Who searches for “hospital remodel interior designer”? Almost nobody, and that’s the problem. Ann Carden, a business growth strategist and CEO of Expert in You, told me about a client on the Unscripted SEO podcast who was paying for SEO and Google Ads to win work that never starts with a search.
Ann’s client runs an interior design and architecture firm. Her buyers only came to her through referrals and relationships. As Ann put it, “your buyers would never be going to the internet and saying wow who should I get to help us remodel our hospital. It’s not going to happen.” There was, in her words, “so much money going out for that and she never got anything from it.”
If you sell SEO, you’ve probably inherited a client like that. Here’s how to spot one before the retainer starts.
Watch the full interview:
Ask who green-lights the purchase
The question I keep coming back to is who is actually making the purchase decision. In a SaaS sale the daily user isn’t writing the check, and a big enough purchase gets argued in the C-suite before anyone signs. Ann agreed: the users “don’t write the checks, right?”
So before you build a keyword map, find the buyer and ask how they found their last three vendors. If the answer is “a board member knew someone,” your keyword research is answering a question nobody in the deal is asking.
Not every market searches for the service
Ann has run a coaching business for 15 years, and she’s blunt about her own category: “people aren’t searching coaches. They’re not searching a business coach or a business consultant. You have to go to them.”
“If you don’t know this, you’re going to waste a lot of time and energy and money marketing the wrong way. And I see this a lot in business. People marketing the wrong way for their market.”
That doesn’t make SEO useless for those businesses. It changes the job. A referral-driven buyer still Googles the name they were handed, so the brand search, the about page and the case studies have to hold up when they do. What you can’t promise that client is a flood of non-branded leads.
Measure the deal, not the session
The other trap is reporting. When the sale closes over lunch, the analytics never see it, and the client concludes SEO did nothing even when the brand search is what reassured the buyer. If your clients sell through relationships, you need to account for the offline conversions an SEO report can’t see, or you’ll lose the account over a report that measured the wrong thing. For lead-gen clients, start by putting a number on every lead with Zeke Camusio’s expected value per lead.
Here’s a quick checklist I’d run on any relationship-driven client:
- Ask how the last five clients first heard about them, in their own words.
- Check whether the brand name, plus the owner’s name, returns the right business on page one.
- Look at branded search volume against the referral calendar, not against last month.
- Agree on one offline signal you’ll track, like “mentioned the website on the first call.”
Premium buyers don’t go through funnels
Ann’s broader point is that marketing has to match how the buyer buys. She works with experts moving into premium, B2B work, and the cheap funnel is the first thing to go: “CEOs are not going to go through funnels. They’re just not going to go through a $7 book funnel. So you have to know how people buy.”
That’s a useful filter for your own agency too. If your best clients came from a conversation, a podcast or an introduction, your own site is a credibility check, not a lead machine, and it should be built like one.
So before you pitch the next retainer, ask it plainly. Does this buyer ever search for this? And if they don’t, what is the SEO actually for?
Hear the whole conversation, including Ann’s case for raising your prices three to ten times, on the podcast, or read the premium pricing breakdown.