Grab Your Client’s Attention and Get Your Money

Disclaimer: I do not recommend you follow through with what’s described in this article. Laws pertaining to this type of SEO strategy may deem such actions illegal where you reside, and even if it is legal, there may be other negative consequences for such an action. Some may also argue it’s wrong. But either way, you’re all adults, you can make your own decisions.

In the challenging world of business, an unfortunate truth is that some clients may end up neglecting to pay for services provided. 

This often leaves businesses seeking innovative and non-conventional methods to claim their overdue payments. One such method utilizes the power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to target the debtor’s brand and potentially outrank them using their own brand keywords.

SEO as Leverage

The fundamental concept here is to construct a new website targeting your client’s brand keyword and adding a “reviews” extension. The idea is to capture their attention by outranking them in the search results for these terms.

The new website should be designed with the homepage dedicated to discussing everything related to your client’s business. 

This helps Google to recognize the relevance of your site to that specific business. 

To increase the chances of outranking, the homepage should ideally contain around 1,000-1,200 words of well-structured content with a single H1 tag, multiple relevant H2 headings, and even H3 tags if necessary.

The homepage should also link to the client’s business and as many other websites referencing them as possible, such as their Wikipedia page, social media profiles, Google My Business page, etc. 

It is vital, however, to ‘nofollow’ these links to prevent passing ranking value to their site.

Building A Review Page

The next step involves setting up an additional page targeting “[Client’s Brand Name] Reviews.” Hosted on domainname.com/reviews, this page should detail your experiences with the client, focusing on their refusal to honor their payment obligations. You shouldn’t get into specifics as keeping it more general will resonate better with an audience. 

~800 words of well-structured content should do the trick. Like the homepage, ensure this page also links to the client’s domain and follows the same linking practices.

Additionally, you can use schema structured data for reviews and assign a low rating (e.g., 1/5). This will visibly display a low-star score in search results, which draws in more clicks.

The Power of Backlinks

Here’s the magic that gets the site to rank #1 for their brand + reviews term and possibly even #2 for their branded keyword

Next, hunt down someone with a private blog network that’s selling links by the thousands of domains for cheap (max $300 for thousands of domain links) and buy a link package. These links are going to be crap and have a shelf life of maybe 3 months max before Google catches onto the PBN and burns those sites down as well as yours, but that won’t matter (I’ll explain). 

There are ways you can prove the links will work; the easiest for you is to ask for a handful of example websites–take those sites, plug them into SEMRush, and as long as they’re getting a good amount of Organic traffic in the Domain Overview report, you’ll know they aren’t selling all junk. Spread out the links and point 2/3 at the homepage, 1/3 at the /reviews page.

This might take about a month to “settle,” but when they do, you should be #1 or close to it for their brand + reviews keyword, and on page 1 for their brand term. This will be enough to get their attention.

Next Steps If The Site Gets Penalized

In the event that Google penalizes your site due to the low-quality backlinks, you can still salvage the situation by purchasing another site and republishing all content from the old website. You then acquire more backlinks, repeating the process.

The penalized site can also be redirected to the homepage of your client’s website or their review page. This strategy might negatively affect their SEO rankings, further helping your new site outrank them and potentially reducing their overall organic traffic.

Expected Outcome

Typically, clients may be willing to pay once your pages make it to the first page of search results, making the whole process of buying a second site often unnecessary.

However, should you have to repeat the process, the penalized site can still contribute to achieving your overall goal.

This strategy is not just a means to claim overdue payments, but it also serves as a reminder of the special place press and the public forum hold in any self-respecting democracy, and a variation of the old adage that comes with it: Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel, or can control page 1 in search engines. – Mark Twain – Michael Scott