Introduction
When one needs some masonry work done, he knows he needs a mason, and how to look for one.
The mason on his part will not need to explain what masonry is, and it usually is obvious to know when a job is done and can be payed.
But there are classes of workers for whom things are not that immediate. Yes, they sometimes can earn much more than a mason, but have to devote a big part of their time away from their work field to capture customers.
Among these workers, Financial Advisors and SEO consultants share a big deal of other contact points.
SEO consultants are like Financial Advisors:
- They cannot guarantee their customers a result
- ...but sometimes they do
- Before acquiring a customer, they have to spend time just to explain what they are talking about
- They don't know exactly what they are talking about,
- ...but no one does completely
- No SEO investment is 100% risk free
- ...but some certainly are high risk
- High risk activities can bring high reward in the short run
- ...or can make you lose all your assets
- They tell customers they should diversify their SEO investments
- Their interest is not completely their customers' interest
- Their potential customers are diffident and never know for sure they can trust them
- They love citing the authorities of the moment when meeting each other
- When they try to model the system, they stubbornly use a Gaussian bell and correlation data
- When they try experimenting, they cannot work with an insulated environment
- The ones who succeed the most, are probably not the most visible
- When they take great risk and are rewarded, they can never know whether they are good or just lucky
- They experience their Black Tuesdays (named after cute monochrome animals)
Conclusions
Being an SEO consultants is not easy; potential customers do not understand completely the business and instinctively do not trust you; you have to first sell SEO, than sell your services against your competitors'.
Your advice might be correct now, but not tomorrow, and you can be blamed by the customer.
A customer can be an happy customer, until he is slapped by a black and white cute animal, and you are going to be blamed...
All these aspects are well known by financial advisors, who exists well before since search engine ever existed. I think the SEO industry could learn a lot by studying how the financial advisors world organized to face such problems.
And you, dear SEO consultant, how do you deal with such aspects?
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