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
-
Changing domain and transferring SEO power to new.
hi, i have a website with some pages index in google on first page. i want to change the domain name but also want to keep the old domain. How can i transfer the index pages SEO power to new domains pages? So the new domain page can appear instead of old domain. 301 redirect will permanently redirect the user to new domain but i want to keep the old domain running for users only, not for Search engines. any idea. please share. thanks.
Technical SEO | | green.h0 -
Does uploading a new disavow file wipe out the original?
Hi guys, Just struggling to get a definitive answer on this one. If say I disavow 55 domains, then upload a brand new disavow file with on 35 domains in it, does this mean the original disavow file will be overwritten and those original domains will be forgotten about? Kind regards!
Technical SEO | | WCR0 -
Is new created page's pagerank 1 ?
Hey I just want to know,
Technical SEO | | atakala
If I create a web page, is the pagerank of the page would be 1?1 -
Big page of clients - links to individual client pages with light content - not sure if canonical or no-follow - HELP
Not sure what best practice here is: http://www.5wpr.com/clients/ Is this is a situation where I'm best off adding canonical tags back to the main clients page, or to the practice area each client falls under? No-following all these links and adding canonical? No-follow/No-index all client pages? need some advice here...
Technical SEO | | simplycary0 -
Manual Actions tab advice on message
Ok so I have this message in manual actions (with no examples of links): Manual Actions
Technical SEO | | pauledwards
Site-wide matches None
Partial matches Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links
Reason Affects
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more. I am not surprised by this as an agency a few years ago did mass aritcle submissions for the same anchor text, I have manually removed 119 or so domains in the last year and a half and 4 weeks ago i disavowed the last 40ish domains left. Obviously the back-link profile can be seen to have an unnatural anchor-text distribution still but not as bad. In terms of rankings we lost some core terms on the homepage, not completely but most have gone from say page one to page 2/3/4 etc We are still getting good traffic to internal pages, so i am assuming action was taken to the homepage - where the mass of those links are pointing to. Where do you guys recommend I go from here, shall i go ahead and click the reconsideration request? or wait longer for the disavow. I am still also trying to remove bad links. Any advice much appreciated.0 -
Client error 404
I have an 404 error but what does that mean? I go to the site and click on the link to exampleX.com there is no problem. What can it be? The error message http://www.example.com/www.example.com/exampleX.html
Technical SEO | | mato0 -
Base HREF set without HTTP. Will this cause search issues?
The base href has been set in the following format: <base href="//www.example.com/"> I am working on a project where many of the programming team don't believe that SEO has an impact on a website. So, we often see some strange things. Recently, they have rolled out an update to the website template that includes the base href I listed above. I found out about it when some of our tools such as Xenu link checker - suddenly stopped working. Google appears to be indexing the the pages fine and following the links without any issue - but I wonder if there is any long term SEO considerations to building the internal links in this manner? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nebraska0 -
Starting a new product, should we use new domain or subdomain
I'm working with a company that has a high page rank on it's main domain and is looking to launch a new business / product offering. They are evaluating either creating a subdomain or launching a brand new domain. In either case, their current site will link contextually to the new site. Is there one method that would be better for SEO than the other? The new business / product is related to the main offering, but may appeal to different / new customers. The new business / product does need it's own homepage and will have a different conversion funnel than the existing business.
Technical SEO | | gallantc0