There was a guy named Ralph, now me and him had spoken for probably two years on and off about the fencing company he ran. Now I’ll be honest when I first spoke to Ralph it was to sell him on my SEO services; however, at the time he was interested but things just weren’t aligning timing-wise as he was struggling with a variety of different problems such as budgeting, staffing, and other growth related issues. Did I want to make a sale? Yeah, probably but I’ll be honest I’m not a very sales heavy person so I just told him “Look man no problem, if you’re not ready now that’s fine I’m always here to help if you have any questions” and boom that was my first interactions with Ralph.

Why does any of this matter you may ask? Well unlike many others, Ralph is someone who actually took me up on that offer and every now and then would check in with me to see if I could help him understand something about SEO, website design, or just ask me my thoughts on marketing related topics. One day he decides to come clean to me and told me he’s been working with an SEO agency who offered him a really solid deal and things were going well but lately he’s had his suspicions and wanted to see if I could audit his site for him. So I agree and I begin to run through the site. Almost immediately I notice some red flags, these were simple things like a lack of keyword volume, title tags weren’t not being optimized, heading tag structures out of whack, and the list goes on. So I finish my video audit and I send it over to him which he replies thank you to.

No more than 2 days later I receive an email from a random marketing agency asking if I’m such and such person. I guess they found me through the audit since I said “Hey Ralph it’s (insert name)” To which I reply yes, and almost immediately the guy starts going off saying things like “How can I lie in my report” and “Who do you think you are trying to steal my client”. I was confused because I honestly had no intention of signing him as a client after the audit and I tried to clear things up with him explaining my situation on how he came to me, but he essentially just said I should be ashamed of myself for trying to ruin it for other small business owners especially since I’m a one man agency. I felt bad and stopped responding, but then another side of me said F that guy he should be doing his job right the first time. Was I wrong here?