SEO can be confusing for people and signing up with an SEO Company can sometimes seem a leap of faith. After all, no reputable search engine optimisation firm are trully able to offer guarantees about the results that a prospective client will gain from working with them.
With so many factors outside of our control, what we can do is offer potential clients is a good level of service – with certain levels of activity that we know should result in improvements to a websites visibility – improving rankings and traffic as well as conversions.
But within these activities are opportunities – for SEOs and clients alike. While it is absolutely critical for an SEO to get an in depth understanding of a clients business, it can also be beneficial for the SEO to educate their clients in some of the techniques employed.
Here is a sample of some of these benefits:
1) Linking Opportunities – once a client understands how links from other websites benefit them, this opens up plenty of opportunities for linking with useful anchor texts back to a website. Whilst you probably want to keep a few click here and a few image links to keep the link pattern nicely mixed, this can help to kickstart a campaign.
2) Internal Linking Improvements – Once you have explained how linking to pages with the right phrases can help with the internal linking structure of the websites, then clients can start doing this themselves with their latest blog posts, news stories and web pages.
3) Adding New Pages to a Website – I’m sure most SEOs have come across times when clients have added pages to a website without telling them first (or immediately after). But if the SEO has explained about using the right balance of keywords in URLs, headings, body text etc, then this page is likely to only need a few tweaks before being ready to rock and roll. This can save on the need for redirects to a better URL not long after a page has been launched or to prevent having to make excessive changes to a page when it has just been re-indexed.
These are just a few of the ways that educating clients about SEO can help both parties – and most particularly help the client get the results that they seek faste.
There are still sadly plenty of SEOs out there that seek to hide the techniques that they are employing to improve a websites results. SEO is not always a difficult job, though is often time consuming, but by mystifying the process, it can damage the relationship with the clients as well as the industry itself.
Obviously it is not appropriate to be educating every client in these ways, as each is different and unique and has its own needs. Some clients don’t care how we go about getting results for them – its all about the bottom line, not what is done to achieve it. But if someone wants to know why you are doing something, then you should tell them!
Does anyone else have any particular favourite areas that are aided by educating SEO Clients? Please comment if so…
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Nice post. Unfortunately not all companies are as transparent as Vertical Leap. Educating clients is par for the course for any business competing in the service industry. Still, *really* savvy companies also educate clients to embrace their culture, approach and most of all, the results achieved. Keep up the good work!