Scott, have you ever wondered why all cleaner turned SEO Gurus stop working for carpet cleaners sooner or later?
We ask too many questions and demand too much.
The questions and demands are okay, that's a part of educating and showing case studies from similar businesses to win them over.
However, when you have primarily 85% DIY O/Os who like to try and figure out how it works, they do it themselves after talking your ear off for 3 hours. Somewhere along the way they mess it up, read about some blackhat tactics on an SEO forum ,or they bought some cheap link package from a guy in India who never provided login details and their rankings drop 3-4 months later when it catches up to them. Then they want the SEO guy to come in and fix it for cheap and depending on how bad the damage it's extremely hard and time consuming to fix.
Doing this for a few years here are things I run into pretty regularly:
1) Tom King made a great point in a post a few months ago where link control is very important. Google is unpredictable and if there is a chance a backlink that was created will be penalized, you need to be able to edit it and remove it. As I've said before you can have 1000 links and they can do you absolutely no good. People also do not consider just how important on-page SEO is to your ranking. There are instances where we outrank big franchises in high competitive areas with less backlinks and better on-page optimization. Don't get caught up in the amount of links you're getting.
2) Some SEO companies do not do a good job at asking enough questions themselves(been there myself, doh). For example, if your company has went by another name or alias. Data aggregators pick up listings all of the time from old business names or closed businesses that still have your URL attached. This results in usually duplicate listings being created or just a bad NAP profile for your listings. If the data isn't corrected or removed at the data aggregator your old business name or address can get sent to 100's of directory sites and it'll be an uphill battle. It will kill your local SEO and also can affect your organic ranking too.
3) How important reviews on not only Google but other sites as well and how saying thank you to interact can help.
4) How using other marketing avenues to drive local traffic to your site can help your ranking. A lot of people dismiss the fact that you can use other media to drive traffic - direct mail, email blasts, TV, radio. Local traffic who stay on your site to read or watch a video longer lessens your bounce rate and when they click on other pages it helps your click through rate(CTR). Low bounce rate and high CTR can play a huge effect on ranking as well. Google sees these factors as you having something worthwhile to read.... in short great useful content.
In low competition areas some of this doesn't necessarily matter because just a few things can make you rank well even with some inconsistencies in your NAP and some bad links, though I'm not condoning either. In higher competition areas all of these things need to be tightened and executed flawlessly to compete.
Now back to your comment Mike - the reason most SEO guys stop working with cleaners is because they(cleaners) want all of this for 99-200 bucks a month and most want it to happen in 1 month and not continue after that. They're also the same guys that will rip on the 3 rooms for $99 guys calling them hacks, claim they make 150-200 an hour, and when their gallon of juice goes up 2.50 a gallon that the supplier is ripping them off when they're making a grand plus on that $20-40 gallon. Just as in carpet cleaning, not every person that leaves an inquiry is the client I want. I'm into the people that want to grow and where I can take my experience being a cleaner and manager to help them as well with more than just a good design and SEO.
Anyways - looking forward to your report on Yodel Mike.
