SEO
How to manage SEO clients’ expectations
30-second summary:
- SEO is expensive, yet offers no tangible guarantees in terms of rankings or traffic. No wonder so many business owners are confused
- All SEO clients are different. It is important to understand their prior experience in SEO before developing your relationship management strategy with each of them.
- Getting to know a new lead and their decision-makers will help you position your service in a more useful and easy-to-understand way
- Educating clients is often necessary for them to know what to expect from an SEO service
SEO is an often misunderstood industry. I’ve seen quite a few business owners who assume that an SEO consultant has some sort of magic button that can boost the site’s organic search visibility within a certain amount of time.
While a decade ago that may have been the case, the SEO industry has evolved far beyond manipulative tactics that (to be quite frank) used to work like a charm in the past.
Today’s SEO is about making websites better, on all possible levels, from content value to usability. It’s doing everything better and faster. There’s no single element that needs to be improved that is sure to boost organic positions. It’s working on a website as a whole consistently to hopefully see gradual growth.
To make things worse, most SEO clients come with a long history of SEO work that has been performed on their site. And that work may have resulted in gradual loss of rankings and organic search visibility. Figuring those out is important because those red flags can prevent those businesses from seeing any progress even if they keep investing into the long-term SEO strategy.
So how to properly manage your SEO clients’ expectations without scaring them off?
Understand your SEO client
It may sound extremely cynical but the best SEO client is the one who has already been burnt by overpromising and under-delivering of those promises. These clients come with a better understanding of why SEO results cannot be guaranteed and why they need to invest into longer-term results.
But those clients have other challenges to fight. Their sites are often penalized or filtered and their budgets are often suffering from months of poor organic traffic. These businesses are often willing to agree to anything that would allow them to fall back into Google’s graces but it is tough for them to erase years of link building efforts and start from scratch.
The other type of an SEO client is a restless one. These businesses may have used other SEO agencies in the past, saw no results and are quite impatient by this point. They are weary of making yet another long-term investment because they feel they have invested enough by this point.
You need to carefully investigate what has been done for these sites so far and explain why it didn’t work and what you are going to do differently, while still insisting on why you cannot guarantee any results in any definitive timeframe.
Finally, there are clueless clients who don’t care what you do but need to know when they are going to rank within top 5 for their important keywords. These clients require a full-scale education, scary examples of businesses losing all their rankings within a day and case studies showing gradual growth of organic visibility that starts with long-tail strategy, link building research and building a tailored outreach strategy.
Investigate your decision-maker unit (DMU) carefully
In many cases, even when it comes to small businesses, there will be more than one person deciding whether you or your agency is someone they will work with.
In the B2B world, a DMU is a decision making unit, in other words it is a group of people which will determine whether a business will work with you. This group may consist of the company owner or CEO, a marketing manager, head of the dev team, etc.
Lots of businesses have internal SEO teams that need outside help. This SEO team will most likely be part of that company’s DMU. Avoid criticizing their work to the management. Don’t make them feel like your agency can replace the internal team.
Instead, find out what that team is doing and how you can complement their work.
From experience, most in-house SEO teams will gladly outsource things like link prospecting, outreach and, more recently, Core Web Vitals optimization (the latter is too new, so not many SEOs are keeping up). On-going tasks like competitor tracking, keyword gap analysis, and backlink profile monitoring are often missing from many in-house SEO strategies.
You need to know those gaps to position your service better.
The best approach is to identify your DMU and how exactly your agency can help at the lead generation form. Make sure your service request form includes questions like:
- Do you have an in-house SEO team or person?
- Have you used SEO services before?
- Do you have any concerns we need to be aware of?
Have a report sample ready
Develop a detailed SEO report sample to show prospective clients to ensure they know what to expect:
- Month one report
- Sample roadmap of further work
- Monthly reports detailing projects completed or underway, etc.
Based on different decision-making units you have come so far and the different services you provide, those reports may vary.
Be clear and transparent
SEO is an ongoing and never-ending process. The only way to build a long-term customer base is to build trust even prior to onboarding them. And nothing works better than being honest and transparent.
It is better to lose a demanding client than to face the consequences of improperly managed expectations.
On your onboarding call, spend some time discussing who maintains their website, how their blog is managed, what it takes to push updates live, who is creating, editing and approving content before it goes live, and whether the site is powered by an existing platform or is it custom-built.
Make it clear that you will need access to their data, including analytics and Search Console accounts.
Understanding these details will help you estimate the turnaround of your SEO recommendations to be implemented. If you foresee any slow-downs (for example, every update needs a tedious approval process or developers are the only people who can update the site and these teams tend to be busy and slow), make it clear that these roadblocks can slow down the process and discuss ways to overcome them.
Don’t forget to explain the set-up process in much detail. Your agency needs time to research the site and its SEO history in much detail, and that takes time, and that time isn’t free. Many businesses expect active work to start immediately when they sign a contract, so don’t let it come as a surprise that SEO research is part of the setup process.
Furthermore, on your onboarding call, try to better understand the rest of the company as well. Mention that you will likely need help and input from other teams, like product development and customer support. The ultimate goal of an SEO strategy is to bring in more sales, not just bring in organic traffic, and that’s the whole company’s initiative.
Ask them for more info on their previous digital marketing efforts, including PPC, lead generation, landing page management, and email marketing. The more you know about the company and its current conversion funnels, the better your SEO service will be positioned to compliment those.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization may seem a very mysterious process to business owners who feel like they are throwing money into thin air without being promised anything tangible in return. If you put yourself into those business owners’ shoes, it is actually quite understandable.
So don’t feel bad when yet another prospective client is demanding some type of guarantee. Be patient but firm. Onboarding SEO clients often requires educating them on why SEO cannot have any guarantees but how it can be very rewarding in the long run.
Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.
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SEO
HARO Has Been Dead for a While
I know nothing about the new tool. I haven’t tried it. But after trying to use HARO recently, I can’t say I’m surprised or saddened by its death. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.
I used HARO way back in the day to build links. It worked. But a couple of months ago, I experienced the platform from the other side when I decided to try to source some “expert” insights for our posts.
After just a few minutes of work, I got hundreds of pitches:
So, I grabbed a cup of coffee and began to work through them. It didn’t take long before I lost the will to live. Every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense from someone who definitely wasn’t an expert.
Here’s one of them:
Seriously. Who writes like that? I’m a self-confessed dullard (any fellow Dull Men’s Club members here?), and even I’m not that dull…
I don’t think I looked through more than 30-40 of the responses. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like having a conversation with ChatGPT… and not a very good one!
Despite only reviewing a few dozen of the many pitches I received, one stood out to me:
Believe it or not, this response came from a past client of mine who runs an SEO agency in the UK. Given how knowledgeable and experienced he is (he actually taught me a lot about SEO back in the day when I used to hassle him with questions on Skype), this pitch rang alarm bells for two reasons:
- I truly doubt he spends his time replying to HARO queries
- I know for a fact he’s no fan of Neil Patel (sorry, Neil, but I’m sure you’re aware of your reputation at this point!)
So… I decided to confront him 😉
Here’s what he said:
Shocker.
I pressed him for more details:
I’m getting a really good deal and paying per link rather than the typical £xxxx per month for X number of pitches. […] The responses as you’ve seen are not ideal but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take as realistically I dont have the time to do it myself. He’s not native english, but I have had to have a word with him a few times about clearly using AI. On the low cost ones I don’t care but on authority sites it needs to be more refined.
I think this pretty much sums up the state of HARO before its death. Most “pitches” were just AI answers from SEOs trying to build links for their clients.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing shade here. I know that good links are hard to come by, so you have to do what works. And the reality is that HARO did work. Just look at the example below. You can tell from the anchor and surrounding text in Ahrefs that these links were almost certainly built with HARO:
But this was the problem. HARO worked so well back in the day that it was only a matter of time before spammers and the #scale crew ruined it for everyone. That’s what happened, and now HARO is no more. So…
If you’re a link builder, I think it’s time to admit that HARO link building is dead and move on.
No tactic works well forever. It’s the law of sh**ty clickthroughs. This is why you don’t see SEOs having huge success with tactics like broken link building anymore. They’ve moved on to more innovative tactics or, dare I say it, are just buying links.
Sidenote.
Talking of buying links, here’s something to ponder: if Connectively charges for pitches, are links built through those pitches technically paid? If so, do they violate Google’s spam policies? It’s a murky old world this SEO lark, eh?
If you’re a journalist, Connectively might be worth a shot. But with experts being charged for pitches, you probably won’t get as many responses. That might be a good thing. You might get less spam. Or you might just get spammed by SEOs with deep pockets. The jury’s out for now.
My advice? Look for alternative methods like finding and reaching out to experts directly. You can easily use tools like Content Explorer to find folks who’ve written lots of content about the topic and are likely to be experts.
For example, if you look for content with “backlinks” in the title and go to the Authors tab, you might see a familiar name. 😉
I don’t know if I’d call myself an expert, but I’d be happy to give you a quote if you reached out on social media or emailed me (here’s how to find my email address).
Alternatively, you can bait your audience into giving you their insights on social media. I did this recently with a poll on X and included many of the responses in my guide to toxic backlinks.
Either of these options is quicker than using HARO because you don’t have to sift through hundreds of responses looking for a needle in a haystack. If you disagree with me and still love HARO, feel free to tell me why on X 😉
SEO
Google Clarifies Vacation Rental Structured Data
Google’s structured data documentation for vacation rentals was recently updated to require more specific data in a change that is more of a clarification than it is a change in requirements. This change was made without any formal announcement or notation in the developer pages changelog.
Vacation Rentals Structured Data
These specific structured data types makes vacation rental information eligible for rich results that are specific to these kinds of rentals. However it’s not available to all websites. Vacation rental owners are required to be connected to a Google Technical Account Manager and have access to the Google Hotel Center platform.
VacationRental Structured Data Type Definitions
The primary changes were made to the structured data property type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.
The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.
The primary changes were made to the structured data type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.
The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.
Address Schema.org property
This is a subtle change but it’s important because it now represents a recommendation that requires more precise data.
This is what was recommended before:
“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.”
This is what it now recommends:
“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Unit 6E”
Address Property Change Description
The most substantial change is to the description of what the “address” property is, becoming more descriptive and precise about what is recommended.
The description before the change:
PostalAddress
Information about the street address of the listing. Include all properties that apply to your country.
The description after the change:
PostalAddress
The full, physical location of the vacation rental.
Provide the street address, city, state or region, and postal code for the vacation rental. If applicable, provide the unit or apartment number.
Note that P.O. boxes or other mailing-only addresses are not considered full, physical addresses.
This is repeated in the section for address.streetAddress property
This is what it recommended before:
address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing.
And this is what it recommends now:
address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing, including the unit or apartment number if applicable.
Clarification And Not A Change
Although these updates don’t represent a change in Google’s guidance they are nonetheless important because they offer clearer guidance with less ambiguity as to what is recommended.
Read the updated structured data guidance:
Vacation rental (VacationRental) structured data
Featured Image by Shutterstock/New Africa
SEO
Google On Hyphens In Domain Names
Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about why people don’t use hyphens with domains and if there was something to be concerned about that they were missing.
Domain Names With Hyphens For SEO
I’ve been working online for 25 years and I remember when using hyphens in domains was something that affiliates did for SEO when Google was still influenced by keywords in the domain, URL, and basically keywords anywhere on the webpage. It wasn’t something that everyone did, it was mainly something that was popular with some affiliate marketers.
Another reason for choosing domain names with keywords in them was that site visitors tended to convert at a higher rate because the keywords essentially prequalified the site visitor. I know from experience how useful two-keyword domains (and one word domain names) are for conversions, as long as they didn’t have hyphens in them.
A consideration that caused hyphenated domain names to fall out of favor is that they have an untrustworthy appearance and that can work against conversion rates because trustworthiness is an important factor for conversions.
Lastly, hyphenated domain names look tacky. Why go with tacky when a brandable domain is easier for building trust and conversions?
Domain Name Question Asked On Reddit
This is the question asked on Reddit:
“Why don’t people use a lot of domains with hyphens? Is there something concerning about it? I understand when you tell it out loud people make miss hyphen in search.”
And this is Mueller’s response:
“It used to be that domain names with a lot of hyphens were considered (by users? or by SEOs assuming users would? it’s been a while) to be less serious – since they could imply that you weren’t able to get the domain name with fewer hyphens. Nowadays there are a lot of top-level-domains so it’s less of a thing.
My main recommendation is to pick something for the long run (assuming that’s what you’re aiming for), and not to be overly keyword focused (because life is too short to box yourself into a corner – make good things, course-correct over time, don’t let a domain-name limit what you do online). The web is full of awkward, keyword-focused short-lived low-effort takes made for SEO — make something truly awesome that people will ask for by name. If that takes a hyphen in the name – go for it.”
Pick A Domain Name That Can Grow
Mueller is right about picking a domain name that won’t lock your site into one topic. When a site grows in popularity the natural growth path is to expand the range of topics the site coves. But that’s hard to do when the domain is locked into one rigid keyword phrase. That’s one of the downsides of picking a “Best + keyword + reviews” domain, too. Those domains can’t grow bigger and look tacky, too.
That’s why I’ve always recommended brandable domains that are memorable and encourage trust in some way.
Read the post on Reddit:
Read Mueller’s response here.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Benny Marty
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