Because of the success of the SEO tricks of the day articles, I decided to take a different point of view as a break and to celebrate the Martin Luther King holiday.  MLK thought big.  He had a dream! The difference is in how you think and how you act.  If he had thought small, he probably would have been a greatly loved preacher in a small town, maybe with a church memorial in his honor.  Instead he had his dream, and we remember where that led, right?  In case you forget, he gave a speech in Washington D.C. that will be remembered forever.  Later on he pissed off the establishment so much that the CIA or some other group had him killed (I don’t care what the group called themselves, if anything).  That’s pretty big.

What does this all have to do with SEO?  Hopefully some of you already figured it out.  Sometimes clients are happy with what they are doing. “My website is just used for …”, “Primarily, our site serves to …”, “We don’t need a website”.

Some people just don’t get it! I’m not complaining about a lack of SEO clients, far from it.  One time I was listening to a very popular talk radio show on WLS radio in Chicago, and I heard the best response I ever heard to a complaint.  A competing radio station had complained, and the response was “Well, they can just sit over there and suck.”  If a potential client is happy with their bad website, or lack of website, they can just sit over there and suck too.  A real SEO worth his money knows that an uninterested potential client doesn’t exist:  They are an oxymoron.  I call these people Targets! That’s right, you just gave me your blessing to do any of the following:

  • Put up a better site and steal all of your customers.
  • Put up a worse site that still ranks above you in search engines.
  • I wonder if your competitors know that you are willing to “sit over there and suck” for the foreseeable future.

What would MLK do with this as an SEO or web developer?  If you truthfully believe that you can improve someones business with SEO work, you also need to believe that the work is valuable enough to do whether or not the world is satisfied.  I have a dream that every SEO at least once in their life sees a client with a website so bad that it demands improvement.  If the client doesn’t want it, you make it anyway!