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
-
Some bots excluded from crawling client's domain
Hi all! My client is in healthcare in the US and for HIPAA reasons, blocks traffic from most international sources. a. I don't think this is good for SEO b. The site won't allow Moz bot or Screaming Frog bot to crawl it. It's so frustrating. We can't figure out what mechanism they are utilizing to execute this. Any help as we start down the rabbit hole to remedy is much appreciated. thank you!
Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
Moving to New Domain - Ranking impact
I understand that when migrating to a new site, even if done perfectly (page level 301s etc) that rankings will drop in the short term and each site will be impacted differently. I picked up the following comment and was wanting to get a few experts thoughts on whether I can quote this to my client: "In our experience, even when 301's are correctly executed, we see a short term fall back (7-30) days and then about a 90% carry through after that period for about 90 days and then back to full strength. "
Technical SEO | | steermoz80 -
Migrating to New site keywords question
We are converting an old static html ecommerce site to a new platform. The old site has excellent ranking for some of the products. In order to maintain our ranking we will implement 301 redirects from old to new pages (as the urls will change to SEF). I am using Googles Keyword tool (in adwords) and entering each page url of the old site (there are hundreds, I'm doing the top 50 in traffic) and generating a set of keywords, then sorting each list by global searches. For each page, Google's Keyword Tool is giving me hundreds of keywords, but in meta tags there should be no more than 15, so I need a method to choose the keywords on the new page. Question: in the new meta tags should we emphasize the most common keywords (as defined by most global searches) or the least common keywords? I would hate to lose the good ranking for the least common (long tail) keywords.
Technical SEO | | ssaltman0 -
New Website, New URL, New Content - What do we do with the old site? Are 301's the only option?
We've just built a new site for a client. They were adamant on changing the url. The new site is entirely new content, however the subject mater is the same. Some pages are even titled very similarly. Is is advisable to keep the old site running, and link it to the new site? Permanently, or temporarily? Do we simply place redirects from the old site the new? Old site was 30 pages, new site is 80 pages. So redirects won't be available to all the new pages. It seems a shame to trash the old site, it is getting some good traffic, and the content - although outdated is unique and of a high quality. Old url is 4+ yrs old, the new url is new. Some enlightened opinions would be greatly welcomed. Thanks
Technical SEO | | MarketsOnline0 -
Client error 404
I have got a lot (100+) of 404´s. I got more the last time, so I rearranged the whole site. I even changed it from .php to .html. I have went to the web hotel to delete all of the .php files from the main server. Still, I got after yesterdays crawl 404´s on my (deleted) .php sites. There is also other links that has an error, but aren't there. Maybe those pages were there before the sites remodelling, but I don't think so because .html sites is also affected. How can this be happening?
Technical SEO | | mato0 -
Moving Old Site to New
Dear SEO Gurus, I have been working on #2 site for a couple of months and I think it is a good idea to redirect #1 (old site) to #2 (new site) below, yes? What is the most effective way of doing this? Do I have to 301 Redirect one page from the old site to a relevant page on the new site and do this for every page.... or can I do a 301 redirect for the whole old site to the new site? Thank you for your time in advance for helping me out! Sheryl | | 1 | Gazpachos - Restaurnte Y CantinaExplore http://www.gazpachorestaurant.com/ |
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.
| 2 | Gazpacho's RestaurantExplore http://www.restaurantsdurango.com/ | Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority | Root Domain Linking Root Domains |
| 42 | Check_big_gray 36 | 30 | 37 |
| 21 | 1 | 6 | 1 |0 -
Advice on display this content on my page for search engines
Hi, my website http://www.in2town.co.uk/Holiday-News is about bringing travel and holiday news to our readers of our lifestyle magazine but i am having problems at the moment with the layout. What i mean by this is, i have written content on the page as an introduction so google knows what this section of the site is about but to be honest it looks rubbish with having the introduction there and i would like to know if i am doing the right thing by having the content there for google to know what my site is about. I have tried taking it away and noticed i dropped in the rankings and when i have put it back up i go up in the rankings, can anyone please give me some advice over this issue
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google shows the wrong domain for client's homepage
Whenever the homepage of my client's homepage appears in Google results, the search engine is not showing our URL as our domain, but instead a partner domain that is linking to us. (The correct title and meta description of our homepage is showing.) I believe this is caused by the partner website (with a much higher pank rank) linking to our homepage from their footer to a URL with it's own domain that 302 redirects to our homepage. Example: Link: http://www.partnerwebsite.com/?ad2203 302 redirects to: http://www.clientwebsite.com/?moreadtracking The simple fix would be for the client to ask for removal of the 302 hijacking link - but they are uncomfortable with this request since they had requested it prior, and their relationship is not the best. Is there any other way to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Conor_OShea_ETUS0