Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:23:10 by Pete Handley
I've worked on lots of sites where I've taken over the SEO from a previous encumbent. The actual SEO techniques that are employed vary from company to company – some do the on-page changes in a similar fashion to how we would do these, others have a very different style.
One frequent (legacy) complaint from clients who have fired their previous optimiser is the poor the communication the relationship suffered from. It often doesn’t matter how good results are achieved in an SEO campaign like this, primarily because the clients don’t appreciate what levels of improvements have been achieved.
This is something that we try really hard to not let happen with our clients. The solution to this is really quite simple – Talk to your customers!
The first conversation that I would normally have with a client isn’t just about looking at the types of keyword that they want to be ranking for. Instead, its about trying to understand the goals that they have for employing your services in the first place. With some campaigns, this does mean talking about rankings for specific keywords, but in most cases its about looking to grow a business, increase leads, increase brand awareness etc.
Once you understand the reason that a company is using your service for, it’s much easier to devise a strategy to look at helping them to achieve this. It also helps to set everyone’s expectations of what we can achieve and likely timeframes for achieving this, although obviously it’s nigh on impossible to guarantee particular results in this arena.
Communicating the reasons for the changes that we make to websites is also an important way of how Vertical Leap works. Ok – not every client wants to know the precise reasons for everything that we do, but explaining the concepts and reasons for some of the techniques in the long term pays dividends, because the next time content is added, if they’ve listened, it will be a much simpler task to optimise it.
It also helps both ways… as sometimes we need clients to tell us things when they change. We weren’t told recently about some threatened legal action involving one of the keywords we were optimising for a client.
Once we knew about the problems, it only took about an hour to remove any sign of this from Google’s index. If we had been told after the initial contact, it may have been possible to head off any further complications. Hopefully that issue should now be simplified somewhat.
So, in short – communication between client and SEO is probably the most important aspect of the whole campaign. Make sure your SEO company is able to communicate effectively with you!
Pete Handley
Campaign Delivery Manager |
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