As Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) becomes more mainstream and a key part of the marketing mix, it is important to ensure client expectations are met. After all, it’s the clients who are paying for the SEO service with their hard earned dollars.
At Reload Media, we make sure we stick to a quality process to measure expectation management that includes:
- Clearly defining that a good quality SEO program is a long term process. We work over 12 month SEO programs as SEO needs this amount of time to meet keyword position targets and guarantees.
- Gain a clear understanding of the most important keywords to the client. Although we might optimise for numerous keywords as part of our SEO programs, there are always ones that the client really wants to get higher up the rankings. Sometimes however, these generic keywords they select may be too ambitious for the amount the client is paying per month. This is often due to their industry already being highly competitive on these generic terms.
- If in a given month a search engine bounces some keywords around, then clearly discussing this movement with the client is important. As often other sites will have experienced the same reshuffle of positions as things always don’t stay the same in search engine land.
- Discussing with the client that we need to access their website to make changes to the meta, footers and other key areas. Some clients haven’t understood that we actually need to change their web pages. Working with them is important to gain the required trust that we won’t crash their site!
- Finally, re-emphasising that it takes patience to be on the first page of the search engines.
If some or all of these areas are done on an ongoing basis, the expectation “bar” can be raised for everyone in the industry. And this will be a good thing for us all.