As a former SEO Manager the most frustrating aspect of my work was getting the client to agree to my suggestions. As the SEO Manager, I would fulfill my job responsibility of getting the client listed in Google-within three months- guaranteed.

The listing was usually for small business owners in their local market. The client website got a ranking on the first page-top three results.

Instead of acclaim-I got complaints.

The client saw that he or she was ranking well but they had no leads.

• We asked them to make the site interactive. No deal.
• We asked them to provide coupons. No Deal.
• We asked them to change the content. No Deal.
• Yet my team, as the SEO provider, was considered the failure.

So I ask now, between the client, the website and the SEO- where do the responsibilities lie?

SEO Responsibilities

• In an ever changing industry the SEO must constantly research, experiment and adjust a website in order to attain, sustain and retain rankings.
• While SEO’s cannot guarantee results they can for the most part assure clients that after a certain time period, the client will see results.

Now here is the challenge. What exactly are results?

In SEO language results refer to ‘rankings’. The SEO will work to ensure the client website gets a good ranking in the major search engines for specific keywords.

The client may define results in terms of conversion. How many new clients they get or how many sales they make.

• So another job responsibility of the SEO would be to educate the client.
• The SEO must ensure that before they begin work for the client, the client understands what the SEO will be providing.

Client Responsibilities

• Clients must be ready to make changes to the website
• Clients must understand and have realistic expectations.
• They must have a solid business plan.

Why does the SEO need to know a clients business plan?

SEO, like any marketing strategy, requires a business plan. The SEO must know what the client expects out of the search engine marketing efforts. If the client is uncertain of the business plan, the SEO will become unsuccessful.

Yes, the SEO will get the ranking, yes they will get the traffic, but there will be no leads, no new clients.

The SEO will create the marketing strategy based on the business plan. If the client website has a unique selling product [USP] or a service that is different, the SEO will work to promote it. However, it is the client’s responsibility to provide and promote that plan.

The Client-the Website and the SEO

Whenever, I took on a new client my first request would be the client fill a business profile brief. The client’s had a hard time providing answers to something as basic as:

• What do you want from the website-leads or sales?

The client thinks that once the site is listed in the search engines, it will automatically be successful. That is wrong.

A website has thousands of competitors. In order to stand out the website requires:

• Engaging content
• Attractive images and web design
• Constant updates
• Landing pages
• Easy navigations
• Ways to engage and retain potential customers
• Lead forms
• Content updates
• And more

An SEO can bring the traffic but unless the client is willing to work with them to make changes to the website in lieu with the business plan all SEO efforts will go to waste.

SEO and ROI

The bottom line for any investment is profit. The problem with SEO is that many times the investments seem out of proportion with the results. It takes 3 months just to start getting results! Once the rankings are in, it is still hard to estimate the tangible conversions.

Think of SEO in terms of ROI. If you have 100 new visitors but only 3 become customers you have a conversion rate of 3%. That is a pretty good ROI.

I had a client, a small contractor who worked in the tri-state area of NJ-CT and NY. He had great rankings and was on top of organic results for the keywords we were using in his campaign. However, he knew nothing about SEO. He allowed us to make changes to his site and work on our own.

He was high maintenance due to his lack of knowledge but we provided custom SEO solutions so we took all the tantrums in stride. Six months down the line he was getting excellent conversions, topping the search engines and we, the SEO team, were very pleased with our work.

The client came in one day and asked me to change the keywords. I was surprised as the current campaign was causing his business to boom. He had apparently been working with someone on a PPC campaign and had been told, our work was ‘competing’ with the PPC. I tried to explain the difference between organic and PPC but the argument fell on deaf ears.

Long story short, the client cancelled the SEO contract so that the work did not interfere with his PPC efforts.

Moral

The moral of this whole article is, we SEO’s have been abused a lot. Sure there are companies and individuals that do a sloppy job and run scams but that is true of any business. However, many times the failure attributed to the SEO comes through the lack of knowledge of the clients.

The clients have as much a responsibility for the failure of any SEO campaign as does the SEO.

Tags: local business, SEO, small business, web content, Website Traffic
Posted in Small Business and Online Business |