If you don't have an online business but instead work for an SEO agency then be sure to skip straight to the part where I talk about how to sell SEO services which help your clients embed SEO in their business.
How to Embed SEO in your business...
...if you have an ecommerce website
- Make sure you add friendly reminders (otherwise known as calls to action) to link to your site in your thankyou emails. Rand wrote a great post on this over here. (By the way, while googling for that post from Rand I came across this which is also a nice read on order confirmation emails.)
- Keep keyphrase research in mind when naming both product categories and products themselves. Things have an annoying habit of ranking for their own name (e.g. wikipedia) and this is also true for the little guys so next time you're going to release the awesome-o-matic-1200 spend a little time thinking if it might not make more sense to call it the awesome-curtain-rail-o-matic-1200 (assuming you're selling curtain rails that is....). This can apply to many many different industries, think about which one of these is going to rank better in Google for [hotel in Seattle]; "The Westin Seattle" or "The Mayflower Park"
- Last but not least, check out this super-awesome post (that Sam also linked to in his round-up but it's just so relevant here that I'm linking to it again): Surviving and Thriving as an Ecommerce SEO
...if you have a content website
- Motivate your content writers with analytics so that they get excited about writing content which gets lots of pageviews/SEO traffic.Brent is world class at this and has achieved some astonishing results with the Tribune and one of the major things he did was to educate and excite journalists about SEO so that they both understood and craved page views.Brent talks about the process he used in more depth in this amazing interview.
...if you have a physical presence
- Engage in the local community. This might not sound like SEO advice but there are plenty of links you can get from local newspapers, local directories and local radio stations if you just play your (seo) cards right.
- If you have shops in shopping centres or offices in business parks then get links from their websites. You'd be surprised what has a website these days!
...if you have UGC on your site
- Build your systems in such a way that the data inputs from your users structure your data in an SEO friendly way. I might write a blog post on this another time but in a nutshell think about the kinds of subtle 'nudges' you can provide your users such as "recommended tags" or "user also tagged this content with ...". These kinds of calls to action can really help your SEO.
- Ensure that your community manager (or whoever moderates and engages with your community) understands the importance of linkbuilding and SEO in general. The contacts and relationships that your community manager builds up can be invaluable for spreading linkbait, launching competitions, writing blog posts and getting links!
...if you have a PR agency
- Ensure that the PR they're generating gets you links! Especially since newspaper sites are so dreadful at linking out it's crucial to educate them about the importance of linking so that the work they're doing anyway can get you more links.
- If your PR agency isn't focused on getting you links then make sure someone follows up with any places which mention you but don't link. A classic example of this was when a client of ours recently appeared in the Daily Mail website of the week column - there's a link there now but when the article was first published there was no link!
...if you are doing PPC or conversion rate optimisation
- Don't leave your PPC or CRO guys locked up in a dark room separate to your SEO team, instead make sure they talk to each other. Your PPC guys will have tons of data about which kinds of headlines work, which search phrases people use as well as which keyphrases convert. Feed that back into your on-site optimisation for higher CTR in the SERPs and nice keyphrase optimisation.
How to help clients embed SEO in their business as an SEO agency
I can only speak from personal experience at Distilled but we're constantly looking to improve our processes and systems and here are a few tips that have helped us when managing client projects to aid them in integrating SEO into their whole business.- Allow your SEO team to be agile and flexible in the work they deliver. If you're selling a specific SEO deliverable it's often almost impossible ahead of time to understand the impact of the recommendations on the client's business. When you dig into their site you might find evidence of paid links, or you might find that they license exact copies of their content to other sites to use. The solutions to these problems might not fall directly within the scope of what the client thinks they want, but it's certainly going to bring benefit to look at and fix them. We've found the key to making this work efficiently is regular client contact and quality project management.
- Educate your clients. It's no use delivering a bunch of recommendations if the client doesn't have the tools, skills or resources to implement them. By educating the client on the WHY of the SEO recommendations you're making you can help them sell the changes necessary either to their boss internally or to other internal departments.
Top notch info.
There's a saying in marketing circles about the great businesses, that goes something like "everyone is in marketing" - meaning that the marketing process should be visible throughout an organisation.
This is just as true today, with online marketing as part of the mix.
In our company we educate our clients before embarking on their SEO program by showing them the time period and traffic that we had for some of our websites at different stages for optimization till we reached rank #1.
Before we did this our client attrition rate was 60%. Not because we were not performing but because they had different expectations. Now we are down to 97%.
Another aspect that we added was the getting their expansion plans and doing related keyword research before the pages were added, much before the actual service/product was offered.
This ensured that once the launch was done the page was already indexed by search engines and things moved faster.
BTW- I think links in posts should open in new windows so that you can finish the post and get to the link.
Here is a tip for SEO companies that work with small/mid sized businesses who get leads/sales via telephone:
Make sure to educate the employees of the client to track phone leads*. They can find out if their customers are coming from search engines/the web/etc.This helps to prove to clients your services are worth keeping.
*In an ideal world, a client's website will have dedicated internet numbers, but it doesn't always work out that way.
Great post but may i add to all areas;When investing in SEO (selling it to the business) Manage expectations... Rome wasn't built in a day and neather is organic performance. :)
Hey thanks, this is really useful information to know. Especially intergrating content with SEO in a way that is both readable and opimisation friendly. Thanks!
I'm amazed how many companies isolate their SEO and PPC efforts. I just started working with a local SEO company on some of their PPC projects, and the clients are thrilled to have the two sides of search marketing actually talking to each other. There's so much potential synergy, from keyword research to landing-page optimization, that compartmentalized departments are missing out on.
Great article and I found the "SEO for business" section to be very informative and full of great tips. However, I thought the SEO Agency section was a bit sparse. I would have liked to see a bit more details on how you can really educate the clients, maybe past examples or more discussion on how to set the scope or set expectations. Overall, very informative it is just that I thought there was more that could have been covered is all.
Yep, I think that section might take a whole post by itself! I'll add it to my todo list.... Thanks
I have listened to several SEOs try and explain to clients what SEO is and how it works and I can tell you that even successful SEOs can struggle doing this.
While most clients can conceptually understand more traffic equals increased potential for revenue that is about as far as they get without asking themselves 'does anyone really search online for my products?'
While extensive keyword research that most of us take part in tells us that users are indeed looking specialized terms like 'cake filters' for example the challenge becomes convincing the client. As I have explained more times than I can count even if it's a small section or subsection of what you do it needs to be on your website and you need to be trying to gain that additional revenue stream.
I personally ensure that all clients I speak with have a clear understanding and provide actual real life examples but educating the client can be difficult so a posting on this could be a good read.
The biggest mistake I made with my first website was trying to integrate my business into SEO rather than integrate SEO into my business. I thought I had read and learned everything so I started posting to article directories and blogs while trying to write around awkward keywords. The result --- people didn't respond favorably to my posts (because the content didn't make sense at times) and the directories became panda casualties. These days my focus is to aim to tell the story in an appealing way that readers and hopefully journalists will pick up and link back to. I love well separated bullet point presentations with images to add excitement for the intended audience.
Great information! I'm re-designing my website and (maybe) including a blog on it, so hopefully my content will be up-to-date AND interesting.
Educating your client is one of the toughest things to do. You really have to dig deep and do your research in order to become an expert in their field. Otherwise, they will see right through you and no mattter how well you explain the process, they will always think in the back of their minds that nobody knows the industry like them. They will view your advice as having little weight compared to their ideas and suggestions. Great ideas can get watered down by a distrusting client and an SEO Firm that can't hold its ground. I suggest having a comprehensive website analysis ready before meeting the client for the first time in order to tell them exactly where they can improve their websites, whether it be through organic SEO, pay per click campaign, or through their internet marketing efforts; surprise them with your research without giving out how to do it. That's our job as SEO experts anyways.
Great article and I found the "SEO for business" section to be very informative and full of great tips. However, I thought the SEO Agency section was a bit sparse. I would have liked to see a bit more details on how you can really educate the clients, maybe past examples or more discussion on how to set the scope or set expectations. Overall, very informative it is just that I thought there was more that could have been covered is all.
good advice and nice article. thanks for the work
"Educate your clients. It's no use delivering a bunch of recommendations if the client doesn't have the tools, skills or resources to implement them."
This is a huge problem with a LOT of companies I've dealt with. While they have a website, it was usually built years ago and they lost touch with the developer. They don't know where or how their site is being hosted. They kind of want to make changes bout don't know how or where to begin.
This topic alone would make a great YOUmoz post. Hmmm...
This is something I've always been struggling with, yet there is so much benefit in integration of SEO in daily marketing processes. The best thing about it is that you're preventing mistakes being made over and over again and fixing them as a result. Instead of doing the boring and repetitive SEO legwork you suddenly have time for development of better strategy and targeting various unexplored opportunities.
"Educate your clients"
The number one priority as an agency. It vaires from the super-keen and really willing to learn, engaging with us and helping us to meet their targets right through to the ones who throw money at the problem but then are impossible to work with and then wonder why they aren't number 1 for an uber-competitive term 6 weeks later.
Obviously the education must begin before they are even your clients, to manage expectations and explain that it is a partnership, they must be active with their website if they want quality rankings. Us SEOs aren't magicians!
Very useful information, thanks alot :)
Maintaining agility and flexibility in client engagements is definitely important; the customer needs a solution that works for them. However I find that it's also important to be able to provide a well articulated and properly scoped solution up front. It makes the sales process so much smoother if you can illustrate exactly what's being done. It also makes it a lot easier to charge for variations to the project brief.
This leads into your educating the client point - there's nothing to be gained from operating behind a veil of 'industry secrets'. It's better to be transparent in your operations and exaplain how you'll be following industry best practice, and also where your unique selling proposition comes into play.
Great stuff! One way I look at it is that SEO always pushes the consumer one more step along the purchasing process -- from doing their research to knowing what they want, from knowing the product they want to knowing the brand they want, then from knowing the brand they want to making the final purchase. At every stage, SEO complements other kinds of marketing.
In fact, I've written a separate blog post on how to integrate SEO with other kinds of marketing, including PPC, PR, and even banner ads!
Exceptionally good post, many business do not understand the importance of SEO, job well done
thanks
Al
Nice article, and good advice - thanks for sharing!
thumbs up bro :) thanks
The SEO field is on a boom it is the fastest growing field in the world now. So, anthing that is related to SEO you suyrely be benefited.
(Edit: Link cleanse)