You could be the best SEO in the world, with the best recommendations your clients ever seen; but if this information isn’t presented and communicated in the right way, the sad fact is that your hard work probably won’t change a thing. A couple of weeks back, Dan and I ran a very enjoyable Mozinar on this very topic. (A huge thank you to everyone who listened in!) If you did miss it, feel free to check out the recording and download the slides here. Rather than talking through the ins and outs of technical SEO, we really wanted to dive into what, in our experience, makes the difference between a site audit being left on the shelf, compared to a document that can potentially turn a business around.
On the back end of the Mozinar, we had a ton of great questions. Many focused specifically on the delivery and follow-up process, and how we approach this particular part of the job. There was quite a bit of interest in this area, so we thought a dedicated post on the latter part of our auditing process (see below) would give us a chance to dive in a little deeper. Although the follow-up and implementation clearly comes once your document has been delivered, a lot of the very early conversations have a big influence on how successful the project will ultimately end up being. I’ve found that getting a client in the mind-set of working together and buying into implementing your recommendations right from the start always makes getting work done so much easier!
Although this post is about the follow-up process, I also want to spend some time touching on other areas that have a direct influence on that part of the project. Let's go!
Sales kick-off and briefing
The sales process is such a critical part of any project; and not just for the obvious reasons. A well thought out sales conversation is the ideal opportunity to discuss goals, understand the clients business, and really find out what they need to achieve. Ron Garrett summed it up brilliantly in this post, and covered some great points with regards to the important details that every initial conversation with a potential client should cover. In terms of how the conversations held at the beginning of a project can impact on the effectiveness of your follow-up, it’s so important to make sure you’re starting the project with the right goals in mind. After all, how can you measure success if you don’t understand what KPIs make a true difference to your clients business?
Q: How much should I give away during the sales process?
On a very similar point, we had a couple of questions crop up in the Mozinar Q&A from people asking how much to give away during the sales process. Some people like to run a sample audit, whilst others won’t give anything away until they have ink on paper. Really, this is down to you. From my perspective, you have to be sensible with your time and learn to consider each situation by its own circumstances. I’ve been in the situation many times before where you sense the company in question is just inviting agencies to pitch in order to gain some free expert knowledge. It takes time to put a proposal together, so you have to make a judgement on the best use of that time. Feel each situation out and you should be just fine.
This is not just about selling projects; it’s about understanding the situation well enough to sell the right project to solve the right problem.
Kick-off and briefing
If you take a step back and think about all the projects you’ve worked on that haven’t worked out well, it’s crazy to think how much probably went wrong before you’d even started. If everyone was in an honest mood, I think we’d all admit to being involved in projects before where it all felt just a little too rushed. As a result, a good solid brief can be skipped meaning the team get dropped in with no idea at all of delivery dates, or what the client actually wants or needs from the project. Clearly, things don’t tend to go well from here. At best, the project just ends up being another report on another desk – at worst reputations get damaged.
So with implementation and a smooth follow-up in mind, what should a good brief cover? As a bare minimum, I suggest the following should always be included:
- Deliverables
- Key dates
- Goals/objectives
- KPIs
- Key personnel
Why is this so important? One of the biggest and most common reasons for a project failing is that for a variety of reasons they simply miss the mark. Usually when a project doesn’t tick the right boxes, the issue can nearly always be traced back to the brief or a miscommunication at the start. The other point here is that if the project is simply being dumped on the team, they’re not likely to be too happy about it. Get your team excited and they in turn will get the client excited. If the client is excited about getting things done, suddenly getting work implemented is a far more enjoyable and productive process.
Deliverables
A major part of any project is the format in which you present your documentation. Sometimes a "highlights" presentation deck detailing the biggest issues is the way to go, whereas some situations require a detailed document and a large set of data to refer to. The best way to do this is really going to depend on who you’re delivering to, and what the initial outline of the project was. We had some really good questions on this during the webinar, so it felt right to pick out some of the best and answer them directly:
Q: What exactly should be delivered? A large document, a set of data, or just the top ten action points?
At SEOgadget, we’ve found that the best approach is to do a combination of all three, with the exact delivery style adjusted to whomever you’re meeting or presenting to. A typical situation for us would be to create a master document containing detailed explanations of our findings alongside all the necessary change requests. Of course, if we’re running crawls and conducting log-file analysis then there’s also going to be a pretty substantial amount of data on hand too. I like delivering the data for two reasons: first, data always backs up what you’re recommending. It’s always so much more valuable to show and not tell. Having the ability to clearly walk the client through exactly what you’ve found can work wonders for adding credibility to what you’re saying. Second, providing the data makes it much easier for a developer to work out what’s going on and gives a reference point for future questions should anything crop up. What’s more, in 90% of situations clients always ask for the data anyway!
Task lists also have a very valuable place. The first question that always comes back is, "OK, so where do we start?" If a question keeps cropping up, then answer it before it gets asked! At the top of all our documents we provide a prioritized list of all change requests (as seen above). This forms a great base for follow-up calls and meetings as everyone can refer back to the same task list. With development resource often being high in demand, it also enables you to start scheduling the biggest fixes first.
Q: Some clients are not "techy," and talking them website audit is not that easy. How many details we should give those clients? Should we spent a lot time and train them about SEO?
This is where being able to give a high-level view first is extremely important. Not everyone understands the details of SEO. You might not always be working directly with an SEO department; you could be working with a traditional marketing team or leading into an Ecommerce manager where their role touches on SEO, but it’s not something they do all day every day. In this case, the best approach is to deliver a "highlights" type of presentation. Break the problems down and focus on the benefits of resolving the issues. Show the client what you’ve found, but think more about explaining the benefits of fixing each issue will have on their business. It’s less about canonical tags and more about ROI. Again, get the client excited about the impact of fixing things and you’ll buy yourself a heap of influence. Even though you’re only presenting on a few key areas, you’ll still have the full document to refer back to in more detail later down the line.
Follow-up support
I’m a big believer in the idea that a technical project shouldn’t be about completing a review and then thinking it’s "job done." It’s so much more important to have the ability to really influence change and action. In fact, the most important part (and often hardest part!) of any technical audit is the follow-up process and getting your work implemented. A good SEO can diagnose issues – a great SEO follows up and makes sure these problems get fixed. Going right back to what we touched on earlier when talking about the sales process, having a good grasp of development resource can really help here. Do you have an understanding of what processes are in place for booking requests? Did you check when development resource is available and allocated for SEO? Getting ahead of the game in these areas is one of the biggest keys to winning!
The follow-up process can be greatly helped by having a central resource to track changes and keep on top of progress or indeed challenges with implementing your recommendations. Using tools such as Basecamp or Asana can be a great way of keeping communication clear, and for making sure you have the right tasks in front of the right people. If you’re not keen on using these tools, a simple Google Docs sheet to display tasks and provide a place to leave comments is sometimes all that’s needed. Combining this with regular calls or checking in via email gives you the ability to keep the project moving in the right direction, and the retain focus when you come to catching up in a meeting or on a call.
If you’ve got any further questions on the process side of technical SEO audits, feel free to drop them in the comments, or tweet myself or Dan and we’ll do our best to answer them.
The key to success is following up and following through...Enjoy your weekend and great article!
SEO audits are important and the follow up is the most important part of the audit!
SEO audits are a great way of selling Seo services. Great post! You are right about the not so techy client. We tried explaining to a small business owner that had no seo department or not even a webmaster the seo-issues of his website like: canonical, their incorrect htacess redirecting to infinite loops, their miserable code that made it very difficult for the search engines to read, their incorrectly applied flash-applications that blocked their content etc.
With the result that the potential client hired the next hobby-seo-company who cannot fix these issues themselves but made it so easy looking to the client. So I guess the target group's viewpoint and level of understanding is often difficult to judge. You are so right. I believe too, that talking about the benefits from the client's level of understanding might be the key after an seo-audit. Very interesting that the US market is facing the same issues in regards to seo-audits. Here in Germany we have tons of "hobby-seos" that offer low cost nonsense seo services without any knowledge of technical seo-issues. The smal company owner with a limited budged might hire a seo that does not even offer seo-audits or offer to fix technical seo-points. When the benefits of such seo-audits results cannot be explained on the small company owner's level of understanding it is a waste of time. As blunt Germans we here in Munich often fail to accomplish this at least for us very difficult sales issue. I know in terms of sales strategies the US is lightyears ahead of us and that is why I enjoy reading your great posts here at SEOmoz.
Reporting is great but 10/1 most clients prefer their phone to ring of the hook :)
Nevertheless, great post. A lot of times it is the end of the month/quarter/year, there is no budget and you are below your quota. Do you use your resources (staff) to work their a**s off to try to deliver results/deliverable during that time or do you spend that time crafting reports that will wow your client into thinking you did a great job.
The later will get your contract renewed more times then not, and for that reason I really love your structure and overall giveaways. Thanks for your contribution.
We love using Podio (and the milestone app) to track specific SEO progress, assign tasks and deliverables, and manage the entire audit process.
I was just discussing this issue with my boss a few days ago.It's great to have this kind of structure that allows follow up enables proper monitoring.I'll use this - thanks a lot!
I have heard people are talking like "Don't explain SEO to client as they are eager to learn and then do it by self." I laugh at such comments. The client who is busy in his business want to spend money on SEO will never such things by self. It will only secure and increase your value to them. If any client does these things itself and don't award you project, I must say that is not probably your prospective client. I will not include in long relationship with you for sure.
Great Article!I think i might take some of these processes listed and implement them, the midway call is such a great idea!
This is a very insightful post. Prioritizing the SEO tasks is a very important thing and a lot depends on it. While working on several clients sites I had to produce detailed recommendations to make clear what had to be done and how important each task was. I wanted to attach a screenshot of table that I had crated here but i cannot seem to find how to attach a screenshot. I think it is worth writing another post about it, with more emphasis on the task prioritization.
Aside from delivering results (which is the ultimate goal of course), a great comunication skill is imperative to success. The best thing that you can do is to make sure you communicate with your clients clearly and respectfully and finding ways on how you can send your message across without alienating them.
Very helpful to someone just stepping into the SEO realm, but wants to take off quickly. Thank you for the post.
I like the completed tasks log, do you actually let this live in a live text document or do you guys use a system like Basecamp for collaborative task lists then just report to the client?
Great guide man!
Thanks for your efforts to create lovely post. This post helps me a lot to study & create a SEO Audit reports for websites.
I think there are few companies who are doing similar activity just like you mentioned in your post but if we don't do this then how can we survive? :)
This post is perfectly timed for me. We have been redoing our audit process. I started out typing them up by hand as I found problems. Now that we have more than just me doing audits and wanting to make them consistent and professional, that approach failed long ago. So I collected all sorts of data and rewrote some - but now we are in the process of again updating and taking *another* huge step forward. This post definitely helps us get on the right track. I've been using SproutSocial's audit form (https://www.quicksprout.com/2013/02/04/how-to-perform-a-seo-audit-free-5000-template-included/) It's pretty amazing and very helpful as we rebuild our own material.
Thanks for the post! Again, great timing for us.
Thanks for the post Jonathan, definitely something that is going in my "sales" bookmark folder. Something I was wondering, are there any tools you use to get the high level view to give to clients?
I'm of the party that doesn't want to give a prospect too much before there's a contract in place, but I haven't really found an accurate tool out there that could do a good job of this.
SearchMetrics is awesome for highlighting how a site's performed in search over a two year period. particularly interesting is being able to quickly see drops in visibility over the past two years; or indeed showing growth :)
Great post! I was really upset I missed the Mozinar(need to go back and watch it). I've found that when I'm trying to follow up with a client sometimes they look at me like I've misled them because they didn't see 1000% improvement day 1 after implementation. How do you manage/estimate improvement for any given audit? Apologies if this was covered during the mozinar!
No worries! Being able to clearly talk a new client through the way you work and approach a project is so important. Setting aside time for that conversation is key; make sure you know the key points you need to cover (expectations, delivery dates etc) and the rest usually takes care of itself.
Thanks for posting this up Jon!
I totally agree with you that diagnosing issues is just one half of the job and getting them fixed is the next half.
I usually map the entire SEO process, from Briefing to Review with the SDLC and Agile Development Methodology. This has really helped me in making sure I stick to the timelines and deliver.
I come up with Xls documents like "PRL" - Priority requirements list, and also apply MoSCoW Prioritization to each of the items - Must haves, Should haves, Could Haves / High, Med, Low - All this is done with the client's buy-in.
Then use time-boxing technique to schedule the deliverable on the basis of priority. 1 Timebox could be of say 1-2 weeks. Each would have has it's own set issues to be fixed, resources with appropriate roles and responsibilities allocated to them.
While working in-house we used Jira for all the project management bit. But I have used Basecamp for some projects, and I like it. :-)
Regards,KAS
SDLC and Agile Development Methodology = Great! Nice to see folks serious about their seo work
These concepts have actually helped me a lot in Getting Things Done along with keeping a track of who did what, why and when which is very important information needs to be referred to time and again.
Regards,
KAS
Brilliant post, clients are always wanting to see metrics behind these things!
Oh, just as I needed. Being assigned as an acting project manager (a position which I really had no prior experience) for an eCommerce site due to an emergency situation, I needed guidance on how to weave everything in place. A combination of gDocs spreadsheets and email seems to work well for task delegation, followups, and reporting. I also keep track of our progress (specially my own) by simply taking down notes using Evernote with mostly bullet point lists where I just use a strike-through on whichever has been successfully done.
Also, documenting repetitive workflows is a good practice. It makes the delegation of tasks to new members or a contractual VA, or transferring assignments from one member to another, easier. A mentor of mine uses SweetProcess for this.
Thanks for this Jon!
SweetProcess looks pretty cool. Would love to see what tools other people use and recommend for task management.
Great post Jon! I know Trello is mentioned and supported, used it and its good. Been having better success with Wunderlist. We have a small team of 3 if that helps qualify anything : ).
Like any task management tool - garbage in, garbage out and vise versa.
I have started blogging for a few months now, as most of the bloggers my ultimate goal is to monetize my site after building a good traffic. But this SEO is the most difficult thing, I can not understand much about it even after reading so much. Can anyone tell me a professional or freelancer who can do this for me? my site is www.liveatcampus.com, please contact me on [email protected] if anyone's interested.
Very nice :) here in Brazil there are few professionals who stop to make on paper management, both in development and SEO Software (a bull market in the region where I live)
Nicely Done JonQ. Any relation to John Q? LOL
Great post. Looking forward to more from you!
Our firm is in the middle of interviewing SEO firms to do some work for us and the biggest mistake / missed opportunity I've noticed as a potential client is not asking what my comfort level on the subject
matter is. Sure I migt be a divorce mediator but I'm also a business owner who happens to love to tinker so I'm quite familiar with SEO (although I'm no expert!) so I get most of the terms and know most of the tools.
Some firms spent so much time talking to me like I was a 5 year old we could have had a much more productive conversation about the real issues. On the flip side, some were too busy explaining to me "their process" I lost interest. Remember - make it about me, my site and my issues.
Oh and one last easy win for all you SEO-ers out there? Visit my site before we talk and do a little bit of detective work. Don't spend time on our call asking me what our company does and not have any idea about our biggest challenges. I get it - you want to sell me on (insert pitch here) but instead of missing the mark, take 5 minutes and hit it so I feel like you're talking to me - not reading me your notes.
I really like the idea of a midway call. Sometimes you just put your head down and get to work, and it can be beneficial for both the client and yourself to get together and hash out any additional details that might be unanswered or needs clarification. Good post.
If in doubt - talk it out
Awesome post JonQ! Finally a thorough post in the topic. I already posted Your link to my clients :)
Its always important to be as simple and detailed as possible with a SEO audit for a site. Its important to get a thorough understanding of each & every drawbacks on a site and report it to a prospect or a client.