charge him for the extra time spent training his daughter (of course, then you would have to spend time training her). Of course, I've never tested this method myself, so it could have plenty of drawbacks (e.g., she steals your methods and tries to create her own SEO agency near you), but if your client insists that his daughter work with you, then it's worth considering.