Communication is a vital part of everyday life, in business and in pleasure.
I’ve written in the past about how the secret to success for any SEO Company is in talking to your customers, and this is really important to ensure that you understand a clients goals – how can you deliver what a client wants from an SEO campaign without listening to them. Whilst for many this is obvious – i.e. more rankings, visibility, traffic and conversions for a website, some people do have other goals, or a particular focus that really needs a push.
In the past I’ve had clients that I have done all of these things for, but have not been able to deliver their core goal fast enough to keep them completely satisfied – so it is always important to ensure that you understand why someone is undertaking an SEO campaign, and tailor the approach you employ to achieve their goals as quickly as you can.
I’ve also blogged in the past about clients of SEO companies also need to tell their search engine optimisation providers when these goals change, whether this be adding a new range of products to a website, or just a particular focus on one aspect of a campaign being particularly important at the time.
I’ve had a few problems recently with lack of communication on site changes – whether this be the removal of pages on a website, or the entire relaunch of a website. Now fortunately I check all of my clients’ websites regularly, so I have been able to get to grips with these issues speedily for the most part – but being informed would certainly have reduced the impact of some potentially big problems.
For example, one of my sites recently re-launched with the following tag on every page of the website:
<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”>
This prevents the page in question being indexed, or any of the links being followed. It had been on the development website – rightly so, as it prevented it from being spidered at an address prior to the launch. But the site was live over a weekend with this in place, and although has now been removed, this could have been quite damaging to have in place for a prolonged period – but fortunately it doesnt seem that Google chose to attempt to re-index the website when this was in place.
I’ve also had issues with pages being “removed” – without redirections – for highly monetisable phrases, and then once I investigate why rankings and traffic have dropped for some closely related phrases, I discover the problem – but after the damage has been done. In this particular circumstance, this traffic could have been retained, as a new similar page was created on another URL, but by the time I got the redirect implemented the damage had been done, and we had to work to get this ranking back in place.
Fortunately, for the most part, this type of incident is rare – but the implications of the lack of information in these circumstances can really impact on the bottom line, and can simply be remedied by including all parties involved on a website in all communications about the website in question.
I certainly like to keep any parties involved on a project up to date about what I am doing – letting the client(s), web designer, PR agency and anyone else who needs to know what I am planning to do in advance, as well as letting them know when its complete. Most people do the same in return – and a lot of the things that I am copied in on, often have little to nothing to do with me.
However, I am more than happy to sift through these items if it means that I am included on the seemingly unimportant detail that makes a difference to a websites performance.
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