Your biggest mistake in local, share it

What was your biggest mistake in local with the web?

So cringe worthy now, it actually is humorous or terrifying?

I had some buyer's remorse from just handing money each month to a web designer and getting 2 exciting blog entries for $500. So I told them to stop this time last year. Doing NOTHING gave me more calls! At least till some Halloween algo or so came.

So I found fiver ordered some crazy map citations and screwed myself further. I believe I went from a pitiful 60 plus organic traffic to zero in about 45 days. I then got a "local seo" expert from WF who really did nothing but find a way to invoice me.

So I had to repair the citations from years back. Then from the fiverr magic. Just then the 7 pack comes and goes. And has been raptured finally.

My biggest competitors in organic are BBB, Yelp, Superpages, Thomas.Net & Blue Book.

So starting over slowly.

I have seen some really tricky situations when it comes to Local SEO.

Most annoying would have to be a website that had claimed my clients google my business listing and business citations. I had to unverify the listing & prove multiple times that my client was the actual business owner and that the other website was a fraud. It was within the floral industry, the fraud business was using e-commerce and then delivering the flowers through a third party.

I had to admire their innovation though.

I had a client who, halfway through our contract period, decided that she wanted to change the official business name. I'll let that one speak for itself.

Then there was also the politician I assisted two years ago who was celebrating the fact that he had no negative press on the first page of Google thanks to me. He celebrated by getting hammered and trying to drive home, then getting a DUI. The news article that went alongside this shot to spot 3. I dropped him as a client the next morning.

upperminds said:

Then there was also the politician I assisted two years ago who was celebrating the fact that he had no negative press on the first page of Google thanks to me. He celebrated by getting hammered and trying to drive home, then getting a DUI. The news article that went alongside this shot to spot 3. I dropped him as a client the next morning.

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Haha that is gold. That is a complete nightmare, you probably could have charged him shitloads to bury the article.

Mikaelo said:

Haha that is gold. That is a complete nightmare, you probably could have charged him shitloads to bury the article.

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But is such an idiot worth the trouble? No doubt he will have unrealistic expectations.

I accidentally said a client does penis piercings when they don't.

I just want a prince albert and no one will give me one.

upperminds said:

Then there was also the politician I assisted two years ago who was celebrating the fact that he had no negative press on the first page of Google thanks to me. He celebrated by getting hammered and trying to drive home, then getting a DUI. The news article that went alongside this shot to spot 3. I dropped him as a client the next morning.

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hahaha my friend that is indeed fvery funny haha.

2xdswu said:

hahaha my friend that is indeed fvery funny haha.

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You'd think so, but I lost out on over $55,000 worth of monthly fees as a result.

We have a local tv celebrity as a reputation management client. She has a really bad article about her, which shows up as the #2 spot in Google when you search her name.

We usually have good results, but we couldn't do anything with it. The big problem was that it was a philly.com article. She is in Philly and seeing it as that. We tried to suppress it with positive material as we do with our rep clients, but it was not working at all for her.

Our efforts were not in vein. We got the article pushed down off the first page everywhere except for the Philly area (which was not going to happen). We showed her this and she was happy.

We don't have problems with reputation management clients, but this one was a nightmare. We managed to make the best of a bad situation and the client was happen in the end.

I am glad they aren't all like this lol!

upperminds said:

You'd think so, but I lost out on over $55,000 worth of monthly fees as a result.

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You could always go for a more well known politician lol.

Lol, love it when clients get sudden "inspiration"

Hopefully she made it more keyword focused at least