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Setting client expectations with a thorough preliminary SEO analysis

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Setting client expectations with a thorough preliminary SEO analysis

Setting client expectations with a thorough preliminary SEO analysis

There are at least three huge mutual benefits to performing a comprehensive data-driven SEO analysis of a new client’s website.

First, your digital agency shows off its personalized, professional approach to every client by demonstrating that you avoid standardized templates. This gives the client the understanding that you set goals, terms of cooperation and pricing policies on an individual basis.

Second, this helps develop trust in your relationship with the client as they get a clear picture of what’s to be expected, how you plan on achieving their goals and why they are charged the rate you set.

Lastly, a detailed analysis gives you the opportunity to lay out a clear roadmap, set the right expectations and shed light on the workflow for the now-educated client. Everyone will be on the same page when it comes to understanding what’s working for them and what areas need to be improved upon.

Let’s dive into the steps that you need to take to have a successful client-agency relationship.

1. Checking the pulse of your client’s website: What parameters to focus on

Straight away, it’s essential to understand what kind of website you’re working with. 

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What you want to pin down first is the quality of the domain and how much authority it has in the eyes of Google and other search engines. You also need to check how much organic and paid traffic they are already driving to their site and how many keywords they target to achieve that volume. 

Next, see how many referring domains they have, what their quality is and how many backlinks they’re getting from those domains. Lastly, but not least importantly, check how the website is doing in terms of its technical setup.
To get started, you can use an SEO tool like SE Ranking’s Competitive Research which provides local and global data on domains in a few clicks.

Setting client expectations with a thorough preliminary SEO analysis

Here you can see summary data on any website that includes its Domain and Page Trust quality scores, its volume of organic and paid traffic, the total number of keywords they target as well as the number of referring domains and backlinks. 

In this case, the U.S. is selected as the target market, plus you can straight away see which other markets this website is getting traffic from. However, to get the full picture, it makes sense to take a look at their worldwide stats as well.

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With this data — which covers every single country in the world including a huge database for the U.S. and provides pinpoint accurate results — you can get a quick understanding of their website’s performance.

Once you’ve analyzed the main parameters of your client’s site as they stand now, take a look at how they have changed over time and determine if they have a positive or negative trajectory.

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The left-hand side of the screenshot above highlights changes in traffic and keywords total, marking upward trends in green and downward drops in red. Everything is clickable, which enables you to dive deeper into any point of interest.

On the graphs on the right-hand side, you can get a good understanding of what your client’s website progress is in terms of traffic, keywords and backlinks. 

If you see a graph that is not going up as steadily as the example above and contains spikes and drops for any indicator, you can take advantage of an extremely useful feature that enables you to go back in time to that specific month and analyze what happened there. Just select a month in the top-right corner and you’ll be taken to a page containing the relevant data.

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2. Understanding your client’s target markets and keyword rankings

Besides analyzing dynamics, you can get detailed information on the organic keywords the client targets and their rankings across multiple locations.

The markets that your clients are active in play a huge role in terms of revenue. You want to be sure that they’re not spending their budget on countries that won’t yield the desired results. The traffic distribution map provides a visual understanding of how much traffic the client is getting from each country in the world.

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By hovering over a country, you can see the volume of traffic the client is getting from it. This data is also available in tables if you prefer to analyze it that way.

On the main dashboard, you can learn how well the site’s keywords are generally performing in search through the Distribution of organic keyword rankings chart. This allows you to see what group of keywords you can focus on to get higher rankings most quickly.

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To dig deeper into the keyword list, open the detailed report. Using filters, you can see what search queries they target and which ones have improved in rankings, which ones have dropped, which keywords they only recently started ranking for and which ones they put a stop on. 

Being able to see summary data as well as switch to detailed reports is extremely helpful when it comes to analyzing multiple websites on a daily basis.

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A great way to get a better idea of what’s working right for your client is to take a look at their site’s top pages and subdomains in organic search. 

Besides looking at how much traffic each of the top pages drives to the client’s site, it’s worth taking a look at the pages themselves to analyze what makes them tick and stand out in search. Since this is where most of the traffic comes to, analyzing such pages deserves your top priority.

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To take things to the next level, find out what keywords each page is ranking for and, using SE Ranking’s Keyword Research, analyze the top organic results to understand what they are doing better than your client.

3. Evaluating how tough the niche competition is

A significant part of this research further down the road involves comparing your client’s website with its top and direct competitors. 
On the Competitive Research dashboard, you can see a list of a site’s top competitors along with their keyword overlaps, Domain Trust scores and the total number of keywords they target.

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A semantics comparison with several top and direct competitors can help you easily expand your client’s keyword list. SE Ranking removes all the hassle by pointing out the keywords that are unique to the site’s competitors and that your client’s site isn’t targeting.

To identify direct competitors, you’ll first need to compile your target keywords list and add them to your customer’s project with SE Ranking. Then proceed to Visibility Rating. 

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Basically, it takes the top websites ranking in search for your client’s target keywords and lets you know what your chances of driving traffic are.

Pro tip: To fully understand who your client’s site is going up against, analyze every competing website the same way you analyzed your client’s site.

Moving on to the cornerstone of any SEO strategy: backlinks. The principle here is that pages with a high number of backlinks from authoritative domains tend to have high organic rankings on Google and other search engines.

SE Ranking provides a detailed analysis of any site’s backlink profile, enabling you to get a clear picture of how the client’s website is seen by the search giant. You can get a detailed backlinks report by clicking the number of backlinks on the Competitive Research dashboard or by accessing the Backlink Checker tool directly.

1650629324 262 Setting client expectations with a thorough preliminary SEO analysis

Right away, you’ll get top-level data on the number of backlinks and anchor text, the ratio of dofollow to nofollow links, and so on. All of the metrics are clickable.

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When analyzing the backlink profile, it makes more sense to start by looking at the total number of referring domains and checking their Domain Trust scores. 

After all, you can have multiple backlinks from a single domain, which is good, but referring domains contribute way more than the actual number of links pointing to a website.

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Once again, remember that you can always spy on successful competition to see what referring domains they get links from and use that data to build a healthier backlink profile for your clients.

5. Defining what technical SEO issues to fix on your client’s website

Looking at the visual components as well as keywords, traffic and backlinks of your client’s website is a must, but it also is an absolute necessity to check under its hood. The technical SEO setup of your client’s site plays a huge part in its performance in search, both from the standpoint of Google and user experience.

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1650629324 35 Setting client expectations with a thorough preliminary SEO analysis

This is just a small snapshot of the information that is provided in SE Ranking’s Website Audit report. With this data, you can bring your client’s website’s health up so that technical issues like loading speed and duplicate content, for example, don’t prevent it from getting higher rankings in search and don’t force visitors to bounce the moment they try to access one of your client’s pages.

To recap, a diligently performed preliminary SEO analysis and audit allow you to identify realistic long-term goals and short-term deliverables, but that’s a topic for another time. The key to building a healthy client-agency relationship is diving head-first into their project to understand it practically as the client does.

So, whether you are auditing a potential client’s website, analyzing a new client’s website in detail, or are keeping track of the progress of your digital agency’s existing clients, SE Ranking is an all-round SEO suite packed with more than 30 tools specifically designed to do the SEO heavy lifting and provide support throughout the entire journey of your client-agency relationship. Join the growing 600k user-strong community and focus on what you do best.


About The Author

1650629325 319 Setting client expectations with a thorough preliminary SEO analysis

SE Ranking is a powerful cloud-based SEO and marketing platform packed with over 30 tools and features. With more than 500,000 users worldwide, it provides entrepreneurs, SMBs, agencies and enterprises with everything they need to get their websites to the top of the search results and stay there, including advanced competitive and keyword research, rank tracking in every major search engine, technical and SEO website audit, backlink analysis and monitoring, and so much more. All housed in an intuitive, user-friendly interface, the all-in-one platform can help you make the most of your digital marketing activities and yield better sales results.


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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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