Do you find that many times your SEO clients frustrate your efforts to help them? I sometimes find that it seems as though they don’t read the reports I send, especially the recommendations! As long as the numbers look good some of them seem to ignore advice until things start to turn south. They are then upset that things are not continuing to improve and want to see some quick action. For SEO to most effective it takes a collaboration between the website owner and SEO company.
Why Do SEO Clients Ignore Advice?
It seems that those clients that ignore advice are the ones that don’t want to give you access to make changes to their site and leave that up to their web designer. This is fine if you have a relationship with the web designer and can simply send them changes that need to be made but many times you don’t have that relationship and getting them to make changes is difficult or requires you to go through the owner for approval. Having to go through the owner can be difficult as it requires you to explain the advantages of the changes you are recommending and many times they simply don’t understand what SEO is or is all about. Even in those cases where the client may respond to your requested changes there is may times a significant delay in getting approval. Normally changes made to the website take months before they will impact on rankings so any delay pushes improvements back later. Many clients are too busy to spend time trying to figure out what your recommendations are all about and have nobody on their staff that truly understands them. For marketing services you must get in touch with only what suits your requirements, learn more about their service
Why Don’t SEO Clients want to be Involved?
Many times clients do not want to be involved with improving their website and expect you to simply do everything it takes. You can certainly handle the technical aspects however, they are the subject matter experts on their company (or should be) and should be involved in providing information, writing blog articles and being active on social media. Although you can do some of these tasks, you many times need input from the client. The client should also be the one active on social media. It is they that should be cultivating a following and responding to comments, not you. I have had one client that I had a guest blogger write an article for and it took over 1 ½ months to simply get approval to post it. Delays such as this can cause improvements in ranking to take forever.
How Can You Better Help Your SEO Client?
The first step to helping an SEO client is to ensure that they understand that they must play a part in helping to improve their website rankings. Once this is done you can then help them to develop a schedule for the tasks they need to accomplish and then provide assistance where they need it, such as finding guest bloggers that can write quality articles for them. You also need to ensure they understand that SEO is something that takes time; changes made today may not impact on ranking for some time. They should not expect to see instant results. Lastly you need to develop relationship with them where you can freely discuss recommended changes and if possible have permission and access to make necessary changes without delay. An example of this would be if you note a broken link on the site you should have access to make a correction without having to go through the owner and simply notify them later. Establishing this type relationship will make the entire SEO process smoother and ensure that you are not frustrated by your SEO client.