Client Expectations: Educating Your Client

Dario — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:13:21 +0000

I feel compelled to write this post about “Educating Your Client” as this seems to be a huge issue in the SEO world. Seems that clients view SEO as a “behind the curtain” type profession; that’s what my last director, Miss Scruggs, told me. Many Clients really don’t understand how SEO works. They assume “I have the money and I should rank for that term”, but, the reality is, you can’t buy rankings.

Rankings are acheved by what I like to call “Doing The Right Thing”. Google’s goal is to provide it’s users with the most relevant results for the keyword term they entered. If your site is well designed, provides users with useful information and is on topic, that’s half the battle A.K.A. SEO 101.

When you sign on a new client it is always good to set the expectation from day one of the relationship. The client needs to know and understand that things don’t change over night and that rankings are not the all mighty measurement. Some clients will be focused on rankings and will call you 5 times a day, which is how many times their rankings fluctuated that day. In SEO we call this the ranking roller coaster. It is up to the SEO specialist or account manager to wheel them in and tactfully show them other measurements that benefit their business better, such as:

Organic Revenue Per Keyword
Site Traffic Data
Site Revenue Data
Search Volume Trends Per Keywords

In my opinion showing the client the revenue stream is more fruitful than showing them they rank #1 in Google.

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Client Expectations: Educating Your Client