Worth naming the misfits explicitly. Engagements that start mismatched rarely end well, and the patterns are consistent.
50+ location enterprises
If you’re a multi-state, 50-location, or franchise-system business, hire an agency or build an in-house team. The work at that scale needs:
- Project management overhead I don’t provide
- Multi-person teams working in parallel — content, technical, citation, GBP — to handle the volume
- Enterprise-tier tooling licenses, integrations, and reporting infrastructure
- Account management for stakeholder coordination across regions
I’ve turned down engagements at this scale even when the budget was generous, because the structural shape doesn’t fit a one-person practice. Hire an agency — there are good ones at this tier.
Businesses with 30 days of runway
If your business needs sales next month or it’s closing, SEO is the wrong channel. Local SEO compounds over 3-12 months — it’s not an emergency-traffic tool.
What you need instead is paid acquisition (Google Ads, LSAs, Meta), partnerships, direct outreach, or a hard look at your unit economics. If you only have 30 days of runway, talk to me before ordering anything. I’d rather spend 15 minutes pointing you to the right channel than take $197 for an audit that won’t help in time.
This is the most common reason I refund or refuse engagements. SEO is not the right move when the house is on fire.
Businesses unwilling to implement
Audits and roadmaps that sit on a shelf are wasted. If your situation requires a roadmap but no one on your team will execute it — and you’re not engaging me to execute it — the $197 audit is unlikely to produce ROI for you.
The rough heuristic: if you can’t allocate at least 4-8 hours/month internally to local SEO work (or hire someone to allocate that time), the audit will be informative reading rather than actionable change. Some clients still buy it for that reason — to learn — and that’s fine. Just go in eyes open.
Industries on Google’s restricted list
A few categories have structural restrictions that limit what local SEO can accomplish:
- CBD, cannabis, and adjacent products. Google’s policies create real ceilings on visibility. SEO works, but the field is narrower.
- Some firearms-related businesses. Similar restrictions, similar ceilings.
- High-risk financial services (payday loans, debt-relief, some crypto). Both ad and organic visibility are restricted in ways that make SEO less effective.
- Adult industries. Beyond my expertise; the playbook is different.
I’ll occasionally take engagements in these spaces if the business is otherwise straightforward, but I’m honest about the ceiling. If you’re a dispensary expecting to compete head-to-head with non-restricted businesses for general queries, expectations need to be calibrated.
Businesses chasing rankings instead of revenue
If you’ve been told that ranking #1 for some specific keyword will fix your business, and you want a consultant who’ll commit to that ranking, I’m not your person. Rankings are inputs to revenue, not revenue. The rankings-obsessed engagements I’ve seen go badly almost always have a deeper diagnosis problem — the ranking isn’t actually the bottleneck.
Businesses where SEO isn’t the right channel
A few honest cases where SEO underperforms:
- Pure B2B with referral-driven growth. If 100% of your customers come through your network, SEO is mostly vanity.
- Hyper-local businesses where the relevant search volume is near zero. Some niche service categories simply don’t have searchers; you can’t SEO into demand that doesn’t exist.
- Brand-new businesses with no operating history. SEO works better with 12+ months of business history (reviews, content, citations to build on). For pre-launch or sub-6-month businesses, paid acquisition usually wins.
None end well for the client. If you’re in any of these buckets and considering SEO anyway, reach out — there’s usually a better channel to point you at.
What “fit” means for me
The clients who do best are single-location or small-multi-location local service businesses, with 12+ months of operating history, a budget of $1,297-1,897/month sustainable for 6-12 months, and at least minimal internal capacity to implement recommendations. Most of my engagements look like this. If yours doesn’t, the conversation should start with whether SEO is the right move at all.