In order to have a long lasting relationship with your SEO clients, there needs to be a level of trust between the site owner and the SEO or SEO Company. In order to build this level of trust, you must allow them to see your level of expertise before beginning the relationship. The best way to do this is be talking with the client and finding out a few key things before beginning their work. Below are a few key areas that should be covered prior to signing a contract or accepting work from a client.
1. What is Their Expectation?
Knowing what the client’s expectation before creating their campaign is vital to success. One client’s expectations may be different than another; some may be way beyond the scope of what can be achieved. Knowing their thoughts can allow you to craft a campaign that works for them and allow you to educate the client about what is actually achievable and the time it may take to achieve them.
2. What is Their Educational Level?
It is important to know what they know about search engine optimization and internet marketing in general. If they have been utilizing pay per click with Google & Yahoo! they may feel that they know what keywords are important to them.
Those that know more about pay per click and have actually found some success with it, tend to feel more adept; where those who are just getting into online marketing are more interested in allowing you to help them due to lack of education. It is vital to get these two types of clients on an even playing ground.
Often times we as the SEO feel prey to the educated site owner; to bend towards what they want and second guess what we know. With the uneducated site owner we are more likely to provide more guidance or even work harder to help them succeed due to the freedom we feel. In both instances education is key.
3. What Do They Consider Success?
When creating a successful campaign for clients you need to know what their overall objectives are and what they consider success. You may have a client that says, “I have to be number one in Google” for one specific keyword. You may have another who says, “I want to increase my traffic”. There are varying degrees of success, but if you don’t know exactly what they want, you can’t begin to achieve it.
Often times you will find that you have done a wonderful job for a client, obtaining top positions for them, doubling or tripling their internet traffic; but they still seem unsatisfied. On the other hand you may feel that you have done all you can and couldn’t achieve the results needed. Finding out exactly what the clients consider success will allow you to educate them where you can collectively set attainable goals that will be measurable, where they can see the goals being met and allows you to have a longer lasting relationship with your client. This results in higher client retention, a more trustworthy relationship were your existing clients are willing to refer you to others.
Education
One theme you see above is education. Educating your clients is the single most important thing you can do to build a meaningful relationship between an SEO and their client.
Below you will learn how to educate clients in a way that will allow you to set the stage for a successful campaign that you and your client will be happy with.
The educated client is the client who has been working with his/her online site for 6 months to a year. This client may have already tried SEO with another company, or worked on their site themselves. The may have found some success but either can’t do it anymore or were dissatisfied with the previous SEO company. They may have been using Google Adwords or some other form of Pay Per Click program and either found some success or feel they at least have some knowledge of what they are doing. They may have done really well with SEO in the past, but do to search engine algorithm changes, lost a lot of their positions for one reason or another. They may have taken an online course or have been reading about SEO and just have some trouble implementing the process.
No matter what their level of education with regards to SEO or any other form of internet marketing; you will need to educate your “educated client”. The first step to educating this type of client is to find out what they know. Discuss the following areas:
1. What keywords they feel is important to their site
2. How did they come to find the keywords that they have selected (keyword research, the keywords their competitors are using, the keywords that Google Adwords provided them, Overture/Yahoo! keyword tool etc.)
3. How they have worked to optimize their site (Creating keyword rich pages, doorway pages, buying keyword rich domains, page generators, cloaking, hiring another SEO company etc.)
4. Why they feel they need additional help (just can’t do it anymore, dropping in serps and don’t know why, left old SEO company)
5. Have they built links to their site (link farms, directories, linked from multiple domains they own, quality links from established sites, natural links from other sites etc.)
6. What is the most important thing about SEO (building inbound links, having optimized quality content, a mixture of on page and off page factors etc.
7. How to they track their internet traffic, conversions etc. ( they don’t, they look at their shopping cart sales every month, they use webstats or some other simple web statistics software, they use Google Analysis, WebTrends etc.)
Make notes of what they tell you, and then review what they have told you with them. If they’re right about certain things that they have learned, let them know. If they are wrong about certain areas, let them know that too. It is important for them to validate what they do know and important for you to show them what you know. Example: Joe From www.buymywidgets.com
Joe C. contacted me today about his site www.buymywidgets.com. His site sells widgets to other companies in New York. Joe said to me, ” My name is Joe, I own a site called www.buymywidgets.com. I’ve owned this site for about 3 years now. I used to rank well on Google for New York Widgets a few years back, but then I fell of the search engines and haven’t been able to get that position again for about a year now. I tried to change my site and make it better by creating more pages about widgets but it really didn’t help. I read about creating links on other site, so I went out and found other sites that trade links and asked them to exchange links with me. I think about 5 swapped links with me, but it didn’t seem to help. I’ve been advertising on Google Adwords and I know that my top keyword is Widgets New York. I want to be found in Google for Widgets New York. I spend 3k dollars a month on Adwords and Yahoo! and the only keyword that makes any sales is widgets New York. I know about SEO, but I’m just having trouble getting my site to rank again.”
I said to Joe, “That’s great that you are using Google Adwords! I’m glad to hear that you are seeing results with that. Can you tell me what other keywords you used when you initially started your campaign?” Joe said, “I just started out with Widgets, but that ended up costing me about $2k in a day our two so I started using widgets New York, blue widgets New York, yellow widgets New York, and professional widgets New York. None of these keywords made me any money except widgets New York.” I then said to Joe, “So when someone makes a purchase from your site, do you know how they found your site or have a way to track you visitors/customers from the time they enter to the sale/exit?” Joe said, “well I look at my “WebStats” program every month and see how my traffic increases or decreases every month.” I then said, “Joe, why do you only sell your widgets in New York?” Joe said, “My store is based in New York and I don’t want to get stuck with the shipping price of shipping to California or something like that.”
Analysis of Clients SEO & Online Marketing Knowledge
My analysis of this client is that, he has a more established site with an age of 3 years. Initially before large updates he positioned well, but after things like “big daddy”, “Florida” etc. he just was not able to keep up with the changes. He understands the fact that links are important, but doesn’t understand that the types of links that really help. He has found some success with PPC, but doesn’t really understand that by using broad match with keywords like “widgets New York, Blue Widgets New York & Yellow Widgets New York really default to Widgets New York. He really has no way of tracking the sales from start to finish, understanding if he has any other keywords that help him, and which ones convert. He has limited himself to one keywords phrase because of some success through Adwords and is now narrowing his success to one keyword due to lack of knowledge. He is limited to selling his widgets in New York because of lack of knowledge about shopping carts, integration with UPS or FedEx GUI etc.
Educating Joe For Success
In order for me to really help Joe, I need to educate him by sharing some of my knowledge and open up his mind to new opportunities.
I said to Joe, ” I see that you do have some knowledge about SEO and internet marketing, you have exhibited that with your previous success with search engine ranking and PPC marketing. If you are open to hearing some suggestions, I would like to share with you some things that can really help your business.” Would you like to hear them?” Joe said, “Yes, I would love any help I can get.”
1. You did well with your search engine ranking before because they relied more on what is called on-page factors. This includes using your keyword in your title, Meta tags and within the text on your page either via links, using it in bold, in headers etc. But with changes over the past few years, they are relying on other areas that are on-page and off page factors. Off page factors are areas such as external links that link to your site, the quality of the site that is linking to you, the page rank of your site, the page rank of the site that is linking to you and natural links versus exchanged/paid links. The average site owner simply doesn’t have time to learn and implement these types of changes. To make it a little harder, many of the search engines change their ranking factors from month to month. This is something I can help you with.
2. You understand the importance of building links, but the type of links that you gain are important than the amount of links you receive. The search engines look at how the site relates to the theme of your site, the page rank of the site linking to you, the age of the link etc. They put so many requirements on the types of links to ensure that you can’t inflate the amount of links linking to you by purchasing them or through exchanging links. A link from a company who sells widget paint will count 10 times more than 20 links you exchanged with 20 random sites. It can be hard to understand what the search engines want with regards to links and how they want you to obtain them. I do have experience and success with building quality links that can count and I can help you with this.
3. It seems that you may have limited yourself to just selling your widgets to just New York because of complications of calculating costs of shipping. Did you know that you can easily implement an online shopping cart that will check the cost of shipping to other areas of the U.S. and automatically add that cost on; keeping you from running into issues with shipping and opening up your business to providing widgets anywhere in the world? If you are interested in looking into this, I can help you.
4. It’s great to see that you are having success with PPC. Being able to truly measure your sales conversions, seeing which keywords actually convert best for you and seeing what visitors do once they come to your site is the only way to make decisions on how to move forward with your PPC campaigns. I think that if you were able to utilize detailed reports that provide this information you may be able to increase your sales conversions, decrease the amount of money you spend on your pay per click campaigns, increase your ROI while allowing you to learn more about your visitors and potential customers. I could help you easily set up an analytics program if you are interested.
5. With Google Adwords there are various controllers that others use to increase their sales, conversions and overall ROI. These are things like adding negative words, wrapping your keywords in “” and [], broadening their keyword base and tracking their messages and sales via specific keywords to create a stellar campaign. If you are interested in learning how to lower your monthly Adwords costs and increase your sales I can help you with this.
What I’ve done with Joe is reiterated what he’s told me, shown him areas that can be improved and how that can help him; and letting him know that if he is interested, I can help him in this area.
If you don’t feel comfortable helping the client in a specific area, still show them the areas that can be improved and let them know that they may want to find someone (web designer, programmer, a program they can purchase etc.) that can help them solve the specific problem.
This has allowed me to educate my potential client, allow him to understand that he needs to build on this and allowing him to know what I can and cannot do.
It is now up to the client to decide how to move forward with the information and knowledge you have provided; you have just become an asset to your potential client in more areas than just search engine optimization.