Great Expectations

SEO is a balancing act between doing actual SEO work and effectively managing your clients’ expectations.

Let me introduce to you Mr New Client who has limited knowledge of how the search engines index sites.

Due to his limited knowledge, he really has no clue as to exactly what we (as SEOs) do or how we do it, but he appreciates that through a mix of science, maths, marketing and magic we can somehow improve how his site performs.

The client has no idea that different keywords are more/less competitive, no idea that ranking for a highly competitive term can drive substantial traffic to his site (which hopefully he’ll be able to convert into sales if he employs good website usability techniques, has a decent product and compelling content… but that’s for a whole nother post)… and no idea about the value this additional traffic can bring to his site.

So, with this in mind, he’s willing to pay (what he believes to be) a lot of money (which really only works-out to be a once-off payment of a $80) to get his site ranking #1 for terms like ‘Free’ and ‘Sale’.

You embarrassingly manage to compose yourself after laughing at the poor guy, genuinely thinking he had just delivered one of the most entertaining pieces of SEO sarcasm you’d hear all day, only to discover from his stern expression that he was actually serious.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this type of scenario, but I see this on a semi-regular basis.

This is where you can make three distinct choices:

1. You can tell the client they’re dreaming and let them go find another SEO firm who will probably tell the guy the same thing.
2. You can tell the client they’re dreaming and then confuse the pants off them by going into all the technical reasons why they’re never going to achieve the results they want on that budget… or
3. You can try and explain to them in simple terms some of the challenges ahead, but guide them towards some more achievable goals and then set-out a plan on how these goals can be achieved.

If you’ve gone with option 3, it’s crucial to (politely) make it 100% undeniably clear about the results your client can expect, the time taken to achieve such expectations and what methods you are going to employ (not in overly technical detail, but enough that the client understands in basic terms what’s happening), otherwise you’ll be forever fighting an uphill battle.

Here are some examples of questions you should expect and ways to help your client better understand the process:

Speed of Results
Client: “It’s been 48 hours, why isn’t my site at the top yet?”
SEO: “Search engines index billions of pages, so it could take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months depending on the age and nature of your site.”

Keyword Competitiveness
Client: “What do you mean I probably won’t reach #1 for the term ‘internet’?”
SEO: “Due to the amount of information on the net (see the question above), the more pages that exist on a given topic and the number of people competing to get to the top for that topic makes it very difficult to rank for overly generalised terms unless you have an incredibly informative and authoritive website. Further to that, the traffic you would attract for such terms wouldn’t be very targeted, making it harder to convert such visitors into sales.”

Traffic Vs. Results
Client: “I thought I’d be getting a million unique visitors every day by now.”
SEO: “Every website is different and subsequently has different goals. ‘Getting traffic’ isn’t a goal. Attracting visitors who will purchase; creating a tool or article that will gain hundreds of links; building your online reputation so you appear far more authoritive/important than your competitors… those are examples of goals. Work-out what goal you have instead of just aiming for traffic, because traffic alone will not help you achieve much.”

Costs
Client: “Why should I pay an SEO that much?”
SEO: “There are plenty of brilliant SEO communities and resources online that can teach you how to optimise your own site, saving you thousands of dollars… but that means investing hundreds of hours reading, learning, testing and measuring your results. If you don’t want to do that, then hire someone who has invested the time and effort already and understands what they are doing. A proper SEO consultant is worth their weight in gold with what they can potentially bring to your site, but given the number of different niches that exist and ways to promote a site (from PPC, Social Media, Organic SEO, Link Bait etc. etc.) finding the perfect consultant for your business will depend on your goals (see above).”

So to avoid having an unhappy client, bad publicity and a lot of grief – make sure the client understands what SEO is all about, the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, the time taken to achieve these results and what goals the client should be focusing on instead of just wanting traffic without a plan on how to convert it.