Link Development Realities Versus What We Tell Our Clients

This week I’m seeking some feedback for a future column with a working title of
“Link Development Realities Versus What We Tell Our Clients”

The idea for this column came from a client conference call I participated in this past week. As the call progressed, it became more and more evident that several of the participants in the call did not, to put this gently, have a clue what they were doing. I was in a situation where refuting what the call participants were telling everyone could easily make them look bad in front of co-workers, managers, etc.

Given that with many corporate clients we can’t know who recommended what strategy, and since many times people within corporations end up in charge of things they are not experienced with, this type of situation calls for delicate handling. It does no good for me to say, “I can’t believe you are wasting three grand a month for that crap”, even though that’s exactly what I’m saying to myself.

As strategists and link builders, part of what we do involves a degree of selection of tactic. While it’s obvious we have to be politically sensitive to the internal workings of corporate clients, and with my example above the best response was no (immediate) response, the issue remains: When confronted with clients who are using tactics and investing budgets for link building services that have no value, but the client doesn’t know it and likely even recommended it, what do you do? And here’s a related question: many aspects of the link building process can take hours to explain why you are doing them but take only minutes to actually do. How much of why we are doing what we do should we feel obligated to tell the client, and when is it best to just say nothing and do our thing?

Eric Ward has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994, providing services ranking from linking strategy to a monthly private newsletters on linking for subscribers. The Link Week column appears on Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.