Competing against yourself?

Multiple clients in the same industry

[Illah]

What do you do when you have numerous clients in the same industry with a core of powerful keywords that all the clients want (and I would want if I were only optimizing one client)? By making one site rank well you in turn beat another, essentially competing against yourself.

--Illah

[Liane]

There is a web design/SEO company in my industry which has dozens (if not hundreds) of customers in the same industry or similar industries which share many of the same keywords.

The answer is that you can't do any of your clients justice. As you correctly noted, you are competing against yourself.

In the case of the company mentioned above, they have had to intentionally dilute certain keywords for some customers in order to make another, more demanding customer happy.

The end result is that my site and many others have managed to successfully displace almost all of their sites without much effort.

Only a greedy man will take money without giving his customer his best work and only a stupid man is willing to lose customers due to his greed! In the end, nobody is happy ... including you!

Offer exclusivity and charge for it! That way, your customer is guaranteed your best work and you are guaranteed quality customers who are willing to pay for results! Everyone wins!

[nalin]

I would tend to agree, it is obviously a situation where someone loses (and therefore you lose as well), I would tend to shy away from such a task as an ethical no-no.

[wheel]

This is tough, but I disagree that it can't be beat. I work only in one industry - and I manage multiple PPC campaigns. What I do is turn over the control of the PPC campaign. Then I charge for regularly reviewing and making recommendations (i.e. a couple of times per month). My customers have the ability to raise their own bids or request help with specific areas if they want to tailor their campaign to compete against my other customers - or the rest of the market. Of course my market is so competitive and broad that they rarely run into each other. I am up front with all my customers that this is what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. None of them have any problem with it, they're all getting good results.

I'm just branching into SEO work and I've struggled with how to charge an ongoing fee with multiple clients. While I haven't firmed up my fee structure yet, I expect I will do one of the following:
- not compete on the same keyphrase. There's enough keyphrases in the industry that they can always focus on another one. The market I'm in is ultra competitive so I don't have any current plans to go after the big three phrases - there's lots of traffic on the other phrases.
- charge a flat fee and not an ongoing fee. The client I'm focussing on will be the one who's campaign I'm working on right now.
Either way, I won't be charging based upon placement, but instead on work. i.e. $X for site review, $Y for so many links, etc. If that gets you to page 1, great. Otherwise, you'll need more links under a new agreement.

Yes, it's not very scaleable. However for now I prefer to charge a bit higher fees and work with fewer clients. I won't be working with 100's of clients even though I potentially could have the business.