New consultant looking for advice on setting client expectations
-
I'm just starting to provide paid consultation to a few clients who have approached me for SEO help. As I've not completed a lot of projects, I'm looking for guidance on how to set expectations. I get the feeling that one of my clients is going to expect that once our initial work (keyword research, addressed their primary technical issues, fixing on-page issues) that they will automatically appear on the first page of Google.
In a project with 50 keywords, I believe this may be true for a few keywords where there isn't a lot of competition. However, I believe that for many of the keywords, we won't be able to achieve ranking on the first page unless we do an on-going link-building program. Is this assumption accurate?
-
As there tends to be a risk for clients due to the fact that we can't ever guarantee anything, what we do is tell the client that they're not under any contract tying them to us so if we don't deliver they can cancel at any time. That minimises the risk a bit for them.
Also, if you're thinking in just terms of rankings with them for the moment you can say that if you don't get x number of keywords (whichever keywords you decide between you are optimal) to page x by date x, and then page y by date y, etc... then they stop payments until you do.
-
Dunamis,
Thanks for the feedback. That is how I started; I took on a couple of pro-bono clients to get experience. Always nice to hear what others are doing.
Eric
-
I thought I'd chime in here about how a friend of mine got started offering local SEO to others. She contacted several people in her circle of friends and offered to optimize their local campaign for free. This accomplished two things:
1. She got experience and learned what she needed to learn to get these sites ranking well.
2. She got great testimonials from these clients. These testimonials made it really easy for her to get more business.
It sounds like you've already got some good SEO experience, so this may be a little basic for what you are already doing, but I thought I'd mention it!
-
Great advice. Thank you.
-
Even during your first contact with the potential client you can find out the industry (and geographic area) where they will be competing. That can help you be prepared for your first meeting.
If you are helping someone promote an auto glass repair business in Scranton, Pennsylvania or a plumber in a small town in Georgia the competition is much easier than going after a nationwide competitive area such as insurance sales.
With local businesses you have organic options, PPC options and local search options. Also, if you can get clients located in your own town you will become familair with the local websites where links and advertising can be obtained.
Some people make a living doing SEO for small local businesses in lower competition niches.
-
This is great feedback, Vinnie. I wake up in the middle of the night fearing that I will put all this work into a site and then the results won't be there. It's helpful hearing how someone else handles a situation like this.
-
That is the first thing that I tell every single client. It's usually the first or second sentence in my proposal. Setting expectations is important.
What I DO guarantee my client is that:
-
I will help them optimize their pages for conversions and clickthrough on SERPS
-
I will target a list of phrases/keywords that I feel are attainable
-
I tell them about white hat and black hat SEO, and where in that spectrum that I work.
-
I will show them how to and help them generate quality content that people will want to link to, that will help them generate sales from search engines.
I then document everything I do for them. Not only for itemized billing, but if in three months or whatever timeframe we agreed upon, there is not much improvement I can show them everything i've done. This will include all the links I've tried to get them, contacted sites about, content upgrades, and basically everything I do. I tell them that if they don't get great results they can take my worklog to any other SEO and see what they say about it.
-
-
Egol, thanks for the guidance. I appreciate your perspective as always. Quick follow up question regarding your comment "It is probably best to take easy projects in light competition at first and then accept more difficult work." Any thoughts on how to accomplish this?
I typically spend a great deal of time on keyword research, which I do after I've already accepted the job. Should I ask them in the inital meeting for a few phrases they might like to optimize for, so I can determine if they are going to be an easier project?
-
the keywords are moderately competitive. (somewhere around 40% on SEOMoz's keyword diffiiculty tool)
-
One of the most important jobs of the SEO is to have a feel for the amount of resources that will be needed to be competitive in a business niche.
Some SEO projects require $100,000 (or a lot more) in resources while other can be accomplished with a few days of intelligent work. The amount of time required to accomplish a goal (achieve rankings) can also be highly variable.
I have been working in a few specific niches for many years and am still surprised when I overestimate or underestimate the difficulty of a SERP. I can also be surprised by the success or failure of content.
Without specific experience you can use the tools at SEOMoz to get some feel for the difficulty of a keyword or the power of a competitor. If I was in your shoes I would get some direct experience with a few projects and then use the SEOMoz tool data to benchmark and project into unknown areas.
It is probably best to take easy projects in light competition at first and then accept more difficult work. The last thing that you want to do is take on a tough job and not be able to advance a client's rankings into potentially profitable rankings. That can happen when the SEO has a budget of $1000 per month but a budget of $10,000 per month is needed for success. You not only have to gain backlinks but you have to gain them at a much faster rate than the competition if you expect to advance above them.
Good luck, keep asking questions here while you progress in experience.
-
Client education is critical to setting expectations. Help them understand that quality sustainable rankings both take time and effort. Also, that even if you are able to do all the SEO you believe needed, there's no guarantee that at the same time, other new sites aren't also being optimized, or that the sites already securely in top ranked positions aren't doing additional ongoing work.
These concepts are why it's important to focus on a mix of low but refined, mid-level and high value phrases.
And it's critical to have a contract where you put in writing the outline of the services you will be providing as well as a paragraph about the challenges inherent in SEO.
-
Whatever you do, don't guarantee any position ever... first page or not. It's a big red flag for bad SEO's.
You'll likely need an on-going link campaign whatever the case is. How competitive are the keywords?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Woocommerce and individual category/product set-up
Hi All, Very new to SEO but trying to make small meaningful changes to wordpress site. My question is whether it would be better for me to bypass this category page (http://liliglace.com.br/categoria-produto/personalizados/) (website is in Portuguese) and go straight to the underlying product pages by creating individual categories for each product. I think this will increase SEO efficiency and clarity on the site with regard to these 3 products but I am worried about having a Woo-commerce category page with just one product page. I know that the plugin goes straight to the product page but is there a risk of duplicate content regarding the unused category page? Also long Urls! The Casamento (Wedding) category is already set up this way and same question applies. Any help or guidence wold be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Eoinfitz0 -
4XX client error
I am a bit confused...my recent site crawl told me I had 1 4XX Client error, (high priority). This is the page...
Technical SEO | | sdwellers
http://www.seadwellers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/367679d2+0+277-SD.mp4 This link below is listed as the "linking page"....I guess that the link comes from?
http://www.seadwellers.com/category/dive-travel/ I'm just not getting this...where did the page of the first link above come from...and what is the deal with the catagory/dive-travel/ page? And how do I fix? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated...0 -
Looking for a technical solution for duplicate content
Hello, Are there any technical solutions to duplicate content similar to the nofollow tag? A tag which can indicate to Google that we know that this is duplicate content but we want it there because it makes sense to the user. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | FusionMediaLimited0 -
Need advice badly domain rank loss
I have a main domain and a sub domain that both were doing very well and after looking at the Moz history its obvious that panda and penguin affected my site considerably. My keywords are holding rank but my search results and traffic are way down. My question is if I just take my subdomain (which is really my bread an butter shopping cart) and I consolidate my sub domain with my main domain would this help? I would basically make my main domain the shopping cart and make them one site. This should change the links to all the sites. The problem is I will lose the backlinks if I do not do a 301 but I do not want to bring bad links over and my keywords are holding rank. What to do?
Technical SEO | | megapixall0 -
Starting a Blog and URL Structure Advice
Hello SEOmoz Community, We are going to start a blog on our website and have a slight dilemma. Our site is a .Net site and the blog platform we've chosen (BlogEngine) only allows us to use the following url structure: www.domain.com/blog/post/post-name. We've looked at other .Net blog software and this one meets all of our needs except for the ideal URL Structure. We would like to remove the /post/ directory; however have not technically found a way to do it. We wanted to get some opinions on whether or not we should just start with this URL structure and not worry about the extra directory, or work to find another solution that eliminates this extra directory. Ideally we want to keep the posts as close to the root as possible for link juice distribution, and the extra directory could get in the way. Also, if anyone has any advice on a more flexible .Net blog platform, suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We thank you so much in advance for your time and help.
Technical SEO | | All-Star-Vacation-Homes0 -
301 from old domain to new domain
Hi, I need to create a 301 redirect for all internal pages located on organic7thheaven.com to the homepage of our new site at http://www.7thheavennaturals.com/ Currently internal pages of the old site such as the following are returning a page not found www.organic7thheaven.com/products/deepcleansing/miraclemud.asp Can anyone help me in setting up a .htaccess file for this problem please? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MJMarketing0 -
Page crawling is only seeing a portion of the pages. Any Advice?
last couple of page crawls have returned 14 out of 35 pages. Is there any suggestions I can take.
Technical SEO | | cubetech0 -
Joomla 1.7 sef404 advice please
Hi not sure if anyone uses joomla on here but if they do i would love there advice. I have just got a joomla site that is joomla 1.7 but i cannot find a sh404sef component to make the url friendly and would like to know if there is a component out there or if you can use an older one. I would have thought by now that they would have installed one with joomla 1.7 If anyone uses joomla, then i would be glad to hear from you.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860