How to handle reluctant clients?

Clients don't want to change anything, how to help?

[Illah]

So I work for a major agency and we sell SEO to help promote the sites we produce, as well as selling SEO to various clients and whatnot. The problem is some of these clients are very reluctant to change any on page copy, and because of the 'corporate' nature of the work content is rarely, if ever, added to the site. As a qualified SEO it's frustrating to work on these sites because I'm basically left with just changing title, meta, and alt tags and crossing my fingers.

Since the quality of my work will ultimately come back to me one day, I don't want a reputation of a snake-oil salesman when these clients wonder why they're not #1. Granted, when I tell them that their reluctance to change X, Y, and Z ultimately did it they understand, but I'd rather be presenting stellar results.

So what do you suggest I do? About all I can think of would be links, but I work with a number of clients and I'd be here 80 hours a week trying to get them all linked with a decent number of relevant links...in other words it's not realistic. Ideas?

Thanks,

--Illah

[cabowabo]

Build your own site, promote it, generate leads and sell them at a premium to your client. That is what they want anyway, leads. You can generally charge $18-$50 per lead (that is lead, not sale). If they don't want to pay those fees and they want their site to generate them, then they have to follow your lead. If they still resist, dump them. They aren't worth it.

Keep your client list to a minimum and only work with those that spur you to dig deep creatively.

Cheers,

CaboWabo