Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've heard great things about Basecamp as well.  It's only 20 bucks a month, so that's not bad.  Hey, Tod, you might have talked me into it!

We've tried quite a few of these out, and frankly didn't really like any of the free options (I'm assumming you don't want to pay.  Grindstone2 was the best of a bad lot.

We ended up just creating a custom excel sheet that auto-updates when you enter data.  It has easily been the best option.  If you want a copy message me in private, I'll be glad to provide one.

Well, sometimes we have to deal with people we don't like.  One of my first clients was a huge pain in my rear.

I complained until my throat was sore, but the fact of the matter is that him being on me made me better at documenting progress, reporting and explaining processes.

Take those lemons, and make lemonade

Welcome to SEO

Explaining what we do and why it has value comes with the territory.

If the site is a nightmare then you shouldn't be building links to it yet!  First get the site architecture figured out, and then get back to this.

That might even be the reason why the client is so upset...he might be thinking that you should be focused on getting the site built instead of buidling links to an unoptimized site (and he would be right).

There are a variety of metrics that you can provide.

1. Increased referral traffic.  If your links are good and are coming from pages and sites that people read, then your referral traffic should always rise.

2. Increased traffic to specific landing page.  If you are targeting the links towards specific landing pages, then their traffic should go up, right?

3) Increase in rank for targeted keywords.  This is easier if the client is long term.  We always tell clients its going to take at least 2 weeks for rankings to increase.  This is my least favorite metric, but it does help clients understand.

Another thing that I have found is that clients need to know as much about where you failed as where you succeeded.  We always provide a list of pending or failed link attempts.  This shows them that the work we do is difficult, helps them understand our efforts.

It sounds to me like what could have been improved was the initial planning period.  If you had helped set expectations from the start, writing down your plans and KPI's you might not have this issue.

That being said, sometimes no explanation is good enough.  If you feel like you've done everything you can and the client is still not happy with your answers, it may be best for you both to go in a different direction.  Nobody wants to give up revenue, but sometimes it is for the best.

Hi Guys,

If you are looking for big time enterprise, or SEO targeting Spain, I highly suggest you check out http://www.iloveseo.net/ as well as http://www.aleydasolis.com/ (I think she is in house, but her blog is always full of great tips).  Ani Lopez has quite a bit of multilingual info on his blog as well (http://dynamical.biz/blog/).

They are all top shelf.  But if all you can afford are well drinks, and perhaps a premium beer (to keep the bar analogy going) at Not Just SEO we help smaller companies target spanish language customers in the US and Latin America.  We're based in Mexico, so we've got that going for us too!  I hope this helps.