“The anatomy of a horrible web design client” I came across this interesting infographic published at Search Engine Journal. Most of the points mentioned about the web design clients are true. Let me share the infographic first and then let me present my comparison of this with the SEO clients that we have.View a clearer pdf version of the infographic and download it hereWhile I agree with all the facts mentioned above, I can say that it is not entirely the mistake of the client. 95% of this is caused by the service provider itself. Remember that no client is “horrible” if the initial approach and planning by the service provider is perfect. Let’s find out more about that later on in this post. When it comes to an SEO client many of them would expect thousands of visitors to their website in a short span. According to them, their website is the best and so, with a little Offpage SEO, the visitors should be flowing in. If the increase in number of visitors is small, then the SEO service provider is not doing it right. Here is how the SEO clients will talkI have a great website that does have a warm welcome online. Now I need to increase by visitors to a few thousands over the next few months. Gimme a best SEO package deal for itGive me an estimated time on when I would start getting a flow of traffic. Let’s create estimated timelines to gain 1000 visitors and so on.The project is in progress of almost 3 weeks and I’ve got only around 50 new visitors. If this is situation, how are you going to achieve 1k visitors in 3 months?And when it comes to the pricing of custom SEO packages, this is a common talk “Give me a best quote because my partner is tight about the budget and I need him to approve the package to offer you the job”The main difference between a web design and SEO client As per the infographic, about 50% of the web design clients do not know what they actually want, which is true. However, in the case of an SEO client, almost everyone knows what they want:35% of them need increased visitors to the website (increase in 1000s)45% of them need huge increase in online sales20% of them need to rank in the first 3 places of search results for all competitive keywords related to their niche According to the SEO clients, all these can be achieved with ease and within a short period of time if the service is done right. With the above expectations in mind, most of the clients are excited during the start of the project but eventually lose hope within a few months. Let’s learn why that happens.What SEO clients think they need is correct - increased traffic, increased sales and higher serps. Out of these three, off-page SEO is mainly inclined to achieving higher SERPS for competitive keywords. It is the free-will of the searches whether to click and visit your website from the search results. And again, it is upto them to make a purchase from your website. Simply said, SEO would present your website to the right audience. The audience visiting your website and converting your clients is based on several other factors. We used to explain these very clearly to our clients. We make them understand that off page SEO can get websites ranked high in the search engine results and getting XXXX number of visitors and sales depends on a lot of other factors including the freewill which cannot be controlled.So we set realistic targets and guarantee search engine result positions instead of number of visitors and sales. With a clear understanding, our clients do their best in making their websites the best so that the search engine visibility that we crate is utilized to its full. In fact we have all “Happy Clients ”