SEO Clients and the emotional period, impress them
The first 6 months of any SEO project can be termed as the “emotional period” of seo project. This is the period where clients will give you a lot of appreciation as well as a lot of sleepless nights. Clients are often not sure of the expected results themselves. If we get them more traffic still some will stick to few keywords and its ranking reports. If we focus on rankings and after few reports they will start asking about traffic. Even if you start generating 100% extra traffic still they will be concerned about their sales. At times, we hear different rating for different clients, from “hardly bothered” to “Impossible to satisfy”. How do we fix this issue? So how do we tackle the clients?
First 6 months of SEO project is the key
Here are some the tips to do a better job at SEO for clients:
- Prepare a simple proposal and give them 3 packages to choose from, $200, $400 and $600 (per month). People will generally agree on proposals that are affordable than that are a little high. People like choices, so make the choices inside your company than allowing a competitor to enter the game.
- From Day 1, work on links. Don’t wait for your SEO analysis and keyword analysis. Client hardly cares about keyphrase analysis.
- Get the important keywords from clients and take some simpler ones and some bigger ones and jump into link building from day 1. Links will take few weeks to be cached and come into play, you need to provide some good first report impression on client.
- While negotiating with the clients if you see some positive signal, start a satellite website for link exchange. Don’t wait for the deal to be done to start off. A website is never a waste.
- While your team is on the link building roll, work on onpage optimization. Optimize the title and the page content. This will also give positive impact on ranking.
- Be careful of the content, they are very concerned about every word that goes to their website.
- Work on internal linking, it helps a lot.
- Do go for directory submission and article submissions to show the quantity of links and go for better quality links for ranking.
- Article submission, be careful. If you are planning to do article submission make sure of the quality as the client will always feel as if the article is written on behalf of the company and the reputation of the company is at stake.
- Don’t enter into too much technical job in first 6 months, just focus on link building and onpage optimization.
- Prepare a book for your SEO clients that will do the training. It needs to be simplified and should be from client’s perspective.
Once you are able to show the result in terms of
- Ranking (the most visible result)
- Traffic and
- Sales.
You can provide a competitor analysis and request for budget increase. Now you can go from $250 to $2000 if the client is ready for it. Don’t forget the partnership model.