January 28, 2012

SEO Evangelism - top 10 steps to making clients believe | SEO Project Management by JPH Digital Consultancy

What can we do to make clients believe in SEO? How do we sum up years of industry insight in one sales pitch? How does the client work out if maybe, just maybe this SEO consultant is for real.
The project manager must explain the huge potential of a well optimised site, whilst at the same time managing expectations and detailing the pitfalls involved with any SEO strategy. Here are the top 10 techniques that I have found useful when managing SEO projects:

  1. Provide a coherent plan of work.
  2. Keep the client updated on progress with that work both in terms of deliverables and results, the client will find out sooner or later and sooner is normally better than later.
  3. State exactly what you aim to achieve with each stage of the plan.
  4. Tell the truth, a consultant can’t charge £10,000 per month for buying low quality links, that is not SEO, that is lying.
  5. Tell the truth, if your client is a one man band they simply aren’t going to be able to appear top for the term “Cheap Holidays”, it is your job as an SEO consultant to come up with a solution that can generate a good ROI based on the tools available to you.
  6. Tell the truth, if your plan isn’t working and it is a good plan that has worked elsewhere, perhaps there is a variable you don’t know about. Talk to the client to try and find out what the cause might be, for example they may have just changed from a .co.uk to a .com or they may be distributing duplicate content via affiliates.
  7. Explain clearly the options available to a client for their SEO strategy, think of yourself as a financial advisor, it is your job to advise and define a good investment portfolio with a mixture of long, medium and short term investments dependant on your client’s specific needs.
  8. Always get sign off on the distribution of any branded materials.
  9. Clearly report on your successes be they improved rankings or increased traffic.
  10. Discuss your failures, several times in my career the team and I have spent hours pouring over traffic data to analyse dips in performance only to have them explained away in the meeting we’ve been preparing for as,”oh we never have any traffic in July, all our users are on holiday”.

Source : JPH Digital Consultancy

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