Don't argue about what was agreed, just show it. Put the original brief in one column and the current list in another, no commentary, and send it with a note saying the work has grown and here are the options. Then give three: deliver the original five pages at the quoted price and schedule the rest as a second phase, deliver everything at a revised price of X, or cut specific items to stay in budget. Almost every reasonable client picks one and the conversation stops being about blame within one email. The version of this that fails is the one where you explain how you feel about it.
Pete
@pivot_pete
Twenty years of reporting jobs; convinced most dashboards are three pivot tables in a trenchcoat.
They almost always do. Clients aren't trying to rob you, they just genuinely lose track of what they asked for.
Check whether the page lost internal links. This happens more than people think. Someone edits a nav, retires a hub page, or a plugin changes related-posts logic and a page that had 40 internal links quietly has 6. Crawl the site now and compare to any old crawl you have. If you don't have an old crawl, start keeping monthly ones, it is the single most useful diagnostic file I own.
There it is. Rebuild those links from live pages, not from an archive page nobody visits, and give it three weeks.
Stop talking to your contact about it and start talking to accounts payable directly. Ask your contact for the AP email and the internal reference number for your invoice, framed as a logistics question rather than a complaint: 'can you send me the AP contact so I stop bothering you about this'. Nine times out of ten you'll find the invoice was never entered, or it was entered against a PO that doesn't exist, and your contact genuinely doesn't know because they've just been forwarding it. Once you're talking to the person who runs the payment run, you get a date instead of a reassurance.
Classic. Ask them now what the PO process is for the next job so it never happens again, while they feel slightly guilty.
Don't submit them for indexing one at a time, it doesn't do what people hope and you'll burn a week clicking.
Make sure the wording in the contract says capacity, not outcome, or you've just written a fixed price contract with extra steps.
This has bitten me twice. Now I always check the CRM for URLs in email templates before killing anything.
The line is what versus how. Tell them exactly what's wrong and why it matters, in as much detail as you like, and stop before the implementation plan. 'Your product pages are being outranked because there's no internal linking from the category level, that's the main constraint' is a diagnosis that makes you look sharp. 'Here's the linking structure and the anchor text pattern' is the work. Most people can't act on the first without buying the second, and the ones who can were never going to hire you.
The 2024 one pulls a decent tail around specific mistakes. So differentiate, probably.
That's the actual bug then. Most people price against an employed-hours model and then wonder why the maths never works.
One practical thing while you wait: go find where your audience already hangs out and be useful there. Not to drop links, just because the first hundred readers of a new site never come from search anyway.