It’s important to know what your capabilities are, to know what you can accomplish. It’s just as important to know what you cannot accomplish. Today, I had one of those situations.
A former coworker of mine had a friend who is a photographer and who wanted to launch a new website. My coworker referred him to me as potentially being able to help him with his search engine optimization efforts. So today I received an email letting me know that he was interested in doing SEO, that he wanted to do things right from the start, and asked if I would take a look at one of the templates he was thinking about using.
Okay, wants to do SEO. Cool! Wants to get things right from the beginning. Great! Wants me to look at a template. Hmmm. Not necessarily terrible, but starting to put up red flags.
As I mentioned before, this gentleman was a photographer. Sounds like it was a one-man operation. Maybe he’s working with someone else, but it’s not a big company. It’s your typical American small business, where efficiency is key, and squeezing the most out of every dollar is critical.
I took a look at the template that the photographer sent over. It was from a company that builds templates specifically for photography studios, where the photographer basically just has to plug in their content, probably into a web-based interface, and they’re good to go with a pretty attractive website.
The template that the photographer was looking at, however, was a Flash template. Totally, completely, 100% Flash. One of those Flash sites where you take a look at the source code, and it’s about 25 lines, max. A head section with a title but no meta description, and a body section that pretty much just puts in the Flash movie and that’s it. All of the menus were in Flash, and there were no unique URLs between pages. You know the kind. A total, complete, 100% Flash SEO disasterpiece.
Next, I took a look at the competitive landscape. I thought about what keywords I would use to find this type of business, and typed them into Google. Every result on the first few pages had the keywords in the title tag, and many on the first page had the keywords in the URL. I clicked through to some of the sites, and it was evident that many of them were doing some pretty serious SEO. Clearly a very competitive arena.
I knew exactly what I needed to say to this guy. I asked him to call me, and when he called, I told him that given the competitive landscape and some other factors, that his marketing dollars would probably be more effectively spent somewhere else, and not on SEO.
A home is only as good as the foundation it is built on. The same goes for a website. A templated website can be very attractive, and can get the job done, but in the long run you will likely have very difficult challenges when it comes to customizing the site and getting it to rank for competitive terms. Add to that very limited resources (not just money, but time as well) and you are looking at a no-win situation. I knew there was no chance I could take on this project and come out successful at the other end.
This doesn’t mean that the photographer’s business cannot be successful. Or even that he cannot be successful driving leads from the web. He may be able to drive leads cost effectively through paid search, through social sites or perhaps other ways. But given the time, effort and money that would need to be invested into an SEO campaign for this site, relying on SEO to drive leads was not going to be a viable strategy.
It’s important to know when a project is going to be too much. It could be a budget issue, where there is not enough money in the budget to invest in the amount of time needed for effective SEO. It may be an expectations issue, where the clients expectations simply are incongruous with what can be reasonably attained. It may be a structural issue, where the website architecture and platform do not allow for the types of changes necessary for effective SEO (this is also a bit of a budget issue).
Any way you slice it, you have to know what you can and cannot accomplish. By not taking on projects that you know will not be successful, you will protect your own reputation, and will gain the respect of a potential client because you did not waste their hard-earned money.
