SEO Services - What to Expect ?
- 29th Aug 2007
- Leave a Comment
- SEO
OK it’s not a term that is familiar to all people believe it or not. SEO - When family ask “What do you do?” - SEO that usually gets a dazed look and wry smile as if the person is on some kind of rare narcotic.
What Should a Client Expect from SEO Services??
More importantly though, what should a customer expect from SEO Services? Recently, I have been looking at a few sites where the clients have asked us to look at their marketing approach and conversion rates to see how effective they have really been and if maybe things could be improved.
It’s surprising then when you encounter pages previously constructed with no titles, insufficient content with keywords mentioned rarely and no Meta descriptions. The call to action is below the fold and in some cases it’s totally unclear where you want the prospect to go on the site.The navigational structure is more muddled than a Russian translator trying to teach Chinese on a runway.
SEO Scandal
Yet this site has had “Search Engine Optimisation” and the client has already paid heftily for this. They are often left confused, thinking that the website would speak for itself and disappointed months down the line that few sales have arrived at their door.
What’s the score here then? Some SEO companies seem to charge the clients a high fee for setting up processes which reap relatively little benefit and effectively waste time leading the client on into spending more and more potential profits.
Initially the client was phased by snazzy PowerPoint displays with graphs charting unlimited success.
This breed of SEO is not one I would choose to follow; OK they can make a fast killing on an unsuspecting client. But what about the long term prospects of their clients business, don’t they care? SHAME ON YOU
Working together you can establish a firm foundation of trust with the client and with them see their business develop and both benefit from your efforts.
SEO Business Plan
Personally I think SEO goes beyond just the technical aspects of getting the site right for the spider, the overall business model needs careful examination to make sure the client reaches their target audience in an effective manner. As with any business a plan is essential and the aim with SEO is to guide the client into making the right decisions for their website.
A very important aspect of this process which is often overlooked is getting the client to understand why certain things have been done to their site; face to face talking seems to work best in this area and definitely not promoting unrealistic expectation levels.
SEO Pride
Another thing to consider is what level of SEO will you work on? Pride comes in here, your planning to charge a one man business the same price as a high flying corporate for building and optimising a website? You want to charge huge prices for a website and think you can just keep adding more and more services on? You refuse to do the work because the job is beneath you? Hmm get over yourself!
There is no one-way approach to SEO as each business model is very different and needs unique attention.
Honesty then is a valued approach and keeping the client informed speaks volumes. Work with each other.
19 Comments | Leave a comment »
[…] SEO Services - What to Expect ?, Dave Naylor […]
Reports and analytics are the main things I try to get to my clients. I give them a full list of changes made and reasons they were made. I understand that my clients don’t want to become SEO experts, but I believe they should know what they are paying for. I also try to explain to them that searched keywords are much more important than the keywords they think are relevant.
Refering specifically to the SEO scandal section of your article, I agree wholeheartedly.
I had one customer recently who’d paid for a monthly SEO fee, and when I looked at what he got for the money, it was pretty much just submitting to search engines. I looked at his backlnks and they were all coming from his own networking within his own industry and his own blogging. He’d actually unwittingly made a really good job of his SEO, and was paying someone else for the privilege. With just a tweak to his onsite SEO which cost him very little we ended up with a very happy customer, whose rankings went up substantially from what he’d had previously - I’ve since had over a dozen referals from him, which just goes to show that the honest approach always makes better business sense, and leaves you with a much better feeling about what you do into the bargain.
I should also add that this customer’s existing onsite optimization was pretty good before I got to it, but that was the work of another web designer whose put together pretty much the same stuff for a lot of other guys in the same industry around the UK - so I know the SEO 3rd party didn’t do that either. I’m still struggling to find what they actually did do for him for 100 GBP per month.
Greetings, I just want to add a comment to what you’ve posted, it’s nice and well informative for me. I just came across your blog and wanted to
drop you a note Telling you how impressed i was with your post.
I also have a blog about Search engine optimizer goes, I’m proudly say that yours is top-notch! Keep up the
great work, you are providing a great resource on the Internet here!
If you have a moment, please visit my blog SEO update
Yours,
Bj007
We see this a lot of this in Australia. The client can be totally sceptical after a bad experience and high fees with few results. This makes my job a lot harder in selling real SEO and its value as well as managing fee expectations.
Getting the tags right are the basics as you say. Give them a checklist and manage the process.
Agree on the business model and looking at their site from a technical, content and linking perspective and being innovative about your approach to each without being spammy in any way. This requires understanding their business, objectives and ability to execute.
Great Post… It just brings back down to earth the principals we SEO people shouldn’t forget.
I’ve found that the most powerful selling point in SEO is proof and reports. If you can show and explain to your clients what they should expect for their money and then back up your progress with analytics and reports then you’ll have a great structure for becoming a respectable referral for future SEO projects.
In addition to this post i would actually like to see what prices are charged throughout the UK for SEO/SEM services so we can keep the industry up to date and in business…! ..:::SUGGESTION:::..
Hi again,
The cost of SEO in the UK can be really all over the place. I know that quite a few of the larger players work in and around the 400-500 GBP per month range for extensive link building campaigns and it might be anything up to 500 per month for PPC. I work in a different market, catering to smaller businesses who often wouldn’t otherwise get a look in. Generally, its a case of fitting it to their budget - by getting the onsite stuff done for as many pages as they can afford and then getting them just enough backlinks to be competitive. Anything larger I pass on to another SEO I work closely with who has the resources for the bigger stuff.
I have to confess I’m not big on the analytics side. What I ask customers to do is to let me know what my work has meant to them in terms of new business, and trade that they weren’t seeing previously. This way I can show both search engine results to prospective customers, and what this actually meant to someone in terms of the health of their business. Always nice to hear that someone got their first online sale when the website had previsouly done nothing or that someone’s sales spiked in a way they’d never experienced before e.t.c. Moreover, sales are for me the true test that everything is working. If someone is prominent for the key phrases but not getting the business from it, then something else is wrong that they may need help with - for instance, one customer recently got his first sale before I even touched his site, just by following my advice to remove a flash video from the front page.
Anyway, time for me to shut up and let someone else have their say - I’m getting garrulous this morning.
By hell Chris you can talk:-)
Hey Jerry,
that’ll be the damned English PhD - the curse of garrulousness. Good luck on the radio tomorrow.
C
Honesty and Trust seems to be a major issue surrounding the SEO Industry. Ive spoken to many potential and now new clients who have been seriously ripped off, paying £300 to £400 per month for little more than a analytics report and zero results.
I have adopted a policy of teaching my clients to a good level of understanding relating to what is required to achieve good keyword positioning, in return they teach me about their business and targeted customer base.
This two street of information sharing enables me to deliver value added services and marketing ideas outside of Internet Search Marketing.
SEO is a service, which in my opinion requires a close working relationship between provider and client. A good business relationship is formed on trust, and should continue if you provide quality services and products.
most of the work believe or not is not the actual link building and not the emprovemnt of the crawling on site the first thing with customer is to uderstand what his needs are and what does he expect from his campaign.
as you mentioned most of the customers dont even know to choose their keywords.every body wants to be on first page on their hot keywords but they dont know how to continue from that point.
the market is still in learning phase the SEO companies, the customer and even the search culture. did you know that when woman make search her inquireies tend to be more specific and more rich in word e.g a man will search “Plumber London” when woman will be something like “24 hour service plumbing provider in london” the keywords are not absolute choose them carefully with your customer
Thanks for writing this article. This is exactly what i needed to read today !
I personally give the clients a “list of SEO deliverables”
It helps avoid miscommunication to a large extent, yet there are always days when clients just don’t have ANY idea about SEO and the RoI
A lot of ’seo’ company’s over here just place your site online, and tell you to make good titles and descriptions and get links. The rest you have to figure out yourself and in most cases, you can only work through a sort of backoffice system that doesn’t allow you to change the layout of your pages. So how te hell can you test positions of pictures/text/add to cart, etc ?
I do understand that they can’t hold your hand all of the time but a little more info would be appreciated :)
Personally what I would expect now from an seo company :
• Teach me how to research a market and how to see if it’s profitable so I won’t waste my time.
• Teach me about usability
• How to use analytics
dave
And how do you change the plan to now incorporate what is really important in SEO, off page optimization. We have had to completely revamp our proposals and just when clients start to understand on page optimization, we now need to tell them we are going to charge them for things that we do on other websites that they cant necessarily see. SEO was just about to come out from behind the curtain and now its going right back.
How do you explain that incoming links are not about the traffic coming from those links but more about increasing your reputation which translates into an increase in your position in the SERPs? Its very frustrating, then to top it off with statements like “dealing with Google can be a reactive process because they don’t publish their algorithms so often its trial and error and learning from the mistakes of others”
Frustrating.
Conversion rate is beyond the standard seo, i haven’t got any problem with seo experts who inform their clients correctly, this means what they will do aswell as what they don’t do
At the end of the day, companies dont bother what you really do with their website, all that matters to them is how many enquiries or sales are happening. I usually give them an approximate time frame in which they would start getting some traffic. Analytics and conversions are the indicators of your work. Usually the results are better if clients take interest the development of the website along with SEO.
[…] SEO Services - What to Expect? (from Dave Naylor) […]
Since the client is paying through his nose for an SEO project, it is fair to keep him informed about what you are doing. If he finds your explanation too technical, you could show him the difference in the volume of traffic before and after the changes are made and the relevance of keywords.