SEO’s and Clients, Part One

As SEOs, we often suffer from the unrealistic expectations that uninformed clients have from our efforts. Frank honesty really is needed to make sure clients understand just what we offer; that it is not a ‘get indexed and high rankings quick’ scheme that we are selling, but a solid foundation to help their site grow in authority on the web. Your client needs to know what they can expect from your efforts, and sometimes this takes a lot of talk to get across!

The client needs to understand how much work is involved on their part, as well as the SEOs, to make the effort a success. Otherwise, when time to move to the next stage of the game plan rolls around, your client may bail as they are let down by the progress so far.

Some clients fee like they needed a SEO expert to help save their business, and maybe they do but they have no concept of what actually has to be done by that SEO. You have to discuss expectations, let them know that you can make recommendations, but you can’t guarantee anything without their wholehearted commitment to an entire game plan.
A big problem faced by SEOs is clients who only want piecemeal services, thinking they have content under control, or social bookmarking, or linking.

Any good SEO can be completely undercut by an uninformed client’s rampaging around without the slightest idea of what they are doing. If they outsource their content writing t some ‘SEO’ hack who churns out keyword stuffed content, they could be damaging all your efforts to present them as a useful, reliable source of information.

If they link indiscriminately, or get involved with a link farm, they could sink themselves in a week and you can do nothing to help. If they spam blogs and forums they can get their IP address blocked, and again there is nothing you can do – but guess who they will blame when their site isn’t number one on the SERPS?

Next, we look at the ways you as an SEO can help, and how to educate your client without giving away your expertise for free.

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